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When you think of the average user of Pinterest – a "pinner", as is often said in a business, you can imagine someone like Brooke, a 28-year-old Seattle blonde who smiles at the documentation from Pinterest's IPO, alongside his scruffy dog. But really, the biggest opportunity for growth in the image-sharing network as it prepares to go public is a pinner like Priyanka from Mumbai; Reika of Tokyo; or Denise from Sao Paulo – all also included in the company's ranking.
Pinterest is targeting global growth. And for good reason: US growth has stagnated. The scrapbooking site has eight out of ten mothers and more than half of the millennials among its American audience, leaving a limited margin for further expansion of these desirable demographics. Meanwhile, its monthly active users have experienced spectacular growth internationally. In 2018, over 80% of new listings came from outside the United States.
So that Pinterest can maintain the growth of 60% from one year to the next announced in its form S-1 of March 22 (required by the Securities and Exchange Commission before a public offering), and that one day to become profitable, it will take – and monetize – many more Priyankas, Reikas and Denises around the world.
And that might be successful – not despite his modest and unobtrusive reputation, but because of that. Pinterest was launched in 2010 and, in January 2012, reached 11.7 million unique visitors for the month, which was the fastest growing ever for a stand-alone site, according to comScore. But there is a kind of contrarianism in Pinterest's founding mythology. Unlike many fashionable technology companies, it is famous for its "beautiful" corporate culture (some of which have complained may be too nice too). The first basic users were neither teenagers nor students. They were residents of Des Moines and surrounding areas, friends and patients of the mother of Ben Silbermann, CEO and co-founder of Pinterest.
Pinterest stayed true to its roots, always appearing more like a quaint scrapbooking encounter than a social media sensation. True to its cautious approach of steady growth, it has set a price range of $ 15 to $ 17 for its initial public offering, bringing the company's valuation to just over $ 9 billion, a level well below its valuation of $ 12 billion in 2017. private financing.
This is a stark contrast to Pinterest's peers in this season's IPOs. Lyft, for example, has set the stock price at 72 USD for a valuation of 24 billion USD, despite losses approaching one billion USD in 2018. (Pinterest reported a loss of 63 million USD in 2018, on revenues of 756 million USD).
Pinterest s-1
Simply calling Pinterest, an online scrapbooking service, does not communicate the itchiness that it scrapes. Pinterest is a way to document aspirations. Pinning is like a promising act, a promise, an investment in the future. The pinners, two-thirds of whom are women, may not be able to afford a remodel of the kitchen of their dreams or have their families eat plates of tastefully prepared vegetables, but they can imagine what they would look like. such an online life by pinning paint samples and in good health. recipes.
And Pinterest offers advertisers a way to turn those aspirations and pins into shopping. The conventional wisdom of marketing says that women control 80% of household expenses – and although there is some doubt about the basis for this estimate, it is clear that many women around the world are shopping not only for themselves, but for the whole family.
What is also clear is that many companies are doing lousy marketing work for women. Pinterest, a platform that women have designed to become a majority of users, has established itself as a better social media mode, where personal attacks and bady selfies do not dominate. It's a market for mothers.
When Pinterest is released, as it is scheduled for April 17, these wild and frumpy Midwestern roots may well be the key to its global success.
Pinterest is a rabbithole, but it's your rabbithole
While attitudes towards social media platforms have changed in recent years, Pinterest has stopped identifying itself as such. Removing from Twitter and Facebook is likely to have real brand advantages. Both have been targeted by the creation of toxic online environments – which is also accurate in many ways.
Pinterest works more like eBay or the Poshmark online resale site (also supposed to be preparing for an IPO) than Twitter. It's a visual search engine designed to help fishermen find things they did not even know they wanted. Yes, the pinnators connect to each other, but this is not the main point of the platform.
If you have ever bought something online, or even thought about it, you probably had the depressing and terrifying experience of seeing that swimsuit or bidet following you on the web, appearing on every site you visit as an announcement. Pinterest is an entire platform dedicated to that – but you chose to be there, so it does not seem strange to you to see things you've been looking for in the past or that are confusing to your tastes. That's why you are here, after all.
The Pinners "are looking for something they want to do, so there is an intention, but they have not decided exactly what they are going to do," as Silbermann says in an interview. We go to Pinterest for suggestions. And it works best when our preferences follow us.
Pinterest turns its billions of pins into a personalized experience through a system called taste graph. Every interaction on Pinterest is a new piece of data that helps you better understand how what we love meets with what others love. The taste chart helps fishermen looking for gardening tips to find out how to plant a hedge. He guides mid-century furniture lovers to Swedish designers. It also helps companies to advertise to very precisely defined users.
In 2017, Pinterest began offering advertisers a targeting service that allowed them to serve ads based on specific searches. It was launched with 5,000 different terms that advertisers could use to tag their content so advertisers looking for the word "wedding in a budget", "ballroom dancing", "graduation day", "yoga in the office Vegetarian barbecue, French street style, wardrobe organization, body scrubs, or diet plans, such as the Ad Week report.
