Pinterest have achieved the unthinkable by becoming a household name on a global level. With a following similar to that of Google, Pinterest is estimated to be worth some $12.3 billion American. They are a web and mobile based corporation who run a platform where members can easily store information found online, and in an age where online time per consumer is fast increasing they have chosen their product very well.
Pinterest became a fabled Unicorn company and joined the other 259 similar firms worldwide back in 2012. Founded by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra it has roughly 250 million interactive engagements per calendar month. With so much popularity we wanted to know how they went about collecting all of that money, and seeing how they keep themselves on top of the pack.
The product itself focuses on pinning posts, informative articles and images to collate information found online into bundles of information with similar topics. It is perhaps best to think of Pinterest as a way that internet users collectively work to sort out the big data stream that is the World Wide Web. They started with a desire to discover and collate useful information and now they operate in 29 different countries around the globe.
Pinterest have their headquarters in San Francisco and run Jelly Industries as a subsidiary. In their time they have also acquired Livestar, Hike Labs and Hackermeter. They have also launched a system wherein users can pay to have their post pinned, increasing their revenue once again. They do a good deal of advertising and are rewarded for it and some of their investors include Anreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and Firstmark Capital. Since they were established, however, they have been generating a fair amount of profit all of their very own.
List of Services
Pinterest don’t just operate a very specified search engine platform, they also do a few other things, Some of their services are as follows:
- Offer a free website where users can upload and manage digital images,
- Offer a video channel service where users can tune in or offer up content.
- Offer a paid pin advertising service.
- Provide an online community and forum where users can easily connect to those of similar interests.
- Offer a virtual storefront which allows businesses to sell through their platform.
- They have massive amounts of user data and account for around 2% of global social media based sales.
With a huge following like Pinterest has and a name that is common knowledge in every home in the majority of the western world; Pinterest is one of those companies who have ridden the surge in online networking until the very peak. With so many users on a regular basis it is highly unlikely that Pinterest will be closing their door any time soon. The added benefit it has is the collected data that it can use to perform its own analytics with, which gives it the edge over competitors who don’t use their own search algorithms and helps them give the big internet search providers a thorough run for their money.
