He’s not taking off the hoodie, and he’s not going to NYC. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook will IPO on Friday with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing the NASDAQ bell remotely from his company’s new Menlo Park headquarters. This follows the trend of companies like Zynga who also rung the IPO bell from home base rather than New York. CNBC tweeted the news this morning and we’ve verified… → Read More
Buckle up everybody: Facebook’s initial public offering, the most highly anticipated tech stock market debut since Google’s 2004 IPO, is one step closer to actually happening.
This morning Facebook filed an 8-A form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which indicated that it has received approval from the NASDAQ stock exchange to offer its shares to the public. → Read More
Facebook has just filed a sixth amendment to its S-1 filing to IPO in order to provide more transparency about how the shift of its user base from the web to mobile is causing it to show fewer ads per user, which could hurt revenue in the long term. Facebook also granted about $796 million in restricted stock units to employees less than a week ago, which was in the previous S-1 amendment but… → Read More
While greedy advertisers claim they’re skeptical about Facebook because it won’t give them obtrusive ad units, investors seem quite confident in its business, considering they’ve publicly poured $915 million into Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers according to a study by AlphaBoost. The future of Facebook ads is a particularly popular bet, as Ads API providers who help brands and agencies… → Read More
Would you prefer a CEO who’s in the trenches making their company worth more, or one who sings and dances for potential investors? In Facebook’s case, having Mark Zuckerberg remain the visionary rather than become a celebrity salesman will be crucial to the company staying on top. Zuckerberg’s steered Facebook around so many pitfalls. And his dedication to the product is so inspiring to his… → Read More
Facebook today filed an amended S-1 to IPO that describes new risks based on its launch of ads for mobile, Zynga’s standalone gaming platform, and a patent dispute with Yahoo. It also explained how its concentrated voting structure would impact investors, and listed additional underwriters.
Here are the major revisions to the S-1 compared to the original Facebook filed at the beginning of… → Read More
Guess who knows what’s best for the future of Facebook? It’s certainly not public investors looking to cash in on “social” 8 years after Facebook started. That’s why those same investors should actually be happy about a warning from Institutional Shareholder Services noting that Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg will own roughly 57% of the company after the IPO. He’s a lot more likely to steer the… → Read More
Congratulations Facebook! You have made history and changed the world. So, here are some thoughts from one of your biggest fans. Like the rest of the planet, I love Facebook and use it every day. So, there may never be a better time than now, when things are going really well, to add a dose of humility and perspective to the Facebook conversation.
Remember the movie Gladiator? Commodus, the bad… → Read More
For those not from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, there’s only 1 thing you really need know about Facebook’s plan to become a publicly traded company: Your Facebook won’t be suddenly overrun with ads. Facebook bluntly warns greedy investors “Our culture emphasizes rapid innovation and prioritizes user engagement over short-term financial results”, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg proclaims, “Simply put… → Read More
Just a little tidbit from everyone’s favorite reading material this week, the Facebook IPO filing: the company noted that it now stores over 100 petabytes of media (photos and videos) uploaded by its 845 million users. In case “100 petabytes” didn’t blow you over, the filing further explains that’s equal to “100 quadrillion bytes.”
OK, now you’re just showing off, Facebook. → Read More
We learned a lot of things about Facebook today from its IPO filing. But there is one detail that sticks out for its improbable exactness: The $1.000 billion in profits Facebook reported for 2011.
The number wasn’t $998 million. It wasn’t $1.003 billion. It was $1.000 billion right on the dot. → Read More
Facebook put the “sexy” in S-1 today, with its IPO filing basically DDoSing the SEC’s site and eventually Scribd this afternoon.
Because it drives massive amounts of traffic we are genuinely interested, we covered it a lot on the site and even changed our logo to Zuck’s face, a move that some thought was funny and others not so much. We’re going to be doing this for some big stories from now… → Read More
Make no mistake about Facebook’s ambitions. “There are more than two billion global Internet users,” its S-1 filing states, “…and we aim to connect all of them.” As evidence of its ability to reach this goal, the company says that it already has some countries with above 80% penetration rates among users.
The problem, as the filing also notes, is that “our rates of user and revenue growth… → Read More
In the S-1 filing for Facebook’s IPO, the company offers a little more insight into its advertising business, which it describes as “the substantial majority” of its revenue (and that’s an understatement).
In 2009, advertising accounted for 98 percent of Facebook’s revenue. The number declined to 95 percent in 2010 and 85 percent last year, thanks largely to the growth of revenue from payments. → Read More
Facebook just revealed its financials in preparation for its public offering.
Bear with me: This means no more “leaks” of Facebook’s revenue numbers to spike its valuation in secondary markets. No more banal and vague conversations about how Facebook is “killing it” at San Francisco bars. It means that I’ll never have to write another one of these “Report: Blah Blah Blah” posts about Facebook… → Read More
Since we were getting a little frustrated with the slow-loading, totally crashing SEC.gov website, we decided to do everyone around here a favor. We made a PDF of the filing and posted it publicly on Scribd instead. Now, there’s a very good chance that this might just crash Scribd too, but for some reason, we’re thinking Scribd can handle the traffic better and scale to support the extra clicks… → Read More
Earlier analyst estimates from December had pegged the monthly active users of Facebook’s mobile apps at around 300 million per month. This number includes smartphone apps, like those for the Android and iPhone, but also apps that run on BlackBerry, Nokia, and feature phones. At the time, that number equated to roughly 40% of the company’s overall user base.
Facebook hadn’t revealed an official… → Read More
Here’s another way that Mark Zuckerberg is following his idol Steve Jobs: He will have a $1 salary, starting in 2013. → Read More
Facebook’s $5 billion S-1 IPO filing includes a detailed assessment of business risks. These include: its lack of mobile monetization and the fact that it doesn’t own a mobile platform, government censorship and privacy scrutiny, inability to maintain its growth rate, and competition from Google+ as well as Twitter and Microsoft.
Here’s a closer look at these risks, followed by the full text of… → Read More
I’ve spent the last few years trying to figure out Facebook’s regional traffic numbers via third party measurement firms and by scraping its ad tool. But now, I don’t have to, because the company has included the breakdown in its S-1 filing today.
And what does it show? Across the board growth. Take a look at the graphs below, going back to March of 2009. Contrary to various other data sets… → Read More
It appears that the excitement over the Facebook IPO has crashed the SEC’s website. The link to the Facebook SEC filing, previously available here, is no longer loading. Instead, we’re seeing a “this webpage is not available message” when attempting to load the site using Google’s Chrome web browser, and similar errors in other browsers. This has gone on for several minutes now, as everyone is… → Read More
Everyone likes to talk about how dependent Zynga is on Facebook, but that relationship cuts both ways. In the social network’s S-1 filing, Facebook says that Zynga accounted for 12 percent of its revenue in 2011, through a combination of virtual goods payments and advertising. → Read More
As part of its initial filing to go public, Facebook has just revealed some new user numbers that illustrate just how big it is.
It had 845 million monthly active users and 483 million daily active users as of December, for year over year growth of 39% and 48% respectively. Mobile is also half the user base, with 425 million monthly actives. Some other stats, which are a big more vague: 100… → Read More
Facebook has just filed its S-1 to IPO. Below is the letter from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s purpose, in which he explains “Facebook was not originally created to be a company. It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected. We think it’s important that everyone who invests in Facebook understands what this mission means to us.” → Read More
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