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Pinterest Raises $200M

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Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#61

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.

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.

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

Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#62
post #19
post #3

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

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…

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

Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#64

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.

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

Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I used FB connect to sign up way back when and I followed my friends. Some of my friends in UI design started pinning cool stuff, so I followed the original "pinner." Then I started following Pinterest's suggestions for me. Recollecting this makes me realize what a great product is -- it just evolves with you. It couldn't be simpler.

You have a lot of ways to discover UI design on Pinterest (if you look at my profile – pinterest.com/xethorn – I mostly use it for that particular reason and architecture work.)

Things you can do to find UI work: you can either follow the boards of people who are relevant to the field, you can also browse what's happening on specific domains ("More from [url]" in the sidebar of the closeup) or you can simply browse the related interests.

Hope this helps!

Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#66
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.

Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#67

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.

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.

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

Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#68

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.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#69
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.

Re: Pinterest Raises $200M

#70
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

They just made $200 million. They sold a dream to some VCs.
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