Technology History | Nasdaq MarketSite — Netflix Went Out at Fifteen Dollars and Stayed Under It

Netflix priced 5,500,000 shares at $15.00 and began trading on 23 May 2002, and its prospectus prints the arithmetic without decoration: $82,500,000 gross, $1.05 a share to the underwriters, $76,725,000 before expenses to the company.

That $82.5 million is the figure everyone quotes. The company's own accounts for the year give a larger one, because the base sale closed on 29 May and an over-allotment of 825,000 shares closed on 14 June: $94,875,000 gross, about $86.2 million net.

It was the second attempt. Netflix had filed to go public in 2000 and withdrew when the dot-com market collapsed under it.

What it brought to the market in 2002 was roughly 600,000 subscribers, a warehouse business in discs, and no profit.

The first day went well enough: the stock closed at $16.75, about 12 percent above the offer price.

Then it broke. The shares spent most of their first year below $15, which is what a broken IPO looks like from the inside — the money is banked and the market spends months telling you it overpaid.

Listing here means less than the pictures suggest. Nasdaq has no trading floor, so a listing is a data feed and a broadcast slot, and the MarketSite at the base of this tower is a television studio with a curved video wall in it.

The photograph shows that wall in 2006, quotes running across it in blue and green, which is the closest thing a Nasdaq listing has to a room.

Netflix stayed listed under NFLX and split its stock twice, two-for-one in 2004 and seven-for-one in 2015, which is why the $15 of 2002 is quoted today as $1.07.

The cylindrical screen on the Broadway front is visible from the Times Square plazas. The studio inside is not open to the public.

Photo: Luis Villa del Campo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons