FACEBOOK IPO

FACEBOOK IPO


In less than a decade, the company has gone from a hobby to a multibillion-dollar enterprise and a worldwide phenomenon. For Facebook to have a multi billion IPO is a testament to the site's popularity. As of December 2011, the site had 845 million monthly active users (161 million active monthly users in the United States). In December 2004, the site just had about 1 million users. To go from 1 million to 845 million in seven years is super impressive.




But it's not just how many Facebook users there are, it's what those users do on the site. As of 2010, users were uploading 3 billion photos to the site every month. Fifty percent of all users logged on in a given day. And the average user spends nearly an hour on Facebook every day. Every 2 minutes, 1 million comments were made on the site. Those kind of numbers get investors and advertisers excited. 

The site is truly worldwide as there are more than 80% of Facebook users coming from outside the United States and Canada.

Earliest investors: PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel invested $500,000 in 2004, followed by Accel Partners, which invested $12.7 million in 2005

Biggest stakeholder: Mark Zuckerberg, who holds a 56.9 pre-IPO voting stake. Other top stakeholders: Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, DigitalSky Technologies; entrepreneurs Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus, Sean Parker.