MENLO PARK, Ca. – Facebook filed for an initial public offering on Tuesday that could value the company up to $100 billion, putting the eight-year-old social network on track to be one of the biggest Web stock market debuts of all time.

In a securities filing, the company said it is seeking to raise $5 billion. That figure is a placeholder and will likely change. Facebook hopes to raise as much as $10 billion when it goes public in the spring, people familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal.

The company revealed it has been growing fast, but the figures were less than some had expected. Facebook said it produced $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011, up from $1.97 billion a year earlier. Outside estimates had pegged Facebook’s revenue for 2011 at $4.27 billion.

In a letter to potential shareholders, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said he plans to continue focusing on building products, rather than optimizing for revenue growth. “We don’t build services to make money; we make money to build better services,” he said.” These days I think more and more people want to use services from companies that believe in something beyond simply maximizing profits.”

Facebook’s public debut is one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in recent years and would put it ahead of Google Inc.’s 2004 offering, which has held the record for the largest U.S. Internet IPO by raising $1.9 billion and valuing the company at $23 billion. Facebook’s offering is also viewed as a defining moment for the latest Web investing boom.

Facebook’s growth is slower than some other tech companies that have gone public recently. Groupon’s revenue grew 695 percent for the nine months ended Sept. 2011, from a year earlier period. Zynga’s revenue grew 106 percent for that same time period. Google saw its revenue grow 29% in 2011 from a year earlier, while Yahoo’s revenue grew 21% in the same period. At $3.7 billion, Facebook’s revenue is smaller than Yahoo, which most recently reported sales of $4.38 billion.

Yet unlike some other newly public Web companies, Facebook is profitable. Facebook’s 2011 profit was $1 billion, up 65 percent from the year earlier period. Facebook’s revenue is driven by its online advertising business, as big brands rush to the site to interact with consumers through display ads and fan pages. The number of ads delivered on the site grew 42 percent and the average price per ad grew 18 percent over 2011 from 2010.

Facebook attributed the growth in price per ads to the vast trove of information it has on its users. The increase in average price per ad delivered “was effected by factors including improvements our ability to deliver more relevant ads to users and product changes that contributed to higher user interaction with the ads by increasing their relative prominence,” the company said in its regulatory filing. <;p>

Social gaming has also become an increasingly important part of Facebook’s business. The company generated $557 million in revenue from partners who sell virtual goods last year.

Through social gaming, Facebook has diversified its revenue over the last year. In 2010, advertising revenue accounted for 95 percent of Facebook’s total revenue. In 2011, that declined to 85 percent.

Overall, Facebook said in its filing that it has 845 million users, up 39 percent from a year earlier. The company also said 483 million of those users log into the site daily, a 48 percent increase from a year earlier.

The company’s IPO would cap a recent wave of Web IPOs, some of which have struggled amid growing Wall Street scrutiny of the new crop of Internet companies. In early 2011, professional social network LinkedIn Corp. went public with a bang, more than doubling on its first day of trading. Zillow Inc. and other Web companies followed with strong IPOs.

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