By David Goldman
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Twitter filed for an initial public offering of stock on Thursday afternoon, though the details of its business will remain a secret for now.
The company sent its filing confidentially to the Securities Exchange Commission. Many soon-to-be-public companies have been taking advantage of new regulations passed last year in the JOBS Act, which allows smaller businesses to keep its financial data out of the public’s eye.
Under the act, companies with less than $1 billion of annual revenue can file for confidential IPOs.
Twitter has been rumored to be going public for the past few years. After Facebook’s IPO in May 2012, it was widely believed that Twitter would be the next major technology company to offer its stock to public investors.
It’s a good time to be going public, since the stock market has been treating social networks particularly well lately. After bumpy starts, both Facebook and LinkedIn hit all-time highs on Wednesday.
Twitter has exploded in usage since its creation in 2006. As of March, it had more than 200 million active users around the world. Last month, the company set a record of 143,199 tweets per second during the airing of a Japanese television show.
Like Facebook, the question for Twitter has never been how much people were using it but on how to capitalize on its gigantic user base.
Twitter serves ads via promoted tweets, promoted corporate accounts and enhanced profiles of companies. But how users’ engagement with those products translates into sales isn’t well-known — and won’t be until the company releases its financial data.
The-CNN-Wire
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