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Pinterest Raises $150M at 2015 Share Price
- arcanus 9y agoSo is this perceived as a lateral move? Or is this a strong negative indicator.
- pg_is_a_butt 9y agowhy can't it be a strong positive indicator? you're all idiots.
- colinbartlett 9y agoHard to imagine somoene seeing this as anything but negative. It's like a stock not gaining at all in two years and then suddenly asking someone to buy a whole bunch of it.
- justin_vanw 9y agoIt's hard to say without seeing the terms, but raising money is not quite like selling a bunch of stock. The money probably comes with a bunch of terms, and if it's effectively a down round the terms are probably incredibly terrible for the company's existing investors.
- giarc 9y agoI've started to use pintrest a lot lately (finding ideas for some DIY furniture). I actually kind of like the product for discovery. I haven't pinned items from other sites, just saved items from other people's boards. My biggest qualm is the number of low quality ads. Ton of stuff for diet drinks, teeth whitening, skin cream and the like. And fidget spinners, lots of fidget spinning ads. Perhaps I haven't used the app enough to get more personalized ads, but I do hope the side of the service improves.
- bby 9y agoI've purchased some shitty fidget spinners from the site, made me wanna never use pinterest again.
- akcreek 9y agoI've used Pinterest for a couple of years or more to save images of cars, motorcycles and houses and the ads are just as terrible for me. I almost never get on there anymore because of the garbage they are pushing on me. Just not interested and it ruins the entire experience to have to wade through these terrible ads that have nothing to do with how I use the product (or anything else related to my life). -edit- The suggested pins for me are just as irrelevant. I spent quite a bit of time marking each irrelevant pin and ad as such, but it didn't seem to help. I finally turned off suggested pins, but ads aren't optional.
- sjg007 9y agoI feel like ads on all of the big platforms started out as bad/irrelevant/spammy. They've typically gotten better over time as inventory improves but then again ads are in general spammy by definition.
- mintplant 9y ago> I finally turned off suggested pins, but ads aren't optional. Well, technically you can always install an ad blocker.
- akcreek 9y agoI've got uBlock origin, but it doesn't block anything on Pinterest. That brings up a good point... on Pinterest it is hard to tell what is and isn't an ad because the only differentiator is the text below that reads "promoted by...". Everything else looks like a normal pin, except usually the content doesn't make any sense with my feed so I think look to see who is posting garbage so I can unfollow them and usually it turns out to be an ad.
- mahyarm 9y ago
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- habosa 9y agoPinterest really dropped the ball, they could have been a super profitable social network. A lot has been written about how people go on Pinterest with shopping intent. It's a way to window shop the entire internet, curated by friends. They never really monetized it much though. Individual influencers made money by leveraging referral programs. It seems like Pinterest was way ahead of the curve when it came to having image-heavy content and a heavy focus on lifestyle products. But they missed the boat on video and a lot of the influencers moved to Instagram or Facebook.
- philfrasty 9y agoAny idea why they never integrated any ecommerce functionality? I mean Instagram (finally) does sort of this with the „Swipe Up“ feature for selected creators in Instagram Stories.
- ceejayoz 9y agoThey've had "Buyable Pins" since 2015. https://business.pinterest.com/en/buyable-pins https://business.pinterest.com/en/buyable-pins
- philfrasty 9y agoHa nice...never seen a single one in the wild...they probably filter by location (me: EU).
- octref 9y agoThey are also people who actively hate "social networking" and just want to collect some visual inspirations without being fed with a bunch of advertisements. Thank you.
- sushid 9y agoSure, but you're not the one paying the bills. You're either the customer or the product.
- idlewords 9y agoThe thing that really puts me off Pinterest is that they require you to log in to see their public pages. I'm surprised that people would throw another $150M on this particular bonfire. Like so many other bookmarking sites before it, Pinterest is overreaching. Their best outcome (for investors, not users) is likely an acquisition by Facebook.
- forsaken 9y agoI have the same issue with Quora. Makes me sad every time I go there and find useful info, but feel pushed away. Dropbox also does similar -- in fact they broke all their old direct public links, so that you can use their new "sharing" dialog, so that they can spam the recipient to get a Dropbox account. Sigh.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoWorry not, I'm slowly assembling a massive Quora WARC file of all of the posts uncensored by the login wall (for cold storage). The moment they're out of business, a magnet torrent will be provided.
- reitanqild 9y agoIs this the explanation for your account name? ;-)
- toomuchtodo 9y agoActually, it is! I'm notorious for taking on too many projects. Time to sleep when I'm dead.
- rpeden 9y agoSeems like kind of a paradox. Too much to do, so you'll sleep when you're dead. But sleep deprivation will kill you, so you won't be able to finish all those things that are keeping you busy. :)
- adventured 9y agoTwitter is currently trading for $12.7 billion. They did $2.5 billion in sales last year. Pinterest has a: show me the sales, problem, I suspect. Public comparables in social like Twitter & Snapchat are going to cap their upside until or unless Pinterest can somehow demonstrate a very profitable business model. If those margins never arrive, Pinterest is going to be worth something a lot closer to Yelp than Twitter. From $12 billion, there's a massive downside risk in the last few rounds for Pinterest investors if this gets a similar reality chopping to what Twitter & Snap have.
- gelstudios 9y agoIt seems that Pinterest has had at at least three distinct revenue sources to date. 1. Commission earnings from inserting their own affiliate identifier into pins to things on Amazon. I'm not aware of what other sites they earn commission from, but that has probably dried up some as Amazon's commission structure changed. Notably they now allow users to post/pin things with links containing user's affiliate code. 2. Paid promotion for user pins, something in between "native ads" and "search ads". Pretty common for anything that might be considered a marketplace, but it works on Pinterest I guess. 3. Sponsored video content to play along paid promoted pins, not unlike Snapchat's corp paid video content. 4. ???
