Pinterest Raises $200M

http://readwrite.com/2014/05/15/pinterest-funding-5-billion-valuation?utm_campaign=&utm_source=t.co&awesm=readwr.it_c1lW&utm_content=readwrite3-orionautotweet&utm_medium=readwr.it-twitter#awesm=~oEnyPbNPuqcMEH

by bdehaaff • 12 years ago

84 63 12 years ago

readwrite.com

loceng• 12 years ago

I imagine Facebook will try to acquire Pinterest - if there is any money left.

nickstinemates• 12 years ago

Makes more sense than Occulus

duaneb• 12 years ago

Pinterest would be fools to accept their money at orders of magnitude better valuations. Pinterest has a solid product, a vastly better user experience (albeit solving different problems), is not pressed to find or invent business models, and could easily expand into more commercial areas. Facebook is a brand people love to hate, it has a stench of evil, and a highly uncertain financial future. What could Facebook do for Pinterest?

qq662• 12 years ago

Pinterest makes literally no money today. Facebook made a billion dollars in profit this quarter. Who, exactly, has the "highly uncertain financial future"?

adventured3• 12 years ago

$12.63 billion in cash as of this latest quarter. $922m in cash flow for the quarter. It's likely they'll be seeing $5b or $6b in cash flow annually within another four to six quarters or so. They can afford it.

austenallred• 12 years ago

Pinterest adds considerably more value to my life than any other social network.

It provides inspiration that plans my meals, my vacations, my clothing, the style of my home, etc.

nostromo2• 12 years ago

Me too. I use it to get inspired at work (for UI design) and home (me and my significant other have a board for backyard ideas) and creative pursuits (like graphic arts).

The space is also very monetizable.

I think Pinterest is going to be bigger than Twitter.

sugerman• 12 years ago

Do you find UI inspiration by searching or just have you started following people who pin related items?

dingaling• 12 years ago

Pinterest disturbs me somewhat in that it is the distillation of what society has become these days: pure consumerism.

'These are the things I want'.

Actually it's quite clever, on reflection, to have found a way to make money from consumerism without actually selling anything.

hnriot• 12 years ago

you're missing the point of pinterest, it's not "things i want", but rather things i like. The whole premise is showcase a personal aesthetic. it is through these aesthetics that we learn more about each other. obviously there is overlap between the things we love, like maybe old cars, or sailing yachts, or (of course) cats, and the things we want, but pinterest isn't about consumerism at all. if you spend any time on it, you'll see passion, places to visit, vintage trinkets, and about a billion wedding dresses. people use it a lot for planning and mood boards. It's easier to explain something visually than it is with words (sometimes) and pinterest taps into that aspect. It's mainly for (I suppose) "creative types", those that are visually stimulated by colors, fonts, textures etc. And of course cats.

qq662• 12 years ago

Well, they're not making any money yet, and to do so, they'll have to start selling something to someone.

jacquesm• 12 years ago

Intent is a huge factor in ad monetization. It does not get much better than pinterest in that sense.

hagope2• 12 years ago

For me it adds very little value (by comparison I find fb to have 0 value and twitter to be very valuable)

I don't actively design day in and day out,so when I'm online I want to be informed... for me Pinterest is just eye candy and entertainment and not a tool that I use often, unlike twitter.

My wife however...

bstar77• 12 years ago

Alternate title considered... "Pinterest adding $200M to it's debt"

colinbartlett• 12 years ago

Where did you read that the $200M raised was debt financing?

k04• 12 years ago

Think about it.

goronbjorn• 12 years ago

I can hear the sound of Yahoo! getting its Alibaba money ready…

kkwok• 12 years ago

They better watch out for Alibaba getting its Alibaba money ready

cletus• 12 years ago

The one thing that annoys me about Pinterest is that it's one of those ideas I really could have thought of and done (but obviously didn't).

I don't mean this in a way to take away anything from the Pinterest team. They had a great idea and seem to be executing really well.

It's just one of those ideas that seems so obvious in hindsight, particularly if you've seen how, for example, women scrapbook for wedding preparation and the like, the rise of "selfies" (and just having a way to list what you're wearing) and so on.

There are many other services that have tried to allow you to share "things" in a given context (eg locations in Foursquare, purchases on Blippy, social integrations with the various music streaming services and so on) but the real genius of Pinterest for me is that it's really about sharing the combination of things, which is of far more value than the individual things themselves.

