Pinterest and Monetization

Woman’s Day is on Pinterest, just as the brand is on every platform, but we have a small number of followers (214,000) compared to Facebook (1.7 million), and, quite frankly, we can’t monetize it, so I don’t pay a lot of attention to it. I also don’t spend any time on it personally as I find it a bit overwhelming (and I am a tad busy these days). All of that said, I am interested in it because I think it probably could be a powerful marketing vehicle. So, this article on Pinterest caught my eye, since it reminded me so much of how Google grew (in part by getting money from gazillions of small companies out there):

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/270790/pinterest-ads-manager-focuses-on-monetizing-small.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=headline&utm_campaign=90986

I was surprised to learn in the article that Pinterest has an $11 billion valuation, because I feel like I hear less about Pinterest these days than I did even two or three years ago. The part about Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s general manager of monetization, also interested me. So, then I got more curious and found this article from Business Insider (I think BI is awesome, fwiw):

http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-worth-11-billion-valuation-revenue-grow-5x-2015

This article is pretty thorough and to me one of the major issues it grapples with is whether you have to build monetization into your initial business model or whether you can uncover it as you go. Certainly Google and Facebook faced the same issues, and Twitter continues to face the issue of both relevance and revenue. But I would think Pinterest would have an advantage over Twitter (for example) because they can harness that “intent” focus that we discussed so deeply with search and Google. Pinterest users are there to either get something specific for now (e.g. a chicken recipe for dinner, a fashion idea for a night out) or for later (e.g. wedding/holiday ideas, interior and exterior decorating ideas), but in many cases (except for the “browsers”), there is an intent to buy something. And yet, Pinterest is clearly much smaller than they should be at this point in their lifecycle (when people describe their revenue growth vs the prior year without naming a number, I usually assume it’s because the number is still lower than they want and that the growth rate was off of a very small base).

So, why is that? There is discussion in the article about salespeople selling deals but upper management/the founders not wanting to fulfill those deals, as well as about the “preciousness” of the platform and the users, and not wanting to ruin the experience. There is also mention of a relatively lower-income user on Pinterest and the fact that the platform doesn’t have the metrics it needs. So is this a case of founders who need a Sheryl Sandberg to take them to the next level, or is it something else? I look forward to diving into social media so that we can talk about the issues around monetization and social media.