Twitter aims to raise $1bn for IPO

Twitter has filed paper work with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public and plans to raise $1 billion in the process.

The social micro-blogging platform, which has 215 million active users and 500 million daily tweets, will be known as TWTR, but has yet to reveal which market it will trade in.

Twitter revealed that its revenue soared by 107 per cent over the last six months to $253.6 million. However, it's not profitable, chalking up a a net loss of $69.3 million - an increase of 41 per cent over the same period.

The site generates revenue primarily through ads but 15 per cent of sales also come from licensing data for analysis.

Twitter recognises that it faces a number of challenges after going public and that it will need to continue finding ways to grow.

"We may face challenges in increasing the size of our user base, including, among others, competition from alternative products and services, a decline in the number of influential users on Twitter or a perceived decline in the quality of content available on Twitter," the firm noted in the filing.

"We anticipate that our user growth rate will slow over time as the size of our user base increases. To the extent our user growth or user growth rate slows, our revenue growth will become increasingly dependent on our ability to increase levels of user engagement."

Twitter may go on to raise more then $1 billion when it floats on the stock market. When social networking arch-rival Facebook went public in 2012, it initially set out to raise $5bn and ended up securing $16 billion. However, Facebook had nearly four times as many users (845 million) and crucially profit of $1 billion when its IPO was filed.