Millenial Media's IPO Filing: 5 big takeaways
Millenial Media, the largest independent mobile ad network, has filed to go public, aiming to raise up to $75 million. Here's a link to its IPO filing. 
I’ve gone through much of Millenial's IPO filing. Here are some key points:
- Revenue is growing rapidly and its loss is shrinking, but Millenial is not yet profitable. The company is now doing about $100M of annual revenue, generating $70M in revenue in the first nine months of 2011, from just $6.2M in 2008. While not yet profitable, their net loss improved from $5.4M to $417,000 during the same period.
- Millenial is the #2 player in the huge mobile advertising market and its growth is taking away from Apple. The mobile advertising market is forecasted to double this year to $3.3 billion and be a $20.6 billion market by 2015, according to Gartner. And while Google/AdMob is the leader in the market, with nearly a quarter of the market share, Millenial ranks No. 2, with nearly 17% of share. Millenial's growth is also coming at the expense of Apple/iAds, who comes in at No. 3 with 15%.
- The mobile app market is just exploding. Gartner forecasts that the total number of downloads from mobile application stores worldwide will increase from 17.7 billion in 2011 to 108.8 billion in 2015. That's a compound annual growth rate of 57%.
- Millenial is BIG and growing pretty fast. In December 2011, Millennial reached 200 million unique users. They also processed a whopping 40 billion ad impressionsin December too. In terms of apps, more than 28,000 have Millennial integrated across more than 7,000 different mobile device types and models.
- The executives at Millennial are all in their late 30's and 40's. I point this out only to highlight that much of Millennial's success so far is because of seasoned executives, not fresh-faced hackers out of college that we so love to glamorize here in Silicon Valley. Speaking of which, chalk up another big win for non Silicon Valley or New York startups -- Millenial is based in Baltimore.
Bottom Line: Millennial is growing fast and going after an enormous market opportunity. If they can continue executing well, they will be an important, independent player for years to come.
