11–20 of 130 posts
If you want some justification, read this http://www.shopify.com/blog/6058268-how-pinterest-drives-eco... TL;DR - Pinterest drives as much ecommerce traffic as twitter with significantly more purchase intent
It seems like what has made Pinterest really successful is that it's basically 9gag/tumblr photo/meme sharing. If you look at their content it's mostly of that type.
Products seem to be a relatively tiny portion of the content. I'm sure they can make a nice chunk of money off that content, but it's unlikely to be a really big business I think, especially if their content skews more and more towards memes/photo sharing which it has been.
I think we'll look back on Pinterest as an over-hyped fad I'm sorry to say. People love to rag on it but Groupon will probably look very good in comparison.
Meanwhile, Pinterest already has amassed well over 10 million users in a very short time, sees enough hits daily to be a top-ten social networking site, and already has a number of advertising arrangements, particularly with retailers like the Gap and Nordstrom.
If this is a bubble, it's been around for a while; and this doesn't seem like the most sterling example. If anything, this is less stunning than valuations of tech companies we've been seeing for many, many years.
[1] http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2007/10/facebook_...
I'd rather have 75 del.icio.us's than 1 Pinterest but.. I readily admit I'm getting old ;-) So my question is, did the folks 7 years ago get a bad deal or are the valuations now over the top?
If you want some justification, read this http://www.shopify.com/blog/6058268-how-pinterest-drives-eco... TL;DR - Pinterest drives as much ecommerce traffic as twitter with significantly more purchase intent
I saw an interview with Gary Vaynerchuck in the Nordic eCommerce summit and one of the things that stuck out for me was when he said that "Pinterest sells more wine for them than Twitter and Facebook combined"
2005: Yahoo acquired Flickr for $35m, Delicious for $15-20m; 2012: Pinterest is now valued at $1500m, Instagram at $1000m. I'd rather have 75 del.icio.us's than 1 Pinterest but.. I readily admit I'm getting old ;-) So my question is, did the folks 7 years ago get a bad deal or are the valuations now over the top?
More likely Option 3: Vastly more people are connected to the Internet, which now has far superior paths to monetization.
Pinterest got this valuation because their story is that it's related to ecommerce. The thing is it doesn't seem like that's turning out to be very true at all. It seems like what has made Pinterest really successful is that it's basically 9gag/tumblr photo/meme sharing. If you look at their content it's mostly of that type. Products seem to be a relatively tiny portion of the content. I'm sure they can make a nice c…
Lately there's been a lot of discussion about some difficulties Facebook has had in the advertising sector. Jason Bigler of Google was snarking about this earlier today. [1] I realize this is largely because all the snarks come out of the woodwork before an IPO, but to a certain degree - they're right. Facebook just isn't a place that puts people into a "transactional mindset." People go to interact, and they kind of seem to like pictures, but only insofar as they're sharing pictures that are (a) funny or (b) very personal and of themselves or their pets.
Pinterest is different. People go on Pinterest to look at pictures of stuff that they like or that they think is cool. Yeah, I can't get into the Pinterest thing either, but I know a few people who do, and I have to say that that model - getting people to amass collections of stuff they think is neat or cool - is much, much more likely to put people in an buyer mindset than most social networking models.
And as a few people have shared above, it seems as though advertising on Pinterest has a lot of momentum; many companies have reported extremely good results. My feeling is that this will continue. The whole metaphor of Pinterest seems to be extremely similar to shopping and acquiring - collecting stuff, putting it on your page, browsing other people's collections.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/gleeful-google-exec-takes-a-s...
For everyone talking about a bubble, 1.5B might actually be low. If you agree that Facebook is worth about 100B, according to Alexa, Pinterest is about 1/20th of the size by uniques (by pageviews it's about 1/30th). 1/20th means that Pinterest should be valued at about 5B, not 1.5B. http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/facebook.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/pinterest.com
Normally I am not one to comment on fundraising, and I have stayed out of the whole "bubble" debate. But, honestly, this is really getting a little out of hand now. The whole funding situation is getting really frothy. $1.5b pretty much prices them out of any real acquisition now for the most part. So is Pinterest going to go IPO? Where do they go from here? That's the question of the day.
In this another debate of "is this a bubble", something interesting came to my mind. I thing the issue here is that any online real estate that made it big, made it huge because they used the latest technology available. Think YouTube. When it started, barely anyone knew how to program flash and have a container to upload 5MB file and it could be coded in different movie codecs and youtube would read it anyways. This was definitely pushing the envelope! The technology was new, but it let you display videos and thats what counted. I think with the new technology coming in, like HTML5, etc, there will be new websites coming out and grabbing huge audience based on this new technology. So in other words, whomever is betting $1,500 millions on Pinterest, is like betting that nothing new will be invented over the web. This is like buying GeoCites, because nobody is sitting in garage developing WordPress 1.0. On buying MySpace because there is no Facebook. I hope you get my drift...