The higher the number of pins, the better the number of refined data points. This poses a challenge in a new market, where there is not much data to easily search for weekday dinners or trendy haircuts tailored to local users. In its S-1, Pinterest promises to become "more accessible to users around the world by locating product and content experience." The same qualities that appeal to searchers – relevance, the pleasure of discovery – are good for advertisers.
Tailoring the online scrapbooking experience to local tastes has proven crucial to Pinterest's success in new markets and could help the company stay relevant in the United States, where the number Users increased more slowly in recent years. At present, non-US origin users account for more than half of Pinterest's 250 million monthly active users.
But monetizing all these international users has been a challenge. American pinners are much more profitable, earning about $ 9 a year per user, compared with just 25 cents per user. To continue to grow revenues and users, Pinterest will need to find ways to make advertising work for businesses around the world.
Part of this disparity may be due to the fact that advertising infrastructure is not in place in new markets. Pinterest ads are currently showing in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Australia and New Zealand. The company is currently testing ad targeting with selected companies in the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Switzerland. . He also paid particular attention to audience development in South America, particularly in Brazil.
It is also possible that cultural barriers will be overcome as Pinterest expands its e-commerce-based advertising model around the world. Social media advertising and Internet retail sales vary considerably from one country to another. According to a survey conducted in 2018 by market research firm Euromonitor International, Brazilian consumers were twice as likely to say that online or social media ads were influencing much or more in their decisions. Purchase than British buyers. Still, the online retail market in Brazil, a country of 209 million inhabitants, accounted for $ 19 billion in 2018, compared to $ 86 billion in the UK, or $ 66 million.
There are very few levers that Pinterest can pull to scale online buying behavior. However, he can aggressively locate the Pinterest experience and that's what she plans to do. The key to this type of customization is subtle: attention to detail and local interest, as well as extensive regional preferences. When Pinterest was launched in the UK, for example, the British were turned off when Crock Pot's revenue continued to surface, the New York Times noted. Be it because the British call this kitchen appliance "slow cooker" or that recipes like chili chicken and cream cheese do not please the British palace, it is not clear. This Pinterest learned from this little example is.
Scott Coleman, Pinterest's Global Leader, gave another example of why this is important in an interview with Medium. "[A] The user who redecorates his home could use Pinterest to find the cabinets ideal for their space, "he said. "The renovation of a house is different from one country to the next. For example, remodeling in France could involve smaller spaces in urban apartments. We want all users in all countries to experience these magical moments. And, presumably, to find and buy the cabinets they want – not the cabinets of Americans or Australians.
There is also a risk of excessive generalization depending on the location. Yuko Yoshioka, an illustrator in Tokyo, said in a 2016 Wall Street article that while she liked the site, she found Pinterest's suggestions insulting. "They do not understand my tastes as an illustrator," she said. "I want to tell them," No, thank you. "
To be successful, Pinterest must predict general regional preferences (metrics for recipes outside the United States, for example) or language preferences, while determining the aesthetics of an individual pinner in each region. This represents a huge technology challenge and an equally important opportunity for ad targeting.
Pinterest does not disturb for fun
One of the statistics that Pinterest likes to mention when it's away from social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter is that social media users are twice as likely to think that their time spent on Pinterest is well spent compared to other platforms.
The data come from a 2017 study, and no explanation was provided on how the question was asked or on which other platforms were compared. That said, it is certainly much easier to find a rainbow unicorn cake than a personal attack against Pinterest. The platform seems to encourage warmth and enjoyment, and a lot of that has to do with what is not The.
The company hit the headlines earlier this year, revealing that it was blocking all vaccine and vaccine research to stop anti-vaccine misinformation. Indeed, there are simply no vaccine-related pins. The company is also blocking some research for questionable cancer treatments, the Wall Street Journal reported.
And that's not the only thing you can not find. Do a bady search on Pinterest. The message "Sorry, we did not find any pins for this search." Appears at the top of the page. At the top of the blank page, a note informs you that "Nudity is appropriate for Pinterest, some not. Make sure you understand our policies. (For comparison, about 65 million publications are currently posted on Instagram #bady hashtagged.)
Lee Humphreys, badociate professor of communication at Cornell, and author, explains Lee Melphreys, master of seamless communication, and how US-based social media companies have so far made a mistake in regulating not the content. of the book The Qualified Self, Social Media, and Accounting for Everyday Life. She pointed out that the first US amendment, which guarantees the freedom of expression of the government, has become a defining element of American identity and the social media platforms that it has created.
Of course, some of Pinterest's rules limit this freedom, which could help him succeed outside the United States. "In many ways, Pinterest's type of self-monitoring could well prepare them for global expansion, so other social media companies, which have so closely embraced the very American notion of freedom of expression, have encountered difficulties in some parts of the world. the world, "she said on a phone call.
