Product Code Database
Pinterest is an American social media service for publishing and discovery of information in the form of digital Bulletin board. This includes recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the Internet using image sharing. Pinterest, Inc. was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and is headquartered in San Francisco.
The development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype as a closed beta in March 2010. Nine months after the launch, the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann said he wrote to the first 5,000 users, offering his phone number and even meeting with some of them. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in more downloads than expected. This was followed by an iPad app and Pinterest Mobile, a version of the website for non-iPhone users. Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until mid-2011.
Pinterest grew rapidly during this period. On August 10, 2011, Time magazine listed Pinterest in its "50 Best Websites of 2011" article. In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week. Pinterest won the Best New startup company of 2011 at the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards. For January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. At the 2012 Webby Awards, Pinterest won Best Social Media App and People's Voice Award for best functioning visual design.
On March 23, 2012, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that eliminated the policy that gave it the right to sell its users' content. On August 10, 2012, Pinterest altered its policy so that a request or an invitation was no longer required to join the site. In October 2012, Pinterest launched business accounts allowing businesses to either convert their existing personal accounts into business accounts or start from scratch.
In April 2017, Pinterest removed its Like button as it seemed redundant to "boards", which are user collections of posts. Users' existing indexes of liked posts were converted into a collection ("board") named as such.
Although starting out as a "social network" with boards, in later years the company has put increasing emphasis in visual search and e-commerce, such as shopping catalogs.
In February 2019, The Wall Street Journal stated that Pinterest secretly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. The total valuation of the company at the time reached $12 billion. They went public on April 18, 2019, at $19 per share, closing the day at $24.40 per share.
For 2020, Pinterest reported advertising revenue of $1.7 billion, an increase of 48% from 2019. On March 3, 2021, Pinterest announced Pinterest Premiere, a video ads product "which will appear in people's feeds, targeted to their interests and other characteristics". Later in April, chief financial officer Todd Morgenfeld announced plans to spend more money on marketing in order to offset a potential slowdown in activity as the United States economy reopened with more people getting vaccinated for COVID-19.
On October 20, 2021, Bloomberg reported that PayPal is interested in acquiring Pinterest, with a potential price of around $70 a share. PayPal's board and management decided later that same week to back away from a potential deal.
In December 2021, Pinterest acquired the editing and video creation app Vochi. Following this, In May 2022, it was announced that Pinterest released a new video streaming app “Pinterest TV studio”. The app is aimed at allowing users to live-stream on its platform and use different devices for different angles while live-streaming on the Pinterest platform.
On June 28, 2022, Pinterest announced that co-founder, CEO and President, Ben Silbermann would transition to the newly created role of Executive Chairman, and online commerce expert Bill Ready will become Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors.
On August 1, 2022, Pinterest quietly launched a new app named Shuffles, which allows users to build collages out of photos from Pinterest's library or those that are uploaded by the user.
In January 2023 at CES, Pinterest announced its partnership with LiveRamp, a data enablement platform to create data 'clean rooms' for selected advertisers on the platform. These 'clean rooms' allow Pinterest's ad partners to utilize first-party data for personalized ads without having to share the data with Pinterest. With data privacy a large concern for online platforms and their users, this partnership is an effort to stimulate ad business on the platform while keeping its user's data safe and in compliance with new data collection regulations. The first advertiser to pilot this feature will be grocery retailer, Albertsons with a winter healthy eating campaign.
Pinterest consists mainly of "pins" and "boards", where a pin is an image that has been linked from a website or uploaded. Pins saved from one user's board can be saved to someone else's board, a process known as "repinning". Boards are collections of pins dedicated to a theme. Boards with multiple ideas can have different sections that further contain multiple pins. Users can follow and unfollow other users as well as boards, which would fill the "home feed".
Content can also be found outside Pinterest and similarly uploaded to a board via the "Save" button, which can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser, or be implemented by a webmaster directly on the website. It was originally called the "Pin it" button, but it was renamed in 2016 to "Save" to try to make the site more intuitive to new users.
In August 2016, Pinterest launched a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site.
In October 2013, Pinterest began displaying advertisements in the form of "Promoted Pins". Promoted Pins are based on an individual user's interests, things done on Pinterest, or a result of visiting an advertiser's site or app.
In 2015, Pinterest implemented a feature that allows users to search with images instead of words.
In March 2020, Pinterest introduced the "Today" tab on the home feed which shows trending pins.
In October 2022, Pinterest announced that its video-focused “Idea Pins” feature has included the ability to add popular tracks from top artists from licensing deals with Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin, and BMG.
In 2013, Pinterest introduced a new tool called "Rich Pins", to enhance the customer experience when browsing through pins made by companies. Business pages can include various data, topics, and information such as prices of products, ratings of movies or ingredients for recipes. Pinterest adds more data to your boards with rich pins . Engadget.com. Retrieved on February 25, 2014.
In June 2015, Pinterest unveiled "buyable pins" that allows users to purchase things directly from Pinterest.Matthew Lynley, TechCrunch. " Pinterest Unveils Buyable Pins, A Way To Purchase Things Directly Within Pinterest ." June 2, 2015. June 3, 2015. In October 2018, the buyable pins feature was replaced by "Product Pins"
In March 2019, Pinterest added product catalogs and personalized shopping recommendations with the "more from brand" option, showcasing a range of product Pins from the same business.
In 2021, the site announced its new Creator Fund, with the stated aim of trying to support creators and their ability to monetize their efforts to preserve engagement and interactions on the platform. The program's initial launch increased creators' overall monthly views by 72%. Pinterest will invest $1.2 million in underrepresented creators via cash grants, ad credits, and equipment.
In February 2013, Reuters and ComScore stated that Pinterest had 48.7 million users globally, and a study released in July 2013 by French social media agency Semiocast revealed the website had 70 million users worldwide.Horwitz, Josh. (July 10, 2013) Semiocast: Pinterest now has 70 million users and is steadily gaining momentum outside the US . The Next Web. Retrieved on 2014-02-25. In October 2016, the company had 150 million monthly active users (70 million in the U.S. and 80 million outside it), rising to 175 million monthly active users by April 2017 and 250 million in September 2018. As of July 2020, there were over 400 million monthly active users. In April 2023, Pinterest reported 463 million monthly active users, which suggests that 7.4% of the world's population over age 13 use Pinterest.
Around 2020, Pinterest was thought to flood search results in Google Images. In 2022 Google claimed to have performed changes to increase "diversity" in the search results. Pinterest claimed that, as a consequence of Google's changes of November 2021, "U.S. monthly active users coming to Pinterest from the web, desktop and mobile web declined around 30% year over year".
/ref> Despite Pinterest's popularity among all age groups ranging from 18-44, the rise of a new generation led to Gen-Z users dominating the majority of the audience as they make up 42% of Pinterest'
/ref> Although men have not been a primary audience on Pinterest, their usage reportedly increased 48%. In terms of age distribution, users between the ages of 18 and 25 have grown twice as fast as those over the age of 25. However, both users between the ages of 18 and 25 and users between the ages of 25 and 40 have been driving the growth of Pinterest.
In early 2011, the company secured a US$10 million Series A financing led by Jeremy Levine and Sarah Tavel of Bessemer Venture Partners. In October 2011, the company secured US$27 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at US$200 million. Co-founder Paul Sciarra left his position at Pinterest in April 2012 for a consulting job as entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz.
On May 17, 2012, Japanese electronic commerce company Rakuten announced it was leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, alongside investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, based on a valuation of $1.5 billion.
On September 20, 2012, Pinterest announced the hiring of its new head of engineering, Jon Jenkins. Jenkins came from Amazon, where he spent eight years as an engineering lead and was also a director of developer tools, platform analysis and website platform.
In late October 2013, Pinterest secured a $225 million round of equity funding that valued the website at $3.8 billion.
In 2014, Pinterest generated its first revenue, when it began charging advertisers. An analyst at Wedbush Securities estimated that ads could generate up to $500 million in 2016. In 2015, investors valued Pinterest, Inc. at $11 billion, making it a "unicorn" (a start-up with a valuation exceeding $1 billion). , the company was valued at $12 billion.
In June 2017, Pinterest raised $150 million from a group of existing investors.
In August 2020, Pinterest paid $89.5 million to cancel a large office space lease on a to-be-completed complex in San Francisco's SoMa area, near its current headquarters.
In April 2023, Pinterest announced a partnership with Amazon to show third-party advertisements on the website, which will allow users to be redirected to Amazon to make purchases.
In April 2015, Pinterest acquired the team from Hike Labs, which had been developing a mobile publishing application called Drafty.
In May 2016, Pinterest acquired mobile deep linking startup URX to help accelerate its content understanding efforts. The URX team's expertise in mobile content discovery and recommendation would prove critical to helping Pinterest understand its corpus of over 100 billion pins, to better recommend them to its users.
On August 23, 2016, Pinterest announced that it would be acquiring the team behind Instapaper, which will continue operating as a separate app. The Instapaper team will both work on the core Pinterest experience and updating Instapaper.
On March 8, 2017, Pinterest said it had acquired Jelly Industries, a small search-engine company founded by Biz Stone.
