Secrets From Facebook's Recent Filings

Facebook added a fourth amendment to its initial public offering filing, updating investors about its recent multi-million dollar deals with Instagram and Microsoft.

The amendment tells us that Facebook paid $300 million in cash and 23 million shares of  Facebook common stock for the photo-sharing service and that it intends to use the service to "enhance" mobile engagement and photo sharing. The deal is expected to close by June. (For those keeping count, 23 million shares of Facebook are worth about $710 million, according to TechCrunch.) Facebook also dishes on its deal with Microsoft, which we previously covered on Monday, but also mentioned that Facebook now has 901 million monthly active users. More surprisingly, more than 500 million of those users access Facebook on a mobile device.

Total revenue dropped about 6 percent from $1.13 billion to $1.06 billion between Q4 2011 and the first quarter of 2012. Facebook took home $872 million in advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2012, down 8 percent from $943 million in the last three months of 2011. All the numbers weren't bad, however, because year-over-year Facebook's numbers showed significant improvement. International revenue also made up 49 percent of its total revenue for the first quarter, rising slightly from previous quarters.

Facebook's first quarter revenue was only about $1 billion ($1.06 billion), just a tad over what Facebook paid for Instagram ($1.01 billion). But the most important thing to take away is that revenue, including advertising were down -- something that doesn't bode well for an IPO that just sank $1.5 billion in acquisitions this month. While Microsoft patents could be seen as a necessity in the increasingly litigious tech climate, Instagram's acquisition now seems like an impulsive purchase.

 
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