Until today, all that was known about Twitter's impending public stock offering was a 135-character message saying it had filed its IPO papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today the company told the rest of the story, making its prospectus public for the first time. So, now that potential investors get a chance to paw through the company's numbers, the debate begins: Is the offering a rocketship or a dog?
The New York Times Dealbook blog summarizes company financials disclosed today:
"In its second quarter this year, Twitter reported 218.3 million average monthly active users, up 44 percent from the same time a year. Its revenue for the first half of this year was $253.6 million, more than double the same time last year.
The company has also been losing money, reporting a net loss of $79 million last year and $69 million for the first six months of 2013. Even after adjusting for stock option compensation and other items like depreciation, Twitter has still reported steady losses.
In its analysis, TechCrunch focuses on Twitter's potential challenges in overseas markets:
Here’s Twitter’s S-1 name-checking a number of services that could harm its growth: "Increased competition from local websites, mobile applications and services that provide real-time communications, such as Sina Weibo in China, LINE in Japan and Kakao in South Korea, which have expanded and may continue to expand their geographic footprint. ..."
If those services were to expand to as many markets as Twitter, they could lower Twitter’s usage, and therefore its ability to sell advertisements. Twitter plans on selling advertisements in more countries in the future it states, but if Line and its ilk slow its rollout, Twitter could find its revenue growth on hold.
VentureBeat goes deeper into Twitter's numbers and highlights Twitter's claimed advantages as an advertising platform:
In its filing, Twitter is telling the world that it can be the “content creation, distribution, and discovery platform for the Internet and evolving mobile ecosystem,” combining the elements of public data, real-time information, conversation tone, and massive distribution. The resulting value proposition for advertisers, the company says, is: unique ad formats (its suite of promoted tweets, accounts, etc.), interest targeting, viral global reach, real-time advertising, pay-for-performance, and the extension of offline advertising, as on TV.
Finally, here's the Associated Press's latest writethrough on the Twitter IPO: