> In the last quarter, the global audience contributed $17 million to revenue compared to $273 million from the United States audience. Annually, this puts the global audience at $41 million in revenue and the United States at $715 million in revenue.
Ouch. $41 million revenue from non-US is .. not nothing, but it's a respectable medium sized national chain of shops kind of number, not a $10bn company number.
(Pinterest is also very vulnerable to Google one day deciding that they shouldn't let them clog up the top of the image search rankings...)
Google used to have this feature (the ability to specify sites not to show in their search results), but removed it for some reason. I cannot remember if they gave a reason why.
They did provide a replacement as a browser plugin (mentioned close-by in this thread), and I am sure that there are other similar plugins available.
Google released very own Chrome Extension specifically to block domains that you find to always provide bad results. You can use that to permanently block pinterest, and any forum/stack exchange clones, etc.
Unfortunately for us google is not interested in making the google search engine useful to us in that way. You might be able to append -pinterest.com to your search, I'm not sure that works these days.
I’m seeing a lot less results as of yesterday, specifically in art related verticals. Guessing investors will be able to catch this pretty early from data sources like SimilarWeb. Also a guess is that the poor monetization is primarily google images traffic, not active users.
If the Google Images traffic drops suddenly after the IPO, that’s very suspicious and the SEC should investigate.
Anyone around long enough to remember Demand Media know what happens when you dominate a wide breadth of search terms.
What are you talking? You know how effing suspicious it is that you need to create a Pinterest account to see those bullshit, third-party stolen images? Yeah, nothing suspicious at all.
I wonder if when opening Pinterest links with a Googlebot user-agent it actually shows the image. I’d check but I’m don’t have stable internet at the moment. A nice plugin would be to change my User-agent when opening Pinterest links if that’s the case.
Extremely vulnerable. By its nature Google wants all those top ranked results to be things Google's users wanted to find. If they get a reputation for not finding what you were looking for and a competitor (say DDG) does better, they could be toast alarmingly fast.
Every day I'm guessing millions of people are disappointed by getting a Pinterest link, and every one of those people is a reason for Google to tweak their policy and/or ranking to get rid of Pinterest from the first page.
Pinterest is indeed very vulnerable, and potentially already in the crosshairs.
Google just recently launched Shoppable Ads in GIS. [1]
Further, from a user value standpoint, image searching quite often a tool for visual purchase planning. Think clothing, furniture and decor, trips, you name it. That is massively valuable for feeding into audience segment models.
With their launch of Collections ages ago and other things they are doing there, I fully expect to see Image Search become more heavily monetized directly and indirectly in the future.
> On April 4th, Snap announced a programmatic offering called Audience Network, which copies Facebook’s strategy of selling user data for third-party ads across multiple applications
This is incorrect, and makes me wonder if the rest of the article is accurate. Both Snap and Facebook's Audience Network is similar to Google's AdSense (running ads on a website) or AdMob (running ads on mobile). Google, Snap, and Facebook don't sell user data (from the aforementioned products, at least).
I suspect "selling user data" is often a shorthand that really means something more like "selling ad-targeting based on user data". Which is not the same thing, although the results can still be abhorrent.
I think this is correct, but we also semi-intentionally conflate the two to say the less worse version while connoting the worse version.
That said, the difference is blurry. LinkedIn and Facebook are both capable of hyper-specific targeting that may as well be specific users. I haven't interacted with Snap's ad product, but I suspect it can accomplish similar granularity.
Selling data, renting it, or monetizing derivatives of it...does it matter? Being a gatekeeper to data pays regardless of what kind of transaction is occurring.
Because, $BAD_ACTOR$ may be able to target advertizing to $GROUP_X$ in one scenario, but in another, may actual have the underlying data which can be abused in MANY other ways.
For example, you search for porn content... an advertiser targeting porn content doesn't know YOU search for porn content in the former... in the latter they do know.
While this fundamental misunderstanding - or more likely to me lack of pedestrian vernacular - is common (see FB), I think the authors intent is correct.
Snap, FB, etc are monetizing user data by allowing advertisers to transact on that audience data, off these platforms' main apps across.
Just need a better, yet still widely understandable, verb/description. I'm not sure I can think of one with just one or two words. Transact upon user data seems to come close, maybe leverage user data to sell targeted ads
Hm, interesting, I thought this would be more about how these companies define "active user". For example: is a user with the app installed, logged in and running in the background considered "active" that day, even if they don't actually launch or really use the app? If you send them a notification, even if they don't click on it, are they 'active'?
Normally I'd be cynical and say it's in the company's interest to be as loose as possible how they count 'active' so the MAU/DAU (monthly/daily active users) numbers are high, but if you are looking at ARPU (average revenue per user) then a lower MAU/DAU means higher ARPU. What's more valuable?
>For example: is a user with the app installed, logged in and running in the background considered "active" that day, even if they don't actually launch or really use the app? If you send them a notification, even if they don't click on it, are they 'active'?
I’m not aware of any company that defines active user in this way. Typically for an app it would have to be an explicit user interaction such as opening the app to count as an active user for that day.
The ARPU numbers that are reported are for the quarter, so they just take total revenue / # of users present on the service in the quarter. They don't look at MAU or DAU for that calculation (if they did, they'd be reporting ARPDAU or ARPMAU, which are industry-standard terms).
Anecdotally that's been fun to observe in the media. I remember at one point it was "Hours/day of engagement per user". At some point it became Active Users (at least once per day). Recently it's been Active Users (at least once per month).
I've never gone back to look at official filings or press releases from any company, but it feels like they're constantly redefining how widespread they are.
I'm particularly interested in whether Pinterest is counting users as 'active' if they have the pin extension installed and displaying their annoying overlay buttons on websites but are not actually pinning anything or visiting the site.
I'd say there's a strong correlation between willingness-to-pay for Pinterest and being a power user on Pinterest.
As such, chances are, you're a power-user, and you (or at least your power-user peers) are generating way above-average ad revenues.
Not only that, but due to your willingness-to-pay for things online, you're also a particular niche within the poweruser group. i.e., a person 1) with money 2) of age, card-holding, ability to pay 3) willing to pay for things etc... you're an ideal e-commerce customer, and thereby an ideal advertising-target that also generates more ad revenue than the average.
In short, to replace you, you'd probably have to pay substantially more than the average.
The more typical pinterest user may only scarcely visit, be quite unwilling to pay anything, and generates a lot less than $9.
> I would strongly suspect this rings true for the vast majority of people
Could you provide your reasoning for this strong suspicion, beyond the fact that you don't like it?
(I also can't stand Pinterest and don't know why Google Images ranks it as highly as it does. That said, I'm not willing to assume my preferences are representative of the population when (a) Pinterest has hundreds of millions of MAUs, (b) Google has better data than I do and as strong or stronger incentives to deliver good results, and (c) I don't have any data about anyone else's preferences. https://equilibriabook.com/ has more on figuring out whether one's thesis that a system is broken is actually correct. https://equilibriabook.com/living-in-an-inadequate-world/ section ii is a great starting point.)
If I had data, I wouldn't have said I suspected it.
A suspect in a crime is what you call them before you gather the data on whether or not they did the crime.
All it is as it stands is a good basis to go and gather some data. However, it doesn't bother me quite that much, and so it's merely a passing interest for me.
I share your doubts concerning the fact that people won't pay 10 bucks for surpassing Pinterest, but it reflect a wider resentment against a company that has repeatedly punish spam. If they can't punish Pinterest the same way (because let's be honest it's f*ing SEO spam), I won't climb in a Waymo self driving car ...
But $10 may be your ceiling, if you were paying them directly. Whereas if they continue to build information on you and ramp up impressions they believe they'll be able to raise that $9 to $15, then $24...
But then why won't Pinterest let me match whatever the advertisers are paying for my eyeballs for this year, and continue to gather data on me, just without showing me any ads? Oh, and maybe they could throw in some little inconsequential bonuses, just like Discord Nitro, so it doesn't just feel like paying for ads to be blocked. It sounds like everyone would win.
Probably because of the development and maintenance effort. It wouldn't actually take much such effort, but it might still be more costly than any benefit they'd get from the number of users who they think are likely to take part in such a scheme.
Also, employee CPU cycle opportunity costs. These companies are interested in scale, so any employee's CPU cycles that are working on non-scalable stuff are basically wasted.
> why won't Pinterest let me match whatever the advertisers are paying for my eyeballs for this year
The users who would opt out are likely educated and higher income. Taking them out of the pool reduces its value by a difficult-to-estimate amount to advertisers.
But why? How do I effectively communicate that ads annoy me and that I actively avoid products/brands I've seen in ads because I assume that if they need to market so hard they're probably not very good.
Like if I'm looking for some inspiration on Pinterest for a dinner party how do I tell advertisers that they look stupid advertising some terrible Kraft Cheese green bean casserole next to pictures of beef bourguignon. The contrast actually makes their product look worse. I could go on a similar rant about just about everything popular on Pinterest -- fashion, beauty products, home decor.
I'm literally in a mindset where I'm looking for things to buy and they're failing so hard it has the opposite effect.
