The Pin-interesting Business Model!

Pinterest is a visual discovery engine for finding ideas like recipes, home, style expression and it is now a hub to find ideas and inspiration on the net.

The History of Pinterest :

Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable savings and discovery of information on the internet using images and animated gifs and videos in the form of pinboards. With billions of pins on Pinterest, you will always find ideas, creative photos, and inspiring artists across the globe.

As of August 2020, Pinterest had over 400 million monthly active users. It's created by -

Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp.

It's based in San Francisco, operated by Pinterest, Inc. and was created in 2009 approximately 11 years ago.

WHAT ARE PINS?

Pins are bookmarks that people used to save ideas they love on Pinterest. People can search for them and save the ones they like and later click on the same pin to learn more about them. If you are a business owner then definitely you can create a pin to exhibit your products and ideas in front of the view and also you can link them back to your website. This can be called as using pins for business use. There are several artists and sellers who have created multiple pins to sell their products online.

Here are some golden rules of Pinterest!

Share interesting and quality items
Show consideration for your followers
Be selective in pinning activities
Pin responsibly
Give credit where credit is due
Provide the context for your pins
Limit the information you share
Allow others to pin your images to drive traffic, sales, and audience.

General Pinterest Stats :

As of January 2021, Pinterest ranks as the 14th largest platform in the world in terms of global active users.

Source: The Global State of Digital 2021

Pinterest’s Q4 2020 Shareholder Report shows that a significant share of the company’s growth took place outside of the United States. International monthly active users rose to 361 million in 2020. That’s a 46% increase from the previous year.

Source: Pinterest

By filling your feed with pins…

HOW PINTEREST MAKES MONEY?

Pinterest has a debut on the stock market with an initial valuation above $10 billion. In 2020 in its IPO filing the company said it lost $63 million last year on revenue of $756 million in revenue, with revenue growth of 60 per cent.

So where does this money come from?

Pinterest makes money (the most of it) via advertising specifically promoted pins. The social network 265 million monthly users who bookmark images defined online by pinning them to themed inspiration boards. That large user base is two-thirds women and is highly valuable to advertisers. Pinterest sells targeted ads called promoted pins that appear at the top of users' feed and search results. Those ads brought in about $3 per user in 2018. Moreover, Pinterest also sells click-to-buy shopping ads to businesses and hundreds of retail partners.

Except for the money-making part, Pinterest offers hourly-paying jobs too!

The Job titles include :

● Visual designer

● Executive assistant

● Process associate

● Software engineer

Here are 5 types of Content To Get You Started on Pinterest :

Let's take a look at some of the most popular types of pinnable content to get your creative juices flowing!

Scenic: people like pretty pictures. People love pictures of places they would like to go. Such type of content can be tricky to align with your products or brands.
How-To/ DIY : people on Pinterest are among the most ambitious in the world. They like to create things, organize things , paint things, design things, and much more. Visual tutorials and craft DIY projects are basically the king of the hill in Pinterest-land.
Humorous : Funny wins almost everywhere! Especially on the Internet, Pinterest is no different.
Recipes / Food: As it's said, Food Unites the foodies! Pinterest is such a place where creative recipes, healthy recipes, and even ridiculous recipes are posted! Be sure to invest in a good, high-quality picture of your creation to showcase the YUM!
Novel: anything unusual creative aesthetic or just downright needed works incredibly well on Pinterest. People feel inspired by the vision, the choice, and the creation and creativity by association.

An Inside Look at Pinterest's Business Model:

Pinterest is known as the best pinboard-style photo-sharing website. Uses leverage the platform to create and manage many photo collections of hobbies, events, and much more.

But the business model of Pinterest is something that differentiates it from other photo-sharing websites. Rather than having users share photos directly with friends, users instead curate personal pinboards of existing photos uploaded by strangers and friends, and even companies. Also, these users can upload their own photos and pin to their online portfolios which are known as pinboards in the world of Pinterest.

Recently there have been new updates and improvements to the advertising strategy of Pinterest :

One way to monitor social media websites is through digital advertisements and Pinterest knows this and hence it created a business plan that monetizes the platform with advertisements. However, they uniquely do this!

Facebook of the world charges advertisers based on the cost per click model - CPC MODEL, Pinterest has created and promoted an ad strategy that charges advertisers on the engagement or action. This means that an advertiser only pays when an existing user engages with a promoted pin, which has the potential to increase the advertiser's return on investment. Pinterest also offers CPC and cost per thousand (CPM) options for advertisers.

In addition to the feature of Pinterest's unique use of pinboards, advertisers can target users based on their interests, personas, or life stages. Doing this gives advertisers the chance to target potential customers on a more precisely granular level than they can on the other social media platforms, which can provide an added boost towards a positive return on investment (ROI) on advertising budgets.

Here's a Pin-interesting Fact :

Pinterest has also introduced an in-house creative studio - The Pin Factory, which allows advertisers to pay for more appealing promoted pins. The main aim of the service is to help advertisers design images and write more engaging descriptions for the content they post!

Focus On Discovery :

While other social sharing sites focus on the interactions between friends, Pinterest has built a business model that instead focuses on letting its users discover new and intriguing things.

This was the Pinterest Business Model in a nutshell. In some ways, Pinterest should be seen as more of a search engine than a social sharing site because the company allows users to stumble on new information rather than look for specific pieces of information which make the business model more unique. This 'focus on discovery' feature is highlighted by Pinterest's partnership with Apple, which allows users to discover new apps in the Apple App Store too.