The social media site Pinterest.com describes its mission as follows:
Our goal is to connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people. With millions of new pins added every week, Pinterest is connecting people all over the world based on shared tastes and interests.
In the U.S. Pinterest is popular with women; in 2012, it was reported that 83% of the U.S. users are women (the Pinterest U.S. user persona is most likely female, a mother, age 35-44, and 28 percent have a household income of $100k).
With almost 1.5 million visitors daily, and growing, Pinterest provides more referral traffic to other sites than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined, and with higher sales conversion rates than other social sites like Facebook. Due to this, many big brands and entrepreneurs, particularly retailers and image oriented business like clothing and furnishings are using the Pinterest social graph for marketing and sales.
Yet Pinterest doesn’t quite yet have a revenue model pinned down. According to the big P:
Right now, we are focused on growing Pinterest and making it more valuable. To fund these efforts, we have taken outside investment from entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. In the past, we've tested a few different approaches to making money such as affiliate links. We might also try adding advertisements, but we haven't done this yet.
Even though making money isn't our top priority right now, it is a long term goal. After all, we want Pinterest to be here to stay!”
Ahh the audience first/business model later strategy peculiar to social media tech start-ups…must be nice!
Pinterest’s revenue testing model has included using third-party affiliate network Skimlinks to monetize user and brand content on the site. When a user clicks on an image linked to an e-commerce site and buys that product, Skimlinks allows Pinterest to collect an affiliate sales commission—the percentages vary depending on the program, but have been estimated to be 3.75% on average per sale for Pinterest. Pinterest says it is no longer using Skimlinks (there was uproar and backlash when people found out the free platform dared to monetize UGC within its terms of service..); but it is not clear what the plan is for revenue.
Analysts like Baynote founder Scott Brave suggest that Pinterest may find a revenue sweet spot in monetizing proprietary analytics of Pinterest users, describing Pinterest as the perfect lab for collecting consumer affinity data about the relationships between consumer behaviors, brands and content. Analytics of such data would be valuable to brands and could be sold for marketing analysis .
1 comment:
Pintest can definately make money in many ways but the question are:
1)can it carry on making money the way it wanted to (selling consumer data or advertisement?
2)can the profits and business grow as predicted in Wall Street?
We all remember the good old Naspter! Free Free Free... file sharing and downloading of music. Once it start to Compliance with the RIAA rules, anti trust laws, etc. by charging money even a few cents or monthly fee, everybody turns away and disappear. So did Naspter eventually.
Will Pinterest get pin by copy rights lawsuits? Will charging a fee be a sellout to Pinterest customers? The first thing that really interest people about Pinterest is the picture/ photo concept and the second is because it is free.
If both 2 of these get pin by lawsuit and fees, I think one of the 2 possiblity is quite high. Even Facebook got slammed with lawsuits now
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