After seven years of serving 140 character messages to the world, Twitter's IPO filing details the scale of its audience and its revenues for the first time.
Twitter has over 200m monthly users
As of 30 June, Twitter had 218.3m monthly active users, which marked an increase of 44% within a year.
For comparison, LinkedIn has around 240m users, but both are dwarfed by Facebook's 1.2bn users.
Around five tweets are sent per user per day
Twitter has 218.3m active users per month.
However, per day, Twitter only racks up around 100m active users, who collectively send around 500m tweets a day, which works out at 70bn characters, if everyone maximised their 140 character allowance per tweet.
That's about 22,580 War and Peaces per day.
Twitter's timeline is viewed 1.65bn times per day
When it comes to eyeballs on screen, Twitter's 218.3m monthly active users generate just under 151bn timeline views a quarter, which works out at around 1.65bn timeline views per day on average, or around 16 views per user per day.
Increasing revenues but still loss making
In 2012, Twitter's revenues increased by 198% to $316.9m (£197.4m), but the company made a loss of $79.4m for the year, although that was a reduction from a loss of $128.3m in 2011.
Advertising accounts for 87% of Twitter's revenue, of which it generates around $0.30 per 1,000 timeline views, or approximately $495,000 a day according to that metric.
Dick Costolo's not in it for the headline salary figure
Twitter's chief executive, Dick Costolo, took a large pay cut two months ago, taking his annual salary down from $200,000 to $14,000, for which Twitter gave no official reason.
However, Costolo received $8.4m in stock awards and $2.9m in options as of 2012. If Twitter's IPO goes as planned, both stocks and options should increase significantly in value.
Shares and millions
Evan Williams, Twitter's former chief executive and co-founder holds 12% of the company shares, while Jack Dorsey, Twitter's chairman and co-founder holds 4.9% and Dick Costolo holds 1.6%.
With the company estimated to be worth between $12bn and $20bn, that will see all three safely into multimillionaire territory.
Spam is one of Twitter's biggest threats
Spam is a problem for everyone across almost all communication methods. Twitter, however, sees it as one of its biggest threats to user growth, specifically mentioning it in the company's IPO filing.
Spam on Twitter refers to a range of abusive activities that are prohibited by our terms of service … including posting large numbers of unsolicited mentions of a user, duplicate Tweets, misleading links (e.g., to malware or click-jacking pages) or other false or misleading content, and aggressively following and un-following accounts, adding users to lists, sending invitations, retweeting and favouriting Tweets to inappropriately attract attention.
Despite the company's targeted efforts to tackle spam, Twitter estimates that around 5% of its user base is actually automated spam accounts or fake users.
Twitter is also worried that substantial spam could affect the company's user analytics and therefore the perception of performance, as well as user growth.
Growth isn't always a good thing for service
Although Twitter's service stability has improved over the past few years, the company is still worried about the infamous 'Fail Whale' outages returning due to the real-time nature of the service.
Although we are investing significantly to improve the capacity, capability and reliability of our infrastructure, we are not currently serving traffic equally through our co-located data centres that support our platform.Accordingly, in the event of a significant issue at the data centre supporting most of our network traffic, some of our products and services may become inaccessible to the public or the public may experience difficulties accessing our products and services.
Twitter sees service availability as a key factor for its business – if Twitter is unavailable due to disruption, then users are going to go elsewhere.
Any disruption or failure in our infrastructure could hinder our ability to handle existing or increased traffic on our platform, which could significantly harm our business.
Potentially ready for Christmas
Twitter now has to carry out the traditional roadshows to court investors, but the timing of the company's public filing suggests shares could start trading in mid to late November.
The US government's shutdown might affect the timing of the IPO, however, as the US Securities and Exchange Commission must approve IPO filings
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