LinkedIn files for its IPO

Looks like we can finally stop asking when LinkedIn is going to have its initial public offering. The professional networking site just filed an S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is the first step in the IPO process.

The IPO has been rumored for a while now, most recently with All Things Digital reporting that LinkedIn would file its S-1 today. When Sequoia Capital partner Michael Moritz joined the LinkedIn board earlier this month, it was ostensibly just to replace departing partner Mark Kvamme, but it also seemed relevant that Moritz had experience serving on the boards of companies like Google as they went public.

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While the IPO market has been slowly warming up after the financial crash, LinkedIn will be the first among the big names in the current wave of Web startups to go public. Facebook is likely to follow next year.

The company also published a blog post announcing the IPO and saying that the transaction will be managed by Morgan Stanley, BofA Merrill Lynch, and J.P. Morgan Securities. The filing doesn’t say how many shares will be offered, what the price will be, or whether the company will be listed on The New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq. (Getting such a high-profile tech company would be a coup for the NYSE.)

In the “key metrics” area of the filing, LinkedIn says that it has 90 million registered members, 65 million unique monthly visitors, and 5.5 billion monthly pageviews (averaged out over the last three months of 2010). The company says that its net revenue for the nine months ending on September 30, 2010 was $161 million, about double its revenue from the same period in 2009.

I’m updating this post as I have more information.