In December 2021, Pinterest announced the acquisition of the Vochi app.
In June 2022, Pinterest announced its definitive agreement to acquire San Francisco based AI-driven fashion shopping platform, The Yes. Pinterest announced that it had closed the acquisition on June 10, 2022.
A "nopin" HTML meta tag was released by Pinterest on February 20, 2012, to allow websites to opt out of their images being pinned. On February 24, 2012, Flickr implemented the code to allow users to opt out.
Pinterest released a statement in March 2012 saying it believed it was protected by the DMCA's safe harbor provisions.
In early May 2012, the site added automatic attribution of authors on images originating from Flickr, Behance, YouTube and Vimeo. Automatic attribution was also added for Pins from sites mirroring content on Flickr. At the same time, Flickr added a Pin shortcut to its share option menu to users who have not opted out of sharing their images.
Content creators on sites such as iStock have expressed concern over their work being reused on Pinterest without permission. Getty Images said that it was aware of Pinterest's copyright issues and was in discussion with them.
According to Monoyios, Pinterest's claim to a broad license to sell user content potentially undermined artists' ability to monetize their own work. Another Scientific American blogger claimed that this provision contradicted another line in the terms of service, that "Cold Brew Labs does not claim any ownership rights in any such Member Content".
Several days later, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that, once implemented in April, ended the site's previous claims of ownership of posted images. "Selling content was never our intention", said the company in a blog post.
In March 2017, Chinese authorities blocked Pinterest without explanation. The block was imposed during the annual National People's Congress, a politically sensitive period in the country. While Pinterest is not known for its political content, experts identified the ban as consistent with Chinese government efforts to use website blocks and the "Great Firewall" as an industrial policy tool to promote Chinese tech companies (e.g., Baidu, Youku, Sina Weibo, and Renren) by censoring foreign tech companies. Huaban, Duitang and many other websites bear similarities to Pinterest.
Internet service providers in India had blocked Pinterest following a Madras High Court order in July 2016 to block a list of around 225 "rogue websites indulging in online piracy and infringement of copyright". The block was temporary.
In December 2018, Pinterest began to take steps to block health misinformation from its recommendations engine, and blocked various searches, content, and user accounts that related to, or promoted, unproved and disproven cancer treatments. The company said it also blocked multiple accounts that linked to external websites that sold supplements and other products that were not scientifically validated. In January 2019, Pinterest stopped returning search results relating to , in an effort to somehow slow the increase of anti-vaccination content on the platform. Prior to the measure, the company said that the majority of vaccination-related images shared on the platform were anti-vaccination, contradicting the scientific research establishing the safety of vaccines.
In June 2019, anti-abortion group Live Action was banned from Pinterest; the company said the permanent suspension was imposed for spreading "harmful misinformation, which includes medical misinformation and conspiracies that turn individuals and facilities into targets for harassment or violence."
In December 2019, following a campaign from the activist group Color of Change, Pinterest announced that it would restrict content that advertises wedding events on former slave plantations.
Beginning in late April and early May of 2025, Pinterest began to remove pins and ban accounts in large volumes citing community guidelines as the reason.
In August 2020, dozens of Pinterest staff participated in a virtual walkout in support of two former colleagues who publicly accused the company of racism and gender discrimination.
In December 2020, Pinterest agreed to pay its former Chief Operating Officer $20 million+ to settle a lawsuit alleging discrimination.
In November 2021, Pinterest settled a lawsuit that alleged racial and gender discrimination. The company agreed to spend $50 million on improving its diversity and to release former employees from non-disclosure agreements. The settlement was in regard to Ozoma and Banks's accusations of June 2020.
On December 18, 2024, Pinterest posted their agenda for their diversity and inclusion efforts. Strategies like workforce representation, building an inclusive culture, and creating belonging through product reenforces Pinterest’s mission to “build a more positive place online.”
Culture of discrimination
In 2020, two former Pinterest employees, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks went public about their experience at Pinterest. Both women recounted experiences of discrimination at work, including racist comments, unequal pay, and punishment for speaking out. Additionally, Ozoma claims that the company failed to protect her when personal information was shared with hate sites by a colleague of hers. In response, Pinterest released an apology statement and CEO Ben Silbermann sent an email to all employees pushing the company to do better.
See also
External links
Categories: Official Website, Android Software, Ios Software, 2010 Establishments In California, Companies Based In San Francisco, Companies Listed On The New York Stock Exchange, Image-sharing Websites, Internet Properties Established In 2010, Online Companies Of The United States, American Social Networking Websites, Webby Award Winners, American Companies Established In 2010, 2019 Initial Public Offerings
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