
Pinterest Raises $150M at 2015 Share Price - jasondc
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-06/pinterest-raises-150-million-at-2015-share-price
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skewart
I've been a fan of Pinterest for a long time, though I rarely use it these
days.

I've been fascinated, and slightly horrified, by their pivot away from social
functionality and towards a vision of a neutral bookmarking site.

It's not that I'd want Pinterest to be more social in and as an end itself,
but rather because I think it better incentivizes people to create good
quality content, and it makes it easier to discover things I want to find.

There's very little ROI for cultivating a public image on Pinterest, so few
people put much effort into doing it. At the same time, people who have taste
similar to mine are a much better way to find things than any algorithm
Pinterest has ever released. And yet, they keep emphasizing algorithmic
recommendations while disincentivizing people from publicly expressing their
taste and making it harder for me to follow people I like.

And then there are the ads, which, as a bunch of other commenters have pointed
out, tend to be really far out of line from anything I've ever expressed
interest in. It's just off-putting to see a bunch of low-quality ads for tacky
crap in the middle of my feed of minimalist interiors.

Maybe they have something up their sleeves, or maybe I'm very different from
their target user. Otherwise I just don't agree with their product direction.

~~~
virmundi
If they want to be a bookmarking site that also recommends items, they need a
way to unequivocally say, "I'm not interest". I get wood working an fashion
recommendations. Then one day at the height of Zootopia they recommended some
comics based on the story. Tried to figure out how to say no. Apparently I
missed. Now I get Zootopia every 5th recommendation.

~~~
shostack
How much of that is Pinterest trying to surface something incorrectly based on
their matching algorithms, vs. the people advertising Zootopia using poorly-
chosen or intentionally broad targeting settings?

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virmundi
I have no idea. But it's taking a Fury twist and I just don't want that.

~~~
gjvc
How do you mean?

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virmundi
Sex and abortion.

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gjvc
Yes, I always placed Pinterest at the same end of the spectrum as Etsy.

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fensterblick
I just started looking at Pinterest as a company to work for. From the
outside, the way they treat their employees looks amazing. Things like KnitCon
(an internal conference for employees led by employees) reflect well on the
company. On the other hand, some of the reviews on Glassdoor are not so kind.

I hope Pinterest can succeed and overcome its current challenges. Even if I do
not ever get a job there, what is good for one company lifts everyone else in
our industry (unless you are a direct competitor!)

~~~
joering2
Just keep in mind they are a company like any other at the end of the day.
They look at bottom line, revenue and how to keep shareholders happy.

HR Managers can outsmart each other day and night on how to make it more
funny, bubbly, friendly, etc to you by pulling off more and more crazy ideas
to make you feel like we're one big family, but when shareholders decide to
cut corners, don't be surprised that your key-card and password doesn't work,
and you are greeted by a large-sized man in dark suit you never met before who
will gladly escort you and your cartoon box of your office belongings outside.
Oh and don't email HR questions like "What happened, I thought we are one big
family, so you told me", because for legal reasons you will not get any
response at all!

Source: own experience :)

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giarc
I've started to use pintrest a lot lately (finding ideas for some DIY
furniture). I actually kind of like the product for discovery. I haven't
pinned items from other sites, just saved items from other people's boards.

My biggest qualm is the number of low quality ads. Ton of stuff for diet
drinks, teeth whitening, skin cream and the like. And fidget spinners, lots of
fidget spinning ads. Perhaps I haven't used the app enough to get more
personalized ads, but I do hope the side of the service improves.

~~~
akcreek
I've used Pinterest for a couple of years or more to save images of cars,
motorcycles and houses and the ads are just as terrible for me. I almost never
get on there anymore because of the garbage they are pushing on me. Just not
interested and it ruins the entire experience to have to wade through these
terrible ads that have nothing to do with how I use the product (or anything
else related to my life).

-edit-

The suggested pins for me are just as irrelevant. I spent quite a bit of time
marking each irrelevant pin and ad as such, but it didn't seem to help. I
finally turned off suggested pins, but ads aren't optional.

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mintplant
> I finally turned off suggested pins, but ads aren't optional.

Well, technically you can always install an ad blocker.

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akcreek
I've got uBlock origin, but it doesn't block anything on Pinterest. That
brings up a good point... on Pinterest it is hard to tell what is and isn't an
ad because the only differentiator is the text below that reads "promoted
by...". Everything else looks like a normal pin, except usually the content
doesn't make any sense with my feed so I think look to see who is posting
garbage so I can unfollow them and usually it turns out to be an ad.

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habosa
Pinterest really dropped the ball, they could have been a super profitable
social network.

A lot has been written about how people go on Pinterest with shopping intent.
It's a way to window shop the entire internet, curated by friends. They never
really monetized it much though. Individual influencers made money by
leveraging referral programs.

It seems like Pinterest was way ahead of the curve when it came to having
image-heavy content and a heavy focus on lifestyle products. But they missed
the boat on video and a lot of the influencers moved to Instagram or Facebook.