> I actively avoid products/brands I've seen in ads because I assume that if they need to market so hard they're probably not very good.
Interesting that you say this. I find that I tend to have a similar belief. According to what I know about economics, advertising is supposed to be an effective way of signaling product quality, because the return on investment is greater when new customers will be satisfied and thus purchase the good multiple times. I'd attribute this difference to the inaccuracies and simplifications of economics, but I find it fascinating that a group of scholars believe something opposite to my (and your) experience.
I feel the same way, and recently rolled my own chrome extension for adblock on pinterest. It currently removes ads in the main grid view, and the little white dots for "buy me" things that overlay images of single pins.
If you're the average user, maybe, but I'd bet the fact you're willing to pay $10 for it makes you far from the average. It's very possible that many users make them a few tens of cents a year, which suggests that at the top end they must have users making them $100? Maybe more? Would you pay $20? $50? At what point is it too expensive?
It doesn’t seem fair to assume the international ARPU is maxed out just because the US ARPU is. I imagine the lose markets are just less mature and are more focused on growth at this point than monetization (as they should be!). What’s the ratio of US/international ARPU for comparable companies?
Pinterest is a visual search engine, not a social network. Comparing it to SNAP or Facebook valuation is missing the entire point.
I think Pinterest has other problems - mostly a market based on manipulating it - but hell so does google but google is further along in tech/services to increase quality.
What i really can't stand about pinterest is that even though it is a visual search - it requires an obscene amount of work from creators to be competitive - having to update your "pins" monthly and cycle them through and do A/B testing all the meanwhile others are stealing or borrowing your pins to enter those search terms/markets it creates a downward spiral - soon topics look spammy and only those who can afford to commit so much time/effort see the reward - then they turn around and start a business selling their idea.
No one looks at your boards anymore, they all search so people stuff their boards to find every variation of keyword and its starting to surface up to the search meaning searches get spammed by those who got there first rather than those most relevent.
I just use it for bookmarking images I might want to come back to or share in the future (e.g., my favorite XKCDs, screenshots of GUIs for inspiration, etc.).
The funny thing is that even though I have lots of clippings, I rarely ever go back to Pinterest to actually look at them.
That was the case for myself as well. I used to find in therapeutic to pin cookie recipes and Halloween decorations during my work break (from a job I was not too fond of).
> Pinterest is a visual search engine, not a social network.
That's exactly how it was promoted by major general news portals in Poland few years ago - as an amazing site where you can "pin" images to your board and see what others pick. I did tested it for a while but in comparison to microblogging platform like tumblr or soup it was way too chaotic in displaying content and navigation, so I left it without regrets.
In last years it become an annoying element of image search results in Google; it still seems to be sucking out images from other sites either by bots or with human help and pretending to be the source of searched image (which in some cases means it steals the views), and whenever you want to see image you were looking for, it asks you to sign in by dumping curtain over the content blocking it.
I don't see how this service can be useful to anyone but s. media influencers and those who naively believe they joined a cool site who does some great thing providing "inspirations".
Pinteres has poor marketing. I've always heard of it as something aimed at women and architects, full of decoration and hairstyle concepts. But they have, to my knowledge, an impressive catalog of (i) really niche erotica (maybe bordering on pornography, but not in the bad taste that databases of pornography have) and (ii) abstract art, both in more common settings (color field, etc.) and in more niche types such as asemic writing.
There's just so much asemic writing on Pinterest! On facebook I used to follow many artists; when I quit facebook I was thirsty for art for a long while. The effect is that Pinterest seems to have unending quantities of that very specific material, much like YouTube has seemingly unending quantities of music that's not officially licensed for streaming anywhere (hours upon hours of Japanese and Polish jazz...)
Same way you find anything: by searching for it, liking things that are similar to what you're looking for, and following any boards and/or people who have things close to what you're looking for. Warning: Pinterest's recommendation engine is generally quite good, but once you've shown an interest in something, it's hard to get it to stop recommending similar things. So you might want to use different accounts for certain subjects.
I mean, you want me to search "niche erotica"? It sounded like you were describing specific collections that would have associated URLs.... but certainly understand if you don't want to post those links here.
I'm constantly surprised on this site by comments like "I would gladly spend $50/month on this", in response to startup/SaaS ideas that I'd balk at spending $5 on once. Perhaps it's cultural or perhaps there's just a lot of San Francisco salaries commenting here.
> I'm constantly surprised on this site by comments like "I would gladly spend $50/month on this"
If someone's willing to spend $50/m on something, the pain point being addressed is usually perceived as worth $50 or more in terms of money, time and/or stress.
