Twitter’s Public Offering: What’s In It For You?

Are you aware that there are now 218 million active monthly users on Twitter worldwide? There are also over 500 million active registered users, with 100 million of them logging in on a daily basis, resulting in a daily average number of tweets of 58 million, generating 1 billion tweets every 5 days!

You will be surprised to know that 3 million websites are integrated with Twitter. Now, 87 percent of Twitter’s revenue comes from advertising, with 65% of its advertising earnings coming from ads on tablets and Smartphones. However, inspite of these impressive numbers, Twitter has never made a profit? Did you get that? Never made a profit!

With these statistics, I’m not sure the Twitter IPO (Initial Public Offering) is completely out of place.

Come November, Twitter will be offering itself on a dish to the public. There will be a lot of expectations for Twitter’s market debut. Twitter has announced that they will sell their shares between $17 and $20, and they plan on selling upwards of 70 million shares valuing the online messaging company at about $11 billion. This is $4 billion less than analysts had expected, and far below the $100 billion valuation that Facebook received in its IPO in May 2012.

Before it went public, Facebook had reported an annual profit of $1 billion and revenue of $3.7 billion. In contrast, Twitter reported a net loss of $79.4 million on revenue of just $316.9 million in 2012.

Twitter's executives are however optimistic about the IPO plan as they work around the clock dotting i’s and crossing t’s. They organized an eight-day roadshow to promote Twitter's IPO with the aim of selling up to $1.6 billion worth of shares in the second largest social media company.

In a bid to avoid hitches, Twitter has also chosen the NYSE for its forthcoming initial public offering ditching the NASDAQ to avert the kind of disappointment that followed Facebook’s IPO.

If you happen to be one of the 500+ million users of Twitter, I guess you’re wondering what you stand to gain for all those months/years of devoted twitting? How is Twitter going to reward you for your loyalty you may ask. Well, I have no ready answer to that question, but Facebook after its IPO introduced some stunning features like the Graph search features, an improved iOS update that allows structured personal status updates, better privacy settings and so on. Maybe twitter can offer you something better. We’ll just have to wait and see.