Friday, July 26, 2013

Pinterest: setting the stage for ad revenue

Today Pinterest announced a couple of interesting additions to its service:
  1. An Edit tool that allows you to personalize your feed
  2. Recommended pins based on websites you've visited
All of this sets the stage to provide Pinterest with a tremendous of data about where users are traversing the web and what their core interests are.  This sounds quite a bit like the way search engines are indexing our preferences except that this is targeting the visual web. All of this data gathering seems to be leading Pinterest towards the one thing that (despite a $2.5bn valuation) is lacking, revenue.

Perhaps laying this ground work will pay off and Pinterest will be able to monetize its business through an ad-driven model.  Or perhaps the company will be wiped out by the next Silicon Valley photo sharing website that doesn't have ads. 

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