Case Pinterest: Revolutionizing the Web-Again
Company Case Pinterest: Revolutionizing the Web—Again
Ben Silbermann runs ragged. And it isn’t because the 31-yearold
husband is up before dawn every morning with his infant son.
It has a lot more to do with the fact that he is the founder and
CEO of Pinterest, the latest “hottest Web site on the planet.” In
less than two years, Pinterest reached the milestone of 10 million
unique monthly visitors—faster than any other online site in history.
At that time, it was driving more traffic than Google+, You-
Tube, and LinkedIn combined. A year later, it reached 50 million
unique monthly visitors. So far, 70 million members have created
750 million Pinterest boards and have pinned 30 billion items.
Pinterest is growing so fast that trying to quantify its success with
such numbers seems pointless.
Rather, the impact of this brash young start-up can be observed
in more substantial ways. In fact, Pinterest seems to have
accomplished the unlikely achievement of revolutionizing the
Web—something that seems to happen only every few years.
Like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and others before it, Pinterest
has put businesses and other online sites everywhere on notice
that they’d better orient themselves around its platform or be left
behind. And like other Internet revolutionists before it, Pinterest’s
impact has caused even the online giants to stop and take notice.
Indeed, Pinterest is changing Web design. It is also changing
e-commerce. And it looks as though Pinterest has solved one of
the Internet’s biggest problems—discovery.
The Discovery Problem
At first blush, Pinterest may seem like any other social media site,
full of people sharing images and commenting on them. Silbermann’s
big idea for Pinterest came as he and college buddy Paul
Sciarra struggled to make a business out of their first product,
a shopping app called Tote. Although Tote failed to take off, it
revealed a pent-up need among Internet users. Tote users didn’t
buy things (kind of a necessity for a shopping app). But they did
e-mail themselves pictures of products to view later.
Silbermann—a lifetime collector of “stuff”—could identify with
that. As a boy, he had a particular fascination with collecting bugs. “I
really liked insects,” he says. “All kinds: flies, grasshoppers, weevils.”
He spent his youth collecting, pinning, drying, tagging—creating his
own private museum of natural history. So when Silbermann and
Sciarra met Pinterest’s third co-founder, Evan Sharp, the idea of digital
collections—of books, clothes, or even insects—as a powerful
medium for self-expression began to take shape.
As the three began working on developing Pinterest, something
about all-things-Internet bothered Silbermann. Despite the
seemingly infinite possibilities for exploration, expression, and
creation, he felt that the Internet was organized in a way that
boxed people in. For starters, the nature of “search” in any online
context may seem to promote discovery, but it actually stunts it.
For example, Google depends on finely tuned queries in order to
yield useful results. Try to find something when you’re not quite
sure what you want—say, “nice Father’s Day gift” or even “very
special Father’s Day gift”—and Google isn’t really much help. The
bottom line is, if you try talking to Google as you would talk to a
friend or a department store clerk, it won’t know where to begin.
The belief that discovery is a problem on the Internet isn’t
original to Silbermann. In fact, it’s an issue that many digital designers
have struggled with since the launch of the Web but no
one has been able to solve fully. Take Amazon, for example. As
successful as Amazon is, its entire structure mirrors every other
e-commerce site—a detailed system of menus and categories.
To browse for something, users must work within this structure
while at the same time being pulled in dozens of different directions
by suggested items and competing products.
“You spend three hours buying a $20 toaster,” says Barry
Schwartz, psychology professor and author of The Paradox of
Choice. “Amazon and Google pretty much stink at browsing,”
echoes Leland Rechis, director of product experience at Etsy. But
Amazon and Google are not alone. The entire Internet is structured
as a series of ever-more-specific menus, inconsistent with how
the human mind works. Such structure inhibits the types of freeassociative
leaps that happen naturally as people walk through
shopping malls, meander through a museum, or even drive down
the street.
As Silbermann and his co-founders worked to sketch out Pinterest,
the three were also intent on eliminating another limiting
characteristic of online design. Other social networks are organized
around “feeds”—lines of text or images organized by time.
This setup lets users browse multiple images at once. The Pinterest
team wanted to change this. “We were really excited about
bringing something that wasn’t immediate and real time, something
that wasn’t a chronological feed,” says Sharp. They pictured
a grid of images, rather than the directories, time stamps,
and pagination commonly imposed by the Web. The goal for Pinterest
was to create an interface that would feel more like visiting
a store or a museum.
As Pinterest took shape, its creators never questioned that it
was to be a social network at its core. What set Pinterest apart
in yet another way was Silbermann’s ability to look outside the
tunnel-vision of other social media entrepreneurship. Although
the current social Web is frequented by millions, most users are
observers, not creators. Thus, they take part on only one level.
Not everyone is a photographer, a filmmaker, or a broadcaster.
“Most people don’t have anything witty to say on Twitter or anything
gripping to put on Facebook, but a lot of them are really interesting
people,” Silbermann says. “They have awesome taste in
books or furniture or design, but there was no way to share that.”
Something Completely Different
The Pinterest team’s focus on solving some of the most limiting
characteristics of the Internet bore fruit. When Pinterest launched
in March 2010, it was widely hailed as one of the most visually
stunning online sites ever. Silbermann, Sciarra, and Sharp worked
through 50 versions of the site, painstakingly tweaking and perfecting
column widths, layouts, and ways of presenting pictures.