Pinterest is probably the startup I'm most bullish about. Seriously, congrats guys.

adventured3• 12 years ago

One of the most impressive things I've found about Pinterest's success, is that they stuck with it for over three years before it finally took off. Much like Twitter, it was anything but an overnight success. As with most concepts, getting traction is by far the most difficult aspect.

http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-pinterest-an-overnight...

steve_benjamins• 12 years ago

"In the future search will be a discovery tool" ... I think this sentence needs some work. It feels empty of meaning. Am I missing something? Or does the sentence really simply mean: "in the future search will be a way to discover things"?

Because in that case the future may already be here :)

nwenzel• 12 years ago

It may possibly be that search today is used to find a particular thing that you are looking for (directions, a way to fix code, a specific book). Whereas in the future, search will lead you to new things that you didn't specifically know you needed to find. More like browsing random sections of a book store.

But yes, it definitely sounds like it's saying that search will be a tool to search for things.

i386• 12 years ago

What exactly is the “Visual web”?

mynameishere• 12 years ago

I've heard the name and ignored it. But what the hell, let's take a look. Obviously, this website is very popular with some people but if you go to the default page you get this:

http://imgur.com/XWdkO8i

...a popup that says "He used Pinterest to start his collection" on top of a blurry background. Who's "He"? Sign up with Facebook? Why? And all this confusion in a popup? Really? The very worst aspect of 1990s web design--pointless popups--on the front page of a trendy website? And with no obvious way to close the popup? And I kept expecting the 45 seconds to go to zero, like a time bomb, but nothing happened. Not only are you annoying and threatening me with a timer, but it's totally static. Really? Why not put a dancing William Shatner next to it? That would really bring back the memories.

But you can, in fact, close the popup. Go to the bottom and click "About Pinterest", and you get this:

http://imgur.com/6NDBdUm

"It's helpful. New descriptive guides help steer your search in the right directions" ...with a picture of a phone and links to install pinterest on my iphone or android devices. ...but, why would I do that? Even after reading an article about the company and looking at their "about us" page, I have no clue what their reason for existence is. Visual Web? You mean "img" tags? That part of the web?

What am I doing wrong? Am I like a person outside of the 14-22 year demographic watching MTV for the first time?

jmduke• 12 years ago

Why? And all this confusion in a popup? Really?

The likely rationale behind the immediate experience of a site that traffics in millions of uniques is that 'the numbers say that the visitors who respond positively to this outweigh the visitors who respond negatively'. In particular, I'd be willing to guess that Pinterest used gendered language in their lead-in because they're in a unique position of having a female user base which outnumbers their male one, and the bounce rate here is much smaller than opening pinterest.com to see a smorgasbord of recipes and pictures of clothing in sepia.

A lot of your other complaints (like expecting the 45 seconds to be a timer) appear to be intentionally dense: I don't mean that to disparage you, but I think your interpretation is quite different than the average person Pinterest is trying to entice (that is, one with an average amount of experience on the internet.)

alaskamiller• 12 years ago

Trying too hard.

Pinterest's value add is applying "pinteresty" context to media objects. A link is just a link, an image just an image, text is just text. But we tune in to sites that deliver more context in addition to sharing those links.

An image shared on Tumblr has tags, affinity score, related notes, reblogged discussions.

That same image existing on Flickr has EXIF data, geotags, discussions.

On Facebook there's value based on perceived relevancy in my friend group.

That same image existing on Pinterest has context such as categorization, relations, and scoring.

For people in those self-identified communities they apply more value to those things on a daily, hourly, and even second by second basis.

Until it's no longer relevant.

harryh• 12 years ago

It sounds like you're being intentionally obtuse to be honest.

120738470293740• 12 years ago

I am in agreement with how jmduke responded to your comment, but wanted to add a couple things.

I contracted with Pinterest for several months on a team directly adjacent to the team responsible for designing, testing, and building the logged out home page you see here. It was very thorough, going through immense amounts of research with a multitude of completely different design experiences, and this page (and the others in this set) tested better than everything else throughout the process. And the team didn't simply A/B test what had the highest conversion, they tested sentiment in terms of: "After converting from this specific experience, is using the actual product in line with what that landing page led me to believe?"

I got to see this process firsthand, be in meetings that involved discussions around how to handle a massively important project like this, and I couldn't imagine the team doing a better job.

It's easy to dismiss this when you aren't a user and don't see it as useful for you specifically. But the landing page isn't aimed at you. It's aimed at many demographics who could find it useful if they arrived here. And in that regard, after seeing the improvement in actual conversion data myself, I find it successful thus far.

janesvilleseo• 12 years ago

Exactly! They are optimizing for their current users (or soon to be users). In other words, you may be a little out of their target market. Second, if someone came to the site directly, then they have at least some brand awareness. So they have some idea what Pinterest is about in the first place.

zak_mc_kracken• 12 years ago

What am I doing wrong?

I'm guessing you're a male?

