

Pinterest is not a Virtual Pinboard - joe-mccann
http://subprint.com/blog/pinterest-is-not-a-virtual-pinboard
Pinterest is not a Virtual Pinboard.  It is the answer to consumers engaging with brands, something Facebook has been unable to do.
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snprbob86
My girlfriend has called it "Reddit for girls" and that's exactly what it is.

Like Reddit, it's a place to waste endless amounts of time. My girlfriend has
gotten a little addicted to Pintrest and has since apologized to me for being
mad that I sometimes getting sucked into Reddit on my phone.

However, the beautiful design is tuned for the target audience. I've watched
several girls surf Pintrest and they use it very differently than most anyone
I know who uses Reddit. Just the way they scan visually and randomly for
something that catches their eye, rather than reading down a row or column and
scanning for blue links.

All that said, I believe that the female audience will prove much more
monetizable than Reddit's. For one, all pins already have a photo, so
sponsored pins will fit right in with the flow. Secondly, the types of things
people are sharing and looking at on Pintrest are extremely gift and "spoil
yourself" centric.

Best of luck to the Pintrest team. Seems like they've got a great run ahead of
them!

~~~
joe-mccann
Yup, spot on. You'll notice that the massive, visually appealing sites and
apps (Flipboard, Instagram, for example) cater to a different audience and are
arguably more suited for monetization: your "sponsored pins" idea - subtle
additions to the natural eye flow down the page, BUT using the data that
Pinterest has on your profile to show sponsored pins that you would actually
WANT to see.

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minouye
"People, mainly women at the moment, are creating mood/story boards which
mostly contain pictures of products."

I keep hearing this, but I find it goes against my own experience on the site
and that of other hardcore users that I know. Food, hair, nails, tattoos,
quotes, amazing pictures, unique crafts/accessories (via Etsy), aspiration
products, and amazing travel pictures yes. Anything being sold by a retailer
seems few and far between.

If anyone knows of anything other than anectdotal evidence that users are
actually actively pinning products, I'd be really interested to read more.

~~~
theseanstewart
A client of mine sells classroom decorations and teacher resources. We
recently added a Pinterest share button to each product page which has
increased our traffic from Pinterest significantly. The conversion rate from
Pinterest traffic averages between 6 and 10 percent. Conversion rate from
Facebook traffic: .40%, Twitter: .08%.

~~~
DevX101
How do pinterest users discover new content like yours?

~~~
timmaah
Same way as people find new tweets. By following others and by having others
follow you.

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rezrovs
The real products that I've seen pinned are mostly clothing. People will pin a
look or a series of pictures that build up a look.

There are two drivers for this that I've seen. Either bookmarking clothes to
build up a look that they will then go and buy, or bookmarking clothes to buy
once they go on sale.

One of the things I struggle with buying clothes online is being able to look
at all the things I like on the same screen and then decide what I will buy.
(H+M does this well). Some retailers limit the baskets to 10 items (Next used
to) so even though I'll only buy a few in the end, the only other way to
compare items is to open lots of tabs. This doesn't work at all when it's a
flash based store. (Esprit.com suffers from this) So I use pinterest for this.

The other time I pin products is when I want comment from other people. I'd
rather have these comments on Pinterest than on Facebook.

One thing that would make me pin products more would be if I could make a
board private. Then I would pin ideas for Birthday presents and I would have
used it to pin ideas for wedding dresses. But private boards are not what
they're aiming for and doesn't fit into the context of the article either I
guess.

~~~
joe-mccann
Yes, private boards are key, IMO. I bought the domain wishistry.com a few
years ago to provide just that: Private wishlists for birthdays, weddings,
holidays, etc. I think Pinterest will roll this out soon.

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Alexx
I've been watching pintrest with some interest recently.

It's not a story of great relevance here, but I basically built pintrest in
2007 - 2008, and then never launched it. It was pretty much the exact same
site; right down to the infinite scrolling, and concept of cards and images. I
did not have the concept of 'repinning' they have though, I opted for 'loving'
something, and copied the hackernews model of moving things around. My concept
was 'what's cool right now'; it was to be a large visual endless board of
interesting visual things and products in the real world.

When I researched how I should categorise, I arrived at almost exactly the
same categories pintrest now has (90% overlap). I put those categories
together by the same method I can only presume pintrest did; by highest
advertising CPC rates and revenue driving metrics. I guess the slight
deviation is because I was working on 2007 figures.

When I came up with the concept, it was when digg was king, and reddit was
still highly techie. I used to browse this site every single day;
<http://www.notcot.org> \- and noticed there was huge gap in community driven
linking based towards images and products. They didn't work well with text
links.

Anyway, after initially planning simply to advertise for revenue (I made my
image columns the same size as a standard advert banner) I arrived at the same
conclusion; The only real way to make a solid stream of revenue from this is
to create some kind of way to tap into the revenue created from the 'products'
linked to.

I stumbled and stuttered on how to implement this. I couldn't figure out how
to blend the concept of products in without trashing it. Then I got caught up
in implementing new features when things like facebook connect were announced,
and then, due to unfortunate personal events, never got around to finishing
the last 5% and going live, it just sat on a staging server for years.

Something clicked for me recently when I saw was fab.com are doing. I realise
with hindsight that had I simply launched when I had a basic product I could
have come to these challenges later; which is exactly what pinterest will be
in the process of doing now; but it's not an easy problem to crack.

Makes me happy to see pintrest doing well. I'm not in the valley, and I never
really had any grand plans, obviously they had the vision I didn't! I doubt
I'd have gotten much beyond a few hundred visitors haha :)

For anyone interested; <http://i.imgur.com/eEJva.jpg> It's not as pretty as
pintreset, I was keeping comments on the permalink and cropping image but it
was an early beta.