“From the beginning, we were aware that if we were going to get
somebody to spend all this time putting together a collection,
at the very least, the collection had to be beautiful,” Silbermann
says. Pinterest’s grid is a key element of its design—interlocking
images of fixed width and varying heights that rearrange every
time a new image is pinned, meaning users rarely see the same
home page twice.
Pinterest also bucked conventional online design in other
ways. At a time when “gamification” was hot, Pinterest displayed
no elements of competition. There is no leader board or any other
means of identifying the most popular pinners. Pinterest also did
away with page views—the predominate metric for illustrating
growth and momentum. Rather, Pinterest’s “infinite scroll” automatically
loads more images as the user expands the browser or
scrolls downward. With almost no time spent clicking or waiting
for pages to load, this feature has proven addictive for many.
“When you open up Pinterest,” Silbermann says, “you should
feel like you’ve walked into a building full of stuff that only you
are interested in. Everything should feel handpicked for you.” Silbermann
and his cohorts have obviously succeeded. Page after
page, Pinterest gives the feel of a collection designed by an individual
to reflect her or his needs, ambitions, and desires. It’s as
if each person is saying, “Here are the beautiful things that make
me who I am—or who I want to be.” There is no single theme to
a pinboard. Pinterest is a place where young women plan their
weddings, individuals create the ultimate wish list of food dishes,
and couples assemble furniture sets for their new homes. Unlike
other social networks, every Pinterest home page is an everchanging
collage that reflects the sum of each user’s choices.
Because Pinterest’s design has departed from Internet convention
in so many ways, it’s only natural that its growth dynamics
would also break from previous trends. Most successful social
services spread through early adopters on the nation’s coasts,
then break through to the masses. But Pinterest’s growth has
been scattered throughout the heartland, driven by such unlikely
cohorts as the “bloggernacle” of tech-savvy young Mormons.
Additionally, nearly 83 percent of Pinterest’s users are women,
most between the ages of 25 and 54—another demographic not
normally associated with fast-growing social media sites.
Hope for Monetization
But perhaps the biggest splash that Pinterest has made in the online
pool is its huge influence on consumer purchasing. Although
many dot-coms have made profits by online sales, the digital
world in general still struggles with turning eyeballs into dollars.
Even Facebook, although it turns a profit, prompts relatively few
of its one-billion-plus members to open their wallets.
But something about the combination of Pinterest’s elegant design
and smart social dynamics has users shopping like mad. A
Pinterest user following an image back to its source and then buying
an item spends an average of $180. For Facebook users, it’s only
$80. And for Twitter, it’s only $70. But Pinterest is having a much
greater impact than those numbers indicate. Although Pinterest is
still far from the top in terms of members and unique visits, when
it comes to e-commerce referrals, Pinterest is the market leader,
driving 40 percent of traffic and edging out social media dominator
Facebook by 1 percent. Even more impressive, Pinterest traffic
converts to a sale 22 percent more often than Facebook traffic.
Companies are jumping on this opportunity. Initially, brands
could drive traffic to their own Pinterest or external sites by paying
opinion leaders to pin images of their products. For example,
companies pay 31-year-old Satsuki Shibuya, a designer with more
than a million followers, between $150 and $1,200 per image.
This method works well because, with Pinterest’s authentic feel,
it’s almost impossible to tell the difference between paid pins and
unpaid pins—something that can’t be said of other online sites.
But recently, Pinterest has entered the world of advertising with
promoted pins and is poised to make a big online advertising push.
More than a dozen marketers have signed up with a $1 million to
$2 million commitment, including Kraft, General Mills, Nestle, Gap,
and Expedia. “Our target is 25- to 54-year-old women, and Pinterest
is a perfect fit,” says Deanie Elsner, chief marketing officer for
Kraft Foods. For Kraft, Pinterest has already been an effective way
to connect with the younger half of that demographic that is typically
harder to reach. “It lets them be the hero,” she said, referring
to Kraft’s practice of publishing recipes on its Pinterest site.
It’s little wonder then that so many other social media sites
have taken note of Pinterest. Numerous copycat sites (such as
Fancy and Polyvore) have mimicked Pinterest’s look and feel,
right down to the font selections. The influence of Pinterest’s design
is also notable on sites such as Lady Gaga’s social network
LittleMonsters.com and the question-and-answer site Quora.
Even Facebook’s move to its current Timeline format is notably
Pinterest-like.
Despite all the ways that Pinterest has departed from the typical
path of social media development, it has largely stayed the
course in terms of making money. That is, it spent the first few
years building its network and honing its site. This year, the company
will begin generating revenue. Silbermann and friends are
still tossing other ideas around. In addition to advertising, Pinterest
could also adopt a referral fee model, retaining a percentage
of the sale of every item sold as the result of a pin. Pinterest
has been valued at $5 billion and has had no trouble raising all
the venture capital that it needs, despite having yet to earn any
money. “There was never a doubt in our minds that we could
make a s**tload of money,” says a former Pinterest employee.
Apparently, investors feel the same way.
Questions for Discussion
17-18 Analyze the forces in the marketing environment that have contributed to Pinterest’s explosion in popularity.
17-19 Why has Pinterest demonstrated such a high influence on consumers’ decisions to purchase products?
17-20 Discuss ways that companies can use Pinterest to build their own brands and generate sales.
17-21 What threats does Pinterest face in the future? Give recommendations for dealing with those threats.
