So Facebook finally filed its S-1 on Wednesday and I've had about three tabs open all week just refreshing to see what people are pulling out of the document. If you missed it: they filed with the SEC on February 1st, saying they want to raise $5 billion, and buried in there are the actual numbers instead of the vague "hundreds of millions of users" line we've all heard a thousand times. 845 million monthly active users as of the end of December. Not 900 million like some headlines are rounding it to, 845 million, and that's up 39% from the 608 million they had a year before. Revenue for 2011 was $3.71 billion, profit was right around $1 billion. Those are real numbers from a real filing, not analyst guesses, which is kind of a novelty at this point given how long we've all been speculating about what Facebook's books actually look like.
The stat that got me was the 483 million daily active users in December, averaged out. That's more than the population of the entire United States logging in on a given day, worldwide obviously, but still. And 80 percent of the user base is outside the US, which I think a lot of people forget when they're doing the "is Facebook growth slowing in America" thing. It was never really about America to begin with, not in terms of scale anyway.
I'm not going to pretend I know what this means for the stock when it actually starts trading (still months out, this is just the paperwork stage, the roadshow and pricing and all that comes later). What I do find interesting is Zuckerberg keeping voting control even after going public, which apparently was baked into the filing from the jump. Founders doing that isn't new exactly, Google did a dual-class thing too, but it always strikes me as a little funny that "going public" for a company like this doesn't really mean giving up control, it just means letting outside money in on the upside while the guy in the hoodie still runs the show. Fine by me honestly. I'd rather have one person who actually understands the product making calls than a board of people who've never opened the site trying to steer it by committee.
Also, over 100 billion friend connections total on the site as of end of 2011. I tried to do the math on what that number even means for a second and gave up. It's a lot of connections is the takeaway.
Unrelated tangent, but this whole week has also had the SOPA/PIPA fallout still simmering in the background, which feels almost old news now less than three weeks after the blackout day, but I keep seeing people bring it up in the context of "see, this is what happens when tech companies actually push back together." Wikipedia going dark for a day in January apparently did more to move senators than a decade of lobbying did. Make of that what you will. I still think it says something uncomfortable about how these decisions usually get made when nobody's paying attention.
Anyway, back to Facebook. The part of the S-1 nobody's really talking about yet is the risk factors section, which is the part of any prospectus that's actually honest because lawyers make companies list out every conceivable way things could go wrong. Somewhere in there they basically admit that if they can't keep growing engagement or if a new competitor shows up that's more interesting to use, the whole thing could stall out. Obvious stuff when you think about it, but it's rare to see a company say it in writing that plainly. I spent longer reading that section than I probably needed to, mostly because it's the only part of a 200-plus page filing written in something resembling normal English instead of legal boilerplate.
I don't have a grand theory about what any of this means for the internet or whatever. Mostly I just think it's a strange thing to watch a company that most of us started using in college (or, depending how old you are, watched your little cousins start using) turn into a line item on a stock exchange. Going to keep an eye on this one as the actual pricing gets closer, assuming I don't get bored of the topic before then, which given my track record is a real possibility.