Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

On Its Eighth Birthday, Facebook Files to Raise $5 Billion in Massive IPO (Get Your S-1 Here!)

Here are the major stats on Facebook’s IPO, which it just filed: 845 million monthly users and 483 million daily users; annual revenue of $3.7 billion; $1.8 billion in annual operating income and $1 billion net income.

And the raise in the initial public offering for now? It’s $5 billion. That could go up, of course; as yet, there is no valuation listed in the S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the social networking giant.

Let’s just say, it will be a lot.

And here are some uh-oh stats:

A full 12 percent of Facebook’s revenue in 2011 was linked to its relationship with online gaming giant Zynga.

And overall growth is slowing too.

Said Facebook’s filing:

“We believe that our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time. For example, our annual revenue grew 154% from 2009 to 2010 and 88% from 2010 to 2011. Historically, our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue. Our user growth and revenue growth rates will inevitably slow as we achieve higher market penetration rates, as our revenue increases to higher levels, and as we experience increased competition.”

That is still en fuego, but will be noted by many.

In case you were visiting the outer rings of Jupiter and did not hear, you might want to know that Facebook filed for an initial public offering today. It is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated of financial events in Silicon Valley in many years.

The massive social networking site — which was launched in an undergraduate dorm room at Harvard University on the first Wednesday in February 2004, exactly eight years ago — is now a global phenomenon.

Its rocket ride to the top of the Internet and in Silicon Valley has been largely due to the aggressive innovation of one very unusual founder, CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Assembling an experienced team and pushing through a series of sometimes controversial products to link friends together online, the young entrepreneur has built a service that now is challenging even search giant Google.

Zuckerberg has been slow to take the company public, although the move was inevitable.

And now, of course, it is here.

More to come, as the ATD team parses the IPO filing, which is below (so join in!):

FacebookInc-20120201-S1-0

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— David Pogue on why he’s joining Yahoo