As the market was closing on Thursday, Twitter posted a tweet announcing that it had started the process of filing for an initial public offering. As Twitter prepares to spread its wings on Wall Street, it will also need to prepare for a flock of financial analysts looking for comparisons between Twitter and Facebook, which went public in May 2012 and spent most of the next year trading below its IPO value. During its 16 months as a public company, the one question that Facebook has had to answer most often for investors is “What about mobile?”
It seems likely that “What about mobile?” will be the question for Twitter as well. Unlike Facebook, Twitter is heading into its IPO with a strong mobile story. According to its website, 60% of its 200 million active users access the service from a mobile device at least once a month. The company identifies “primary mobile users” as a distinct group, but does not disclose the size of this group. Twitter does say that “primary mobile users” tend to visit Twitter more often during the day, engage more with brands, and share more content.
Perhaps the most compelling part of the Twitter’s mobile story is its most recent chapter: the $350 million dollar acquisition of MoPub. MoPub is the world’s largest mobile advertising exchange and by combining MoPub’s platform with its own user profiles, Twitter can bring a unique offer to advertisers. It can serve ads based on demographic information gleaned from tweets and follows, and it can identify a user who logs onto the site from different devices, meaning that someone who browsed products during downtime at work could see an ad for that same type of product on their tablet at home.
Twitter said that it had filed a confidential S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission, but it did not say when it had submitted that paperwork. The confidential S-1 could have been submitted some time ago, meaning that Twitter is almost ready to file a public S-1 and begin a “road show” to market its shares to institutional investors.