~~~
checker
LINK IS NSFW!

~~~
Alexx
Apologies - you were correct. I update the link so it is now SFW.

It was a small screenshot of a site, and on of the thumbnails visible had a
picture from an artist which you can see a nipple in. I didn't spot that. I
have removed it.

~~~
checker
Thanks for updating, I just wanted to give a warning those of us at work and
make it as visible as possible. I think the site looks great by the way! It
definitely had potential.

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j45
Pinterest is internet scrapbooking, and sharing it.

Strangely I'm mostly hearing about Pinterest so far from the women in my life,
and not the guys so much.

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timmaah
My wife just recently started a food blog and along with that found Pinterest.
With a site redesign we did, we added a Pinterest button directly next to the
Facebook like button. The Pinterest button gets upwards of 10 times the
actions as the facebook like.

We were just talking about how it is not considered as acceptable to share as
much mundane stuff on Facebook and how that is what Pinterest is all about.
Facebook has no way to easily categorize or review what you have shared in the
past, so it gets lost. Women especially seem to enjoy this.

One odd thing is Pinterest doesn't seem to combine all pins of a single image
together. For a single image, you may have 20 different pins, each of those
with their own set of repins and comments. See:
<http://pinterest.com/source/thinlyslicedcucumber.com/>

~~~
easp
My wife started pinning DIY posts from her pet blog on Pinterest and
discovered a lot of them had allready been pinned. Also, in just over a month,
it has become the leading non-search referrer to her blog.

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caublestone
I was thinking about this same thing last week in the shower. The reality is
that I find most people pinning items that are not necessarily to be purchased
i.e 20 different wedding dresses, ferraris, crazy tattoos. That sparked my
apiphany, like yours, that this isn't to create a store front, this is to
curate enough data to proverbaly shoot fish in the barrel with targeted
advertising.

I know Google made an offer to Pinterest and clearly it wasn't enough. They
should have put all of their eggs in this basket because this is the true
alternative to FB's power house advertising that is soon to be bolstered by
the inevitable search capabilities.

~~~
joe-mccann
With FB's IPO imminent, they should take some of that cash and buy Pinterest
(Andreeson is invested in both anyway).

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blanecordes
Does anyone know what the breakdown between men/women users are on pinterest?
Do you think it will always be women dominated or will they roll out something
to attract men users?

~~~
j45
I think it's about time a startup is used by women in majority.

The fairer half are a grossly underserved audience, there are lots of
opportunities and I hope Pinterest is the first of many to build on it.

~~~
joering2
doesnt Pinterest smell too much women (no disrespect whatsoever!) by now? I
mean, its been built upon profiles of shoes, wedding dresses, carpets,
flowers, knitting stuff, etc. I wonder if they will be trying to shift it more
towards men, or perhaps there is a good niche right now here: built pinterest
that has a strong lean towards men interests: cars, women, alcohol, bikes,
boats, luxury watches, houses, cool places, etc, etc.

EDIT: although second thought. Pinterest strong side is that women (more than
men) like to collect stuff. Nice thing about Pinterest is that you can
pinboard your collections, join others, etc. I am not sure if the same effect
would work on "mens pinterest".

~~~
Zimahl
I think you'd definitely want a separate space for men, although I don't think
you will ever get as much traffic. Sharing the website (even though it is
technically done that way right now) would be weird - most women aren't going
to be interested in a handgun on the page or a swimsuit model or a muscle car.

I don't think a men-only version would work anyways. Men just don't tend to
'window shop' like women do. Men also don't like sharing as much as women do.

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Splines
I've never heard of Pinterest before - my first impression was that this was
somehow related to Path. The color scheme , logo, and favicon are eerily
similar.

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brackin
Great piece, I wrote something similar on Google+ recently but you've summed
it up better than I did.

Pinterest could create real social shopping and users want it. They'd love to
to be able to purchase the items they repin. That would be easy to monetize
and eventually could even allow for payments to go through pinterest to make
it a slicker solution and without the need for lots of accounts.

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AznHisoka
Kaboodle, StyleHive and many others captured the same concept years back, and
Pinterest just adds more visual appeal to it.

I also wonder if the guys behind Pinterest are doing some sneaky things like
creating fake users and making them Like your pins immediately after you
create them. When I first started, I had a few people immediately follow me,
and like some of my pins.. but then it died down as I continued to use it. I
wouldn't be surprised.. my dopamine levels shot right up when I got an email
notification than 3 ppl liked a pin of mine.

~~~
rokhayakebe
I can tell you they aren't doing anything funny. I have been pinning items
from my site (I feel a bit of shame when I do this). Now that they have
millions of users, your pin gets lost within millions of pins unless someone
who has lots of followers repins you.

I have figured I could get around 1000 visits to my site daily from Pinterest
by pinning around 200-300 items, assuming 10 of them become hits. But the
traffic is not really sticky.

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pnmahoney
really? pinterest has a substantial potential for data warehousing! maybe
_that's_ why they're hiring to find ppl with data mining experience for their
hadoop stack . . .