Pricing is usually set based on a specific target market, so if you only value that pain point as being worth $5/m, then you're likely outside of the target market.
I'm most familiar with Pinterest through kids' birthday parties. Most people of my acquaintance don't spend a lot of money on stuff they saw on Pinterest, however I've encountered some "whales" who drop lots of money on the Pinterest-perfect birthday party. So I wouldn't say Americans in general are that willing to spend, but we've got relatively higher rate of big spenders.
I mean, I get why there's a discrepancy. But 17/223 is 6% vs 94%.
Let's be frank here, the European Union alone has a GDP similar to the US (both around $19-20 trillion), the population is about 50% larger, with a very substantial western part that has similar disposable income as the US (particularly as things like healthcare or education costs less here, purchasing power is stronger in the EU than the nominal figures). The fact incomes are more egalitarian should also help, given pinterest-revenues aren't being driven by a small group of rich people.
In a world with just US/Europe, I'd expect more of a 60/40 split, 70/30 at worst. Yet it's 94/6.
But then the world isn't just US/Europe. You can add lots of other OECD countries, like Japan, Korea, Australia, Canada etc, when taken together you can quickly add up to another US-sized population of high-incomes. Again, it's not an exact comparison, but here too you'd expect at worst a 70/30 split.
Together with Europe and other huge but lower income markets like the BRIC countries, you'd be looking at 50/50 US/Rest, easily.
Google is at 45/55 and Apple is at 40/60. Pinterest being at 94/6 is absolutely not just a function of US incomes.
Yet we keep hearing about how poor so many Americans are. We also hear about how many trillions the US government is in debt. Despite these downsides to how it works in America, from a sales point of view the USA is the tastiest market to sell in to and there is no chance of that changing any time soon.
The physical size of the country also makes a difference, it is not as if you are forced to pay a fortune for a house, just move out to the suburbs. Only a few places where there is special geography such as NYC and San Francisco do you have to pay mega-bucks to rent seekers.
It's just a question of income. You will inevitably spend your income somewhere, ads are just a way to influence where it's spent. On the other hand, if you have no money you can't really spend it.
It's not just income, it's disposable income + savings rate. If you're in an Asian country like China or Japan you're probably saving 30-40% of your income even if you're "middle class". Here in the US it's more like 7%. In the EU, even when incomes are decent, disposable income is often significantly lower than in the US [1] due to higher taxes, more expensive daily services, etc. The combination means that people have less disposable income and spend a smaller portion of that disposable income on frivolous things.
American companies do that because americans spend more.
Gdp per capita here is larger. This is one main reason. As a percent ot their income, i dont know how people compare on their spending across different countries.
I appreciate the analysis. I love thinking about these economics so I deeply appreciate the thought process!
My question would be, and I hope to be able to dig in later, is the international ad platform rolled out completely? Ad products tend to roll out continuously and I would want to know if the problem is adoption of the platform from advertisers or a low-usage issue.
Advertisers will always find out where customers are so I would assume that it's either the platform isn't getting adopted or the actual tool of delivery is lagging behind, maybe until adoption increases.
I still don’t understand why Pinterest makes any sense for the investor but I guess I dont understand pinterest and their target audience. I have never once thought about browsing or even encountered Pinterest links through google searches.
Do you ever look for curated product list like wire cutters? Do you ever look at car or home improvement forums or reviews to see which is the best product. Do you like when sites so grids of feature comparisons?
Pinterest is this but for things that are mostly asthetic. Eg show me curated groups of products that for my style.
I hate Pinterest ui but as I get into leather working I can see why having curated lists of things in a style vector is useful. Also why I'd want to just pin things I saw into a page about a backpack. Or garage cabinets for me redoing my workshop.
Seems like it's bigger in the female space from what I can tell. My gf and a lot of her friends used it in the past or use it now. They use it to save outfits, foods, etc.
Suppose all this points out is that Pinterest needs to hire Facebooks international growth team. Surely there are countries outside of say India where users are more prone to monetization, despite stagnating growth in the USA.
This is a hit piece. Why didn't she update her article with the results of Snaps Q1 earnings that came out later the day this was published? 190 DAU goes against her narrative of declining users
She said "You’ll see below that the user base has struggled to break out over 191 million daily active users and has declined to flat for three straight quarters" which still holds true with Q1 earnings at 190
Ouch. $41 million revenue from non-US is .. not nothing, but it's a respectable medium sized national chain of shops kind of number, not a $10bn company number.
(Pinterest is also very vulnerable to Google one day deciding that they shouldn't let them clog up the top of the image search rankings...)