- shostack 9y agoThey do, and they also have something Twitter typically does not, which is purchase intent. Lots of people go go Pinterest because they are looking for ideas on something to buy. If they can find it and purchase it all in one place, that makes Pinterest valuable from a direct response marketing standpoint. Also, Pinterest's demographics are VERY desirable to marketers.
- owenversteeg 9y agoWait, so Pinterest is about as valuable as Twitter? That makes no sense. Twitter is everywhere - it's how people communicate with the damn President of the United States of America for crying out loud. Twitter and Facebook are really the only big worldwide social networks: everything else is localized, or too small. There's massive value from that alone. Meanwhile Pinterest... well, maybe they have a lot of interior decorating collections and cupcake ideas, but there's also a ton of spam and most people I know that used it years ago don't use it now. How are the two even close?
- fensterblick 9y agoI just started looking at Pinterest as a company to work for. From the outside, the way they treat their employees looks amazing. Things like KnitCon (an internal conference for employees led by employees) reflect well on the company. On the other hand, some of the reviews on Glassdoor are not so kind. I hope Pinterest can succeed and overcome its current challenges. Even if I do not ever get a job there, what is good for one company lifts everyone else in our industry (unless you are a direct competitor!)
- joering2 9y agoJust keep in mind they are a company like any other at the end of the day. They look at bottom line, revenue and how to keep shareholders happy. HR Managers can outsmart each other day and night on how to make it more funny, bubbly, friendly, etc to you by pulling off more and more crazy ideas to make you feel like we're one big family, but when shareholders decide to cut corners, don't be surprised that your key-card and password doesn't work, and you are greeted by a large-sized man in dark suit you never met before who will gladly escort you and your cartoon box of your office belongings outside. Oh and don't email HR questions like "What happened, I thought we are one big family, so you told me", because for legal reasons you will not get any response at all! Source: own experience :)
- finolex1 9y agoPerhaps a lot of it has got to do with the personality of the founder: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/05/pinterest-interview-ben-silbermann-social-media https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/05/pinterest...
- Pyxl101 9y ago> Things like KnitCon (an internal conference for employees led by employees) Who else but the employees of a company would lead an internal conference?
- kentbrew 9y agoKnitcon founder here; happy to chat with anyone thinking about taking a job at Pinterest. It's been pretty amazing so far.
- tanilama 9y agoWell this is kinda flat round, and it casts a negative outlook on the company.
- acchow 9y agoDoes this new round have the same preferences that the 2015 round had?
- skewart 9y agoI've been a fan of Pinterest for a long time, though I rarely use it these days. I've been fascinated, and slightly horrified, by their pivot away from social functionality and towards a vision of a neutral bookmarking site. It's not that I'd want Pinterest to be more social in and as an end itself, but rather because I think it better incentivizes people to create good quality content, and it makes it easier to discover things I want to find. There's very little ROI for cultivating a public image on Pinterest, so few people put much effort into doing it. At the same time, people who have taste similar to mine are a much better way to find things than any algorithm Pinterest has ever released. And yet, they keep emphasizing algorithmic recommendations while disincentivizing people from publicly expressing their taste and making it harder for me to follow people I like. And then there are the ads, which, as a bunch of other commenters have pointed out, tend to be really far out of line from anything I've ever expressed interest in. It's just off-putting to see a bunch of low-quality ads for tacky crap in the middle of my feed of minimalist interiors. Maybe they have something up their sleeves, or maybe I'm very different from their target user. Otherwise I just don't agree with their product direction.
- jquery 9y agoAds will likely improve over time. Remember when Facebook was filled with "one weird tip" ads? My bigger concern is yours, that Pinterest will lose its human touch by removing social features. The new tried-it feature seems like a promising new foray into making Pinterest social again in a way that's uniquely Pinterest. Time will tell.
- virmundi 9y agoIf they want to be a bookmarking site that also recommends items, they need a way to unequivocally say, "I'm not interest". I get wood working an fashion recommendations. Then one day at the height of Zootopia they recommended some comics based on the story. Tried to figure out how to say no. Apparently I missed. Now I get Zootopia every 5th recommendation.
- shostack 9y agoHow much of that is Pinterest trying to surface something incorrectly based on their matching algorithms, vs. the people advertising Zootopia using poorly-chosen or intentionally broad targeting settings?
- wkoszek 9y ago"Pinboard acquires Pinterest for $35k"
- dngerousminds87 9y agoI see parallels in pinboard and craigslist - both not so technologically awesome, but good enough
- wkoszek 9y agoYes. I think it's a part of a software art to just build a no-bloat functionality and leave it like that for a long time.
- kmfrk 9y agoI was one of their biggest supporters until they set up a registration wall and increased their targeting outside the site. I thought one of the best use cases was as a wishlist, but that's not gonna work with a registration wall.
- gjvc 9y agoWhen aliens deign to view us they will see a society which has recently taken the fetish of (targeted) advertising to new heights, possibly above the actual production of products and services which to advertise.
- traviswingo 9y agoThis title made me think they had a down round...
- Grue3 9y agoHaven't heard of Pinterest in a lo-ong time. I guess it still exists?
- intoverflow2 9y agoI'm shocked how Pintrest gets away with spamming Google images with dead end links to sign up forms as an on-boarding mechanism. I search images these days and I click a result only to be thrown into a Pintrest on-boarding flow and unable to get the image I wanted. Honestly think they should be banned from Image Search results.