4 ms·
Pinterest 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 shoppin
by habosa 9y ago
Pinterest 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.
- zitterbewegung 9y agoThis is true but I think pinterest and reddit have a similar problem where they really can't make their userbase too mad at them and they could either stunt their growth or users will jump ship. Either that or its the guiding philosophy to not make their userbase mad.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- opportune 9y agoI feel like you're missing the entire point of how a social network site works and makes money
- j-c-hewitt 9y agoOne major issue is that their ad unit is "Google/Bing shopping ads, but lower quality and at a comparable price."
- DanBC 9y agoThey tried skimlinks, and some of the users were loud and vocally against it. IMO Pinterest should have had skimlinks for everyone, and a PinterestPro for the "influencers".
- paulpauper 9y agoHow is a $12 billion valuation dropping the ball. Pinterest appeals to a very lucrative democratic who are looking for stuff to buy, such as clothes, household products, and other stuff, whereas people go to Facebook to see pictures of family or engage in political gossip.
- hkmurakami 9y agoFor fashion, afaik "influencers" are indeed using platforms like Instagram much more than Pinterest. That is certainly a situation where they could have defended their turf more effectively.
- paulpauper 9y agobut Instagram is more for browsing than buying . people who use pinterest are more in a buying mood
- jimmywanger 9y agoI'd tend to disagree. Both are for browsing. If I see something on Pinterest I'm interested in, then I'll go to Amazon to see if it's offered there, and if not, I'll head over to Google to see if I can get it cheaper. I'm not going to buy directly from Pinterest unless it's a link directly to Amazon.
- dngerousminds87 9y agoEven if they weren't able to raise their valuation, 12B is not too shabby
- sjg007 9y agoYeah the whole LuLaRoe phenomenon should be pinterest dominated but instead it is Facebook/instagram.
- et-al 9y agoIn the early 2010s there was another site called Svpply that did the same thing. eBay ended up acquiring them. My impression was that all these sites were inspired by the original idea of ffffound. https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/ebay-acquires-style-focused-social-curated-shopping-site-svpply/ https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/ebay-acquires-style-focuse...