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Twitter is 11 years old and has never made a profit even though it's been publicly traded for 4 years. It has 330M MAUs but its growth has stalled. Pinterest

Twitter is 11 years old and has never made a profit even though it's been publicly traded for 4 years. It has 330M MAUs but its growth has stalled. Pinterest is 7 years old, has close to 200M MAUs, and is still growing at a good enough pace for investors to justify this kind of valuation. Pinterest also excels in huge markets which you are probably not familiar with: recipes, weddings, fashion, and interior design. Even though most people you know don't use it, there are still 200+ million people out there in other demographics that do use it. Probably a lot of them have never heard of Twitter :-D. FWIW I think Twitter is undervalued as well.

owenversteeg 9y ago
I'm actually one of the few percent of Pinterest users that are men, and I have used it for years for exactly those kinds of things: recipes, fashion (to some extent) and interior design. But these days I'm finding that it's much easier to just use the rest of the web. There's so much spam, and noise, repeated crap, and things which make nice pictures that would never work in real life. What I have no idea about is how Pinterest will make money. Ultimately, Twitter could continue for years without making money, and there are a number of things they can charge for (larger tweets, a Pro service, tweet pipeline, user data, faster access to Tweets) (perhaps sell Trump's tweets to HFT firms, 500ms before the rest of the world sees them?) Meanwhile, Pinterest is full of shitty ads if you turn off your uBlock, and the only other revenue stream I can think of is Amazon affiliate stuff, which has probably dried up now that Amazon turned off that pipe.
- omarchowdhury 9y ago
  500ms is nowhere near enough to discern the necessary qualitative insight (or lack thereof) from Trump tweets and translate it to quantitative arbitrage.
- hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
  I have the exact opposite view. Fundamentally, many people look at Pinterest for ideas about stuff they want to buy - that's usually the perfect spot to be if you want to make money on advertising. If anything, just seems like Pinterest has big execution problems more than business-model problems.

owenversteeg 9y ago

I'm actually one of the few percent of Pinterest users that are men, and I have used it for years for exactly those kinds of things: recipes, fashion (to some extent) and interior design. But these days I'm finding that it's much easier to just use the rest of the web. There's so much spam, and noise, repeated crap, and things which make nice pictures that would never work in real life. What I have no idea about is how Pinterest will make money. Ultimately, Twitter could continue for years without making money, and there are a number of things they can charge for (larger tweets, a Pro service, tweet pipeline, user data, faster access to Tweets) (perhaps sell Trump's tweets to HFT firms, 500ms before the rest of the world sees them?) Meanwhile, Pinterest is full of shitty ads if you turn off your uBlock, and the only other revenue stream I can think of is Amazon affiliate stuff, which has probably dried up now that Amazon turned off that pipe.

omarchowdhury 9y ago
500ms is nowhere near enough to discern the necessary qualitative insight (or lack thereof) from Trump tweets and translate it to quantitative arbitrage.
hn_throwaway_99 9y ago
I have the exact opposite view. Fundamentally, many people look at Pinterest for ideas about stuff they want to buy - that's usually the perfect spot to be if you want to make money on advertising. If anything, just seems like Pinterest has big execution problems more than business-model problems.