Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically “ideas”) on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards.The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and had 450 million global monthly active users as of December 2022. It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., based in San Francisco.
The idea for Pinterest emerged from an earlier app created by Ben Silberman and Paul Sciarra called Tote which served as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs. Tote struggled as a business, significantly due to difficulties with mobile payments. At the time, mobile payment technology was not sophisticated enough to enable easy on-the-go transactions, inhibiting users from making many purchases via the app. Tote users were, however, amassing large collections of favorite items and sharing them with other users. The behavior struck a chord with Silberman, and he shifted the company to building Pinterest, which allowed users to create collections of a variety of items and share them with each other.
The development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype as a closed beta in March 2010. Nine months after the launch, the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann said he wrote to the first 5,000 users, offering his phone number and even meeting with some of them. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in more downloads than expected. This was followed by an iPad app and Pinterest Mobile, a version of the website for non-iPhone users. Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011.
Pinterest grew rapidly during this period. On August 10, 2011, Time magazine listed Pinterest in its “50 Best Websites of 2011” article. In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week. Pinterest won the Best New Startup of 2011 at the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards. For January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. At the 2012 Webby Awards, Pinterest won Best Social Media App and People’s Voice Award for best functioning visual design.
Founder Ben Silbermann (left) at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March 2012
On March 23, 2012, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that eliminated the policy that gave it the right to sell its users’ content. On August 10, 2012, Pinterest altered their policy so that a request or an invitation was no longer required to join the site. In October 2012, Pinterest launched business accounts allowing businesses to either convert their existing personal accounts into business accounts or start from scratch.
In April 2017, Pinterest removed their dedicated post “liking” feature as it seemed redundant to “boards”, which are user collections of posts. Users’ existing indexes of liked posts were converted into a collection (“board”) named as such.
Although starting out as a “social network” with boards, in later years the company has put increasing emphasis in visual search and e-commerce, such as shopping catalogs.
In February 2019, The Wall Street Journal stated that Pinterest secretly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. The total valuation of the company at the time reached $12 billion.They went public on April 18, 2019, at $19 per share, closing the day at $24.40 per share.
For 2020, Pinterest reported an advertising revenue of $1.7 billion, an increase of 48% from 2019. On March 3, 2021, Pinterest announced “Pinterest Premiere”, a video ads product “which will appear in people’s feeds, targeted to their interests and other characteristics.” Later in April, chief financial officer Todd Morgenfeld announced plans to spend more money on marketing in order to offset a potential slowdown in activity as the United States economy reopened, with more people getting vaccinated for COVID-19.
On October 20, 2021, Bloomberg reported that PayPal is interested in acquiring Pinterest, with a potential price of around $70 a share. PayPal’s board and management decided later that same week to back away from a potential deal.
In December 2021, Pinterest acquired the editing and video creation app Vochi. Following this, In May 2022, it was announced that Pinterest released a new video streaming app “Pinterest TV studio”. The app is aimed at allowing users to live-stream on its platform and use different devices for different angles while live-streaming on the Pinterest platform.
On June 28, 2022, Pinterest announced that co-founder, CEO and President, Ben Silberman would transition to the newly created role of Executive Chairman, and online commerce expert Bill Ready will become Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors.
In January 2023 at CES, Pinterest announced its partnership with LiveRamp, a data enablement platform to create data ‘clean rooms’ for selected advertisers on the platform. These ‘clean rooms’ will allow Pinterest’s ad partners to utilize first-party data for personalized ads without having to share the data with Pinterest. With data privacy a large concern for online platforms and its users, this partnership is an effort to stimulate ad business on the platform while keeping its user’s data safe and in compliance with new data collection regulations. The first advertiser to pilot this feature will be grocery retailer, Albertsons with a winter healthy eating campaign.
The creators behind Pinterest summarized the service as a “catalogue of ideas” that inspires users to “go out and do that thing”, although that it is not an image-based “social network“. It also has a very large fashion profile. In later years, Pinterest has also been described as a “visual search engine“.[27][44]
Pinterest consists mainly of “pins” and “boards”. A pin is an image that has been linked from a website or uploaded. Pins saved from one user’s board can be saved to someone else’s board, a process known as “repinning”.Boards are collections of pins dedicated to a theme such as quotations, travel, or weddings. Boards with multiple ideas can have different sections that further contain multiple pins. Users can follow and unfollow other users as well as boards, which would fill the “home feed”.
Content can also be found outside Pinterest and similarly uploaded to a board via the “Save” button, which can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser, or be implemented by a webmaster directly on the website. It was originally called the “Pin it” button but was renamed in 2016 to “Save” due to international expansion, making the site more intuitive to new users.
In August 2016, Pinterest launched a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site.
The home feed is a collection of Pins from the users, boards, and topics followed, as well as a few promoted pins and pins Pinterest has picked. On the main Pinterest page, a “pin feed” appears, displaying the chronological activity from the Pinterest boards that a user follows.
In October 2013, Pinterest began displaying advertisements in the form of “Promoted Pins”. Promoted Pins are based on an individual user’s interests, things done on Pinterest, or a result of visiting an advertiser’s site or app.
In 2015, Pinterest implemented a feature that allows users to search with images instead of words.
In March 2020, Pinterest introduced the “Today” tab on the home feed which shows trending pins.
In October 2022, Pinterest announced its video-focused “Idea Pins” feature will now include the ability to add popular tracks from top artists, thanks to new licensing deals with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG.
In 2017, Pinterest introduced a “visual search” function that allows users to search for elements in images (existing pins, existing parts of a photo, or new photos) and guide users to suggested similar content within Pinterest’s database.The tools powered by artificial intelligence are called Pinterest Lens, Shop the Look, and Instant Ideas
The platform has drawn businesses, especially retailers, to create pages aimed at promoting their companies online as a “virtual storefront”.
In 2013, Pinterest introduced a new tool called “Rich Pins”, to enhance the customer experience when browsing through pins made by companies. Business pages can include various data, topics, and information such as prices of products, ratings of movies or ingredients for recipes.
In June 2015, Pinterest unveiled “buyable pins” that allows users to purchase things directly from Pinterest. In October 2018, the buyable pins feature was replaced by “Product Pins”
In March 2019, Pinterest added product catalogs and personalized shopping recommendations with the “more from [brand]” option, showcasing a range of product Pins from the same business.
Pinterest Analytics
Pinterest Analytics is much like Google Analytics. It is a created service that generates comprehensive statistics on a specific website’s traffic, commonly used by marketers. Impressions, Engagements, Pin clicks, Outbound clicks, Saves are some aspects of user data that Pinterest Analytics provides. It also collects data that depicts the percentage of change within a specific time, to determine if a product is more popular on a specific day during the week, or slowly becoming unpopular. This data helps marketing agencies alter their strategies to gain more popularity, often changing the visual content to appeal to the Pinterest community. The “Most Clicked” tab in Pinterest Analytics demonstrates products that are more likely to sell. Through the access of Pinterest Analytics, companies receive insight to data via API.