Pinterest's fragmented policy on bady selfies and anti-vaccination propaganda may prove controversial or insufficient as it grows, but until now, these choices have made Pinterest the most effective. one of the least offensive, wildest, most miserable Internet sites in the world.
Good fences make good neighbors
Even though Pinterest has spared no effort to offer global and inclusive features, it has done so in privacy. In 2018, Pinterest launched a skin tone filter for some research – a progressive solution to the problem of bias in search algorithms, where search results disproportionately show white people. The filter allows pioneers to search for makeup ideas or hairstyles to reduce the results to a specific skin tone range.
But with the new feature, Pinterest has made sure to protect the privacy of users: the filter must be applied each time and does not follow the search quilters. "It's important for Pinners to know that we respect their privacy," wrote engineer Laksh Bhasin on the Pinterest engineering blog. "That's why if you tap a skin tone range, we do not store that information and do not use it to create a profile. This means that you must press a skin tones range for each search. We also do not use this information to target ads. We do not try to predict a user's personal information, such as his or her ethnicity. "
An article by CNBC detailing the complaints of Pinterest employees, past and present, that the culture of excessive kindness of society has hindered growth, has helped to better understand the internal logic that led to the decision not to share the complexion data with advertisers:
… There was some concern about what Pinterest would do with your flesh data said a manager who left the company in 2018. There was talk of letting advertisers use the information to target users, but an employee of the company's policy team objected to the idea, citing concerns about allowing advertisers to target by race. In the end, Pinterest opted for a conservative approach and decided not to open the data to ad targeting, said the executive.
This approach balances confidentiality with specificity and also suggests a more holistic point of view. "I would never want to move to a place where we customize the default canvas to guess the tone of your skin," said Omar Seyal, Pinterest Product Manager at Quartz. "This would prevent us from trying to show you the extent of the world."
The sweetness of the home
The focus on the home is at the heart of how people use Pinterest, regardless of their location.
The big categories people are looking for are the same all over the world, said Coleman in his interview to Medium. "We found that our main categories or use cases are similar in all markets (food, home, fashion) but what people are saving is aligned with local tastes," he said.
It's these familiar interests that pushed Pinterest to take off. One of the first moments when Pinterest caught the eye and began to win more and more users was a campaign titled "Pin it Forward" in 2010. The site invited bloggers to create display boards illustrating some aspects of what "home" meant to them.
"I do not think we know it at the time, but I think the authenticity of the first" Pin it Forward "was really very important as the site grew", explained Silbermann in his keynote address at Alt Summit 2012. He launched a similar campaign in the United Kingdom in 2013 as a strategy to locate the Pinterest experience for British pinners.
Internationally, it makes sense that these fundamentals gain in power. These are universal needs – food, shelter, clothing – that have universal appeal. And the desire to communicate about these interests is also universal and is part of long-established traditions, especially among women, around the world.
While social media may seem entirely new, it's just a new way to engage in well-established types of communication, says Humphreys. In her book, she connects Twitter to the daily newspapers of many women in their dresses dating back to the 1700s. These little newspapers contained terse comments about the day – who saw the women, what they ate, what they have – and have often been sent to family members or distant friends as a means of maintaining contact.
Diane Bondareff / AP Images for Nestlé
Humpreys compares Pinterest to a scrapbooking, a folkloric (and once again traditionally feminine) activity that simultaneously preserves memory, while being forward-looking and ambitious. Scrapbookers and pioneers add items they want to find for the pleasure of watching or reading, next to things they want to do in the future – whether they're recipes they can prepare, furniture for a nursery or haircut consider.
Humphreys calls herself a pinnist. Its personal use is largely inward-looking, but it also offers moments of connection. When she sees her mother's pins, for example, it reminds her to go through the women's magazines at home when she was a child and to notice the pages her mother kept for him, to come back to a tempting recipe or a trick. of the House.
"As social beings, we have long needed to document our lives and share them with others," Humphreys said. "Scrapbooking, diaries, photo albums, and social media are all ways to do that. It's a way to both understand ourselves, who we are as well as our place in the world, and to strengthen our social connections with others … Pinterest fits in a lot of that. "
And of course, the need to organize, filter and sometimes just escape the flow of information inducing modern anxiety is even more universal than the need to find a new recipe. The warm cocoon of Pinterest's personalized content is a place where pioneers can relax. It's a breath. That's what Moms (and many others) want in the Midwest in Mumbai: a moment for themselves.
"It's the best time of the day when I get home and I can sit on my couch and scroll through Pinterest," said Mylène, a 27-year-old Frenchwoman also in the S-1 , on the Pinterest business blog. "I do not have to think about work or things like shopping or dishes. I'm going to find pins that make me think, "Why do not I try this?"
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