Last I checked, Pinterest was overwhelmingly used by women, which is both a blessing (very few web sites appeal so massively to women) and a curse (they are trying hard to find out how they can attract males).

k04• 12 years ago

I'm a burly bearded man. I check out the "geek", "technology" and "science and nature" sections. I also search for camping gear and kayak pics on the Pacific ocean that remind me of my time kayaking from Anacortes, WA to the San Juan Islands. I have also posted my own very humble nature and landscape photographs on Pinterest. Pinterest is trying to "attract" males, but males need to think to use Pinterest.

Edit: Add link to article that made me think of Pinterest differently: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/4/15/scaling-pinterest-...

simplestyle• 12 years ago

At this stage, people who arrive at Pinterest's signup page already know what they're getting themselves into. The word-of-mouth factor is massive. A new user has heard from her friend how great the site is. She's not going to be daunted by signup flow that has a modal you can close, or whatever else your post was about. You've missed the point entirely.

dchuk• 12 years ago

What am I doing wrong? Am I like a person outside of the 14-22 year demographic watching MTV for the first time?

Nah, you're probably just a cynical pedant. Pinterest has one of the clearest and most compelling landing pages of any social network ever. Not to mention it's a household name now, they're nearly at a point of recognition like Facebook or Google.

You don't see Google explaining what they do anymore do you?

llaxsll• 12 years ago

Hi mynameishere,

I'm the developer on the Growth Team @ Pinterest that built the experience in question.

First, thanks for the candid feedback. We always strive to understand users and better their experience (in this instance from the very first second they come in touch with Pinterest).

The overhaul of the unauth home page, which is internally dubbed "inspired wall", is a concept that we introduced and refined over a period of a few months. As the name suggests the idea behind it is to instantly connect with you on the level of a story(or a use case) of Pinterest that can inspire you and stick with you as you go through the signup and orientation process. It is a hint of what Pinterest could be for you not written in words but rather expressed through a visual composition. The further you get into the product the more we tailor the experience around things that you love and the story that they tell about you.

We actually did quite extensive testing around this experience because it is such an essential and sensitive part of the product. This included concept research (where we tried to identify what got people to use Pinterest), A/B testing (where we quantitatively showed that results were better than the previous home page), and user testing (where we qualitatively showed that people get better understanding and satisfaction with the product). One of the key findings was that people were able to instantly grasp how Pinterest is different from other popular services such as Instagram or Flickr. To put in music channel terms - it did a good job at explaining how MTV is different than VH1.

Obviously the work is not done and things can be improved. The inspired wall is still a relatively fresh concept and we continue iterating over it.

We plan on releasing an engineering blog post soon that will detail the process of rebuilding our unauth home page and the several iterations that it went through to be successful. Stay tuned and again thanks for the feedback.

Ludo

bobbles• 12 years ago

I thought pinterest was a waste of time. Then I got engaged to get married.

Searching for something like 'wedding favours' on google gives a pretty boring list of top10 lists and other cruft, but a similar search on pinterest gives a great view of peoples ideas, descriptions, alternatives, etc.

For me, this type of searching is pretty rare, but pinterest is definitely the best tool I've seen for this

chaz• 12 years ago

It's great for design ideas of almost any kind. For example, I wanted to see how people were setting up their stacked washer and dryer units: http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=stacked%20washer%20d...

Another source for home decor is Houzz, which is more of a professional designer portfolio + marketplace, but also a good source of inspiration. http://www.houzz.com/stacked-washer-dryer

cstrat• 12 years ago

haha, exactly the same experience here. I couldn't really see what the point was until my fiancée started searching for wedding venues and ideas.

pyrrhotech• 12 years ago

This values it 27% higher than Yelp and 4.2x Trulia for perspective

leorocky• 12 years ago

I get why Pinterest is interesting. I don't use it, but I get why people use it although maybe I should. But what I don't get is why a site with pictures to pin needs $200M. It's basically still the same site it was when it had $500K in funding. Does it cost $200M to scale from thousands of users to hundreds of millions? Wikipedia doesn't need $200M to run.

gms• 12 years ago

Maybe. We don't know their future plans.

aclements18• 12 years ago

It still costs money to acquire new users. It's easy to think when something becomes a household name there is no need to keep spending to bring new users on. As with most social sites the bigger the network is the harder it is for competitors to come in and steal their position. Pinterest user base is still "only" around 50 million. Thats 5% the size of Facebook.

Additionally the markets are not treating tech stocks so well right now, this might last another three months, and it might last a year and a half. What you know for sure is that you don't want to go out and try to raise money when the market is really down. You'll be terribly diluted if you're even able to raise money at all. They get what you can now, because they don't know how long it will be until the IPO.