~~~
paulpauper
How is a $12 billion valuation dropping the ball. Pinterest appeals to a very
lucrative democratic who are looking for stuff to buy, such as clothes,
household products, and other stuff, whereas people go to Facebook to see
pictures of family or engage in political gossip.

~~~
hkmurakami
For fashion, afaik "influencers" are indeed using platforms like Instagram
much more than Pinterest. That is certainly a situation where they could have
defended their turf more effectively.

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paulpauper
but Instagram is more for browsing than buying . people who use pinterest are
more in a buying mood

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jimmywanger
I'd tend to disagree. Both are for browsing.

If I see something on Pinterest I'm interested in, then I'll go to Amazon to
see if it's offered there, and if not, I'll head over to Google to see if I
can get it cheaper. I'm not going to buy directly from Pinterest unless it's a
link directly to Amazon.

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idlewords
The thing that really puts me off Pinterest is that they require you to log in
to see their public pages.

I'm surprised that people would throw another $150M on this particular
bonfire. Like so many other bookmarking sites before it, Pinterest is
overreaching. Their best outcome (for investors, not users) is likely an
acquisition by Facebook.

~~~
blowski
I don't know why they can't carry on doing just what they do now. Keep the
servers going, apply security updates, do backups, etc. But why do they need
new features?

This constant need to grow really irks me.

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adventured
They could. They should get to $1-$2 billion in sales and print a Facebook-
like margin at 30% net income margins by keeping operations as slim as
possible. Decent growth, 40 PE with a public listing (for however long this
market stays up), $300m in net income on $1.2 billion in sales, $12 billion
market cap. That'd be a real, sustainable business.

That's what Twitter should have done as well. Pinterest won't do it, for the
same exact reason Twitter didn't, making the same business mistake with
predictable consequences. They all want to be the next goliath and none of
them are going to be (and when that reality sets in, they all become
reactionaries under pressure from a dozen angles, working from a position of
weakness).

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bm1362
Yes, compare this response to Craigslist. The latter is downright successful,
dominating and print money for everyone involved.

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adventured
Twitter is currently trading for $12.7 billion. They did $2.5 billion in sales
last year.

Pinterest has a: show me the sales, problem, I suspect. Public comparables in
social like Twitter & Snapchat are going to cap their upside until or unless
Pinterest can somehow demonstrate a very profitable business model. If those
margins never arrive, Pinterest is going to be worth something a lot closer to
Yelp than Twitter. From $12 billion, there's a massive downside risk in the
last few rounds for Pinterest investors if this gets a similar reality
chopping to what Twitter & Snap have.

~~~
owenversteeg
Wait, so Pinterest is about as valuable as Twitter? That makes no sense.
Twitter is everywhere - it's how people communicate with the damn President of
the United States of America for crying out loud. Twitter and Facebook are
really the only big worldwide social networks: everything else is localized,
or too small. There's massive value from that alone.

Meanwhile Pinterest... well, maybe they have a lot of interior decorating
collections and cupcake ideas, but there's also a ton of spam and most people
I know that used it years ago don't use it now.

How are the two even close?

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econner
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.

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owenversteeg
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.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
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.

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wkoszek
"Pinboard acquires Pinterest for $35k"

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dngerousminds87
I see parallels in pinboard and craigslist - both not so technologically
awesome, but good enough

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wkoszek
Yes. I think it's a part of a software art to just build a no-bloat
functionality and leave it like that for a long time.

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arcanus
So is this perceived as a lateral move? Or is this a strong negative
indicator.

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colinbartlett
Hard to imagine somoene seeing this as anything but negative. It's like a
stock not gaining at all in two years and then suddenly asking someone to buy
a whole bunch of it.

~~~
justin_vanw
It's hard to say without seeing the terms, but raising money is not quite like
selling a bunch of stock. The money probably comes with a bunch of terms, and
if it's effectively a down round the terms are probably incredibly terrible
for the company's existing investors.

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intoverflow2
I'm shocked how Pintrest gets away with spamming Google images with dead end
links to sign up forms as an on-boarding mechanism.

I search images these days and I click a result only to be thrown into a
Pintrest on-boarding flow and unable to get the image I wanted.

Honestly think they should be banned from Image Search results.

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kmfrk
I was one of their biggest supporters until they set up a registration wall
and increased their targeting outside the site.

I thought one of the best use cases was as a wishlist, but that's not gonna
work with a registration wall.

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gjvc
When aliens deign to view us they will see a society which has recently taken
the fetish of (targeted) advertising to new heights, possibly above the actual
production of products and services which to advertise.

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traviswingo
This title made me think they had a down round...

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tanilama
Well this is kinda flat round, and it casts a negative outlook on the company.

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Grue3
Haven't heard of Pinterest in a lo-ong time. I guess it still exists?

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acchow
Does this new round have the same preferences that the 2015 round had?

