Last week, Airbnb (finally) filed to go public. Ahead of the firm’s expected stock market debut in December 2020, we list and analyze various types of alternative datasets which could directly help investors better understand company performance.

1. LISTINGS AND AVERAGE DAILY RATE

Airbnb predominantly earn their commissions from one of two ways: 1) taking a cut of the booking subtotal (i.e nightly rate + any applicable fees), or 2) charging a service fee of 14-20% from hosts with active listings. Therefore, getting a thorough understanding of a listing’s average daily rate, as well as the number of active listings at any given point in time, is one way to gauge Airbnb’s potential revenue.

The most common way to capture these two data points is