LinkedIn files registration statement for Initial Public Offering
blog.linkedin.com
blog.linkedin.com
1. 90 million registered members worldwide. 2 million registered groups. 65 million unique monthly visitors. 5.5 billion page views in December, 2010.
2. $160 million in revenues during Q1-Q3 2010 (already doubling 2009 numbers).
3. Company is currently profitable.
4. Class A stock being offered to public. All key insiders (founders) hold Class B, which has a 10x voting advantage over the A. Preferred holders will convert into B at the time of the offering, thus also having a 10x voting advantage over the public shareholders. As with Google, the insider group will have firm control of the company even after the offering.
5. Offering will be from newly issued shares of the company and also from piggy-back sales by certain preferred investors.
For anyone interested, the S-1 registration statement is here: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271024/0001193125110...
It's extremely ominous that they're only offering such disingenuous metrics. They even admit as much in the footnotes:
"We define unique visitors as users who have visited our website at least once during a month regardless of whether they are a member, based on data provided by comScore"
In other words, they're counting people from India and other countries that aren't worth anything to advertisers, people who get there accidentally by clicking Google results and email signatures, etc. And not only that but they aren't even using their own analytics data. It wouldn't surprise me if 80+% of their traffic was fake. Not to mention the fact that:
"The number of our registered members is higher than the number of actual members, and a substantial majority of our page views are generated by a minority of our members."
This whole thing has scam written all over it. It wouldn't surprise me if this IPO ends up throwing cold water on the valuations of the entire sector, similarly to how eToys destroyed the first dotcom bubble after they couldn't deliver their shipments in time for Christmas.
According to http://venturebeat.com/2011/01/27/linkedin-ipo-facts/ their 2009 revenue was $120 million, so 2010 isn't quite a 200% increase but rather about 179% increase (still notable).