

LinkedIn files registration statement for Initial Public Offering - dmpatierno
http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/01/27/linkedin-ipo-registration/

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grellas
Some tidbits from the registration statement:

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...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1271024/000119312511016022/ds1.htm)

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Alex3917
"65 million unique monthly visitors. 5.5 billion page views in December,
2010."

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.