These are only a couple of the considerations, if they are planning an IPO very soon then there's a completely different motivation. Hope this helps.

adventured3• 12 years ago

They'd be crazy not to take $200m for 4% give or take. Given the beating high flying tech stocks have taken lately on Wall St., and the continued Fed tapering, who knows how much longer the easy money gates will remain open. Better to take it now, and have tons of cash to ride out any eventuality. Bull markets don't run forever, and clearly Pinterest is hardly even in the first inning of monetization, so they're going to need the money. The public markets, even in semi-euphoric mode, will not react well to zero sales and $200m a year in losses.

k04• 12 years ago

Growth...growth might be in their future plans. Acquisitions, KLO, more employees, new directions. I hope they go big. Great service, smart design that works. Monetizing would be easy.

DaniFong2• 12 years ago

The question every mega software startup should try very hard to answer...

uses• 12 years ago

Shouldn't they have their own $200M by now? No but seriously.

Oh. http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=pinterest

k04• 12 years ago

You must have a developer account or something. Pinterest, for me, is free and they don't seem to be placing ads or monetizing sales like Etsy. I only connect to Pinterest at 3 distinct times/places: waiting rooms, king conference room (toilet), and when I'm looking for inspiration and ideas (sometimes all in one :)...so I am probably not considered a hard-core user.

How does google search attempts equal 200 million USD...if that were the case searches for Obamacare or Affordable Care Act would have paid the national debt thrice over. [I just used a gov't example, I don't care what the healthcare bill is called]

DigitalSea• 12 years ago

I've always admired Pinterest. As a guy I don't really understand the appeal of it myself, but my soon-to-be wife absolutely loves it, so does her mum, her sisters, my sisters and my sisters friends. They seem to have done a fantastic job at capturing the female demographic and it has paid dividends for them.

Congratulations to the team, curious to see how Pinterest can take it to the next level. Most likely the e-commerce route is the one they will be taking.

msoad• 12 years ago

If I did the math right, Instagram when Facebook acquired it, was worth ONE FIFTH today's Pinterest.

Does that make sense to you?

hagope2• 12 years ago

by today's math, Instagram was a bargain for fb...

forrecovery123• 12 years ago

Remember the dot com bust days, when companies with ZERO revenues raised BILLIONS on user (vanity?) numbers ?

ycpan• 12 years ago

I use it as a tool to collect and save infographic data... quite a good tool but the valuation is kinda beyond my understanding!

sleepyhead• 12 years ago

"Pinterest has raised a total of $764 million to date."

That is a lot of money to be able to pin some photos.

MichaelGG• 12 years ago

Perhaps don't read it as "raised" but "was given". Giving away 4% for $200M seems like a fairly slick deal for a company with no revenue(?) yet.

OTOH, in 2012 Twitter spent over $250M on staff and R&D. Pinterest is nearing(?) that size of application (perhaps more as Pinterest has more photos than Twitter had), although Twitter had many more employees then (I think 1500 or so compared to "140+" WP says for Pinterest). Billions is a hell of a lot to share some SMSes.

DaniFong2• 12 years ago

It is important to ask -- what on earth could this be for?

SpaceX achieved orbital flight on that amount of capital...

gadders• 12 years ago

Slightly off-topic - my wife has 20k followers on Pinterest. Is that a lot, relatively speaking? Any suggestions as to monetisation? She already gets invited to events via Pinterest.

penguindev2• 12 years ago

Maybe they can use this money to hire someone who can fix their !$!@# pinit button [the small gray button with numbers on the right] to actually stay where I put it (and not move to the right 20px and bleed over other content).

Really, it's the only social button I put on each of my wife's blog posts [echoing what others have mentioned, she likes pinterest for the 'bridal trends', recipe ideas, art, ...], and it's easily the most annoying thing on the page... sure let's have the JS totally remove all the css/elements that were there and recreate it differently.

kentbrew2• 12 years ago

May I please know the address of your wife's blog? Happy to look into this.

kentbrew2• 12 years ago

I've just pushed a test fix; if you will please add data-pin-pad-count="true" to a Pin It button that has data-pin-config="beside" you should see whitespace under your pin count.

I'm not pushing this out to everyone until I understand how badly it will break other sites that have already implemented fixes like yours.

Hope this helps!

penguindev2• 12 years ago

Thanks, but doesn't change a thing for me. It's still breaking out of a containing div to the right.

And I forgot to mention that the vertical alignment was/is also a PITA. Got the image where I want it, and other text elements bottom-aligned to it? Great, now once the JS munges things it's all changed - the image gets higher.

edit: submitted a ticket to pinterest support, keyword kentbrewster

Pinterest Raises $200M

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