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Comment by habosa | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest really dropped the ball, they could have been a super profitable social network.

A lot has been written about how people go on Pinterest with shopping intent. It's a way to window shop the entire internet, curated by friends. They never really monetized it much though. Individual influencers made money by leveraging referral programs.

It seems like Pinterest was way ahead of the curve when it came to having image-heavy content and a heavy focus on lifestyle products. But they missed the boat on video and a lot of the influencers moved to Instagram or Facebook.

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How is a $12 billion valuation dropping the ball. Pinterest appeals to a very lucrative democratic who are looking for stuff to buy, such as clothes, household products, and other stuff, whereas people go to Facebook to see pictures of family or engage in political gossip.

For fashion, afaik "influencers" are indeed using platforms like Instagram much more than Pinterest. That is certainly a situation where they could have defended their turf more effectively.

but Instagram is more for browsing than buying . people who use pinterest are more in a buying mood

I'd tend to disagree. Both are for browsing.

If I see something on Pinterest I'm interested in, then I'll go to Amazon to see if it's offered there, and if not, I'll head over to Google to see if I can get it cheaper. I'm not going to buy directly from Pinterest unless it's a link directly to Amazon.

Even if they weren't able to raise their valuation, 12B is not too shabby

One major issue is that their ad unit is "Google/Bing shopping ads, but lower quality and at a comparable price."

They are also people who actively hate "social networking" and just want to collect some visual inspirations without being fed with a bunch of advertisements. Thank you.

Sure, but you're not the one paying the bills. You're either the customer or the product.

This is true but I think pinterest and reddit have a similar problem where they really can't make their userbase too mad at them and they could either stunt their growth or users will jump ship. Either that or its the guiding philosophy to not make their userbase mad.

I feel like you're missing the entire point of how a social network site works and makes money

Any idea why they never integrated any ecommerce functionality? I mean Instagram (finally) does sort of this with the „Swipe Up“ feature for selected creators in Instagram Stories.

They've had "Buyable Pins" since 2015. https://business.pinterest.com/en/buyable-pins

Ha nice...never seen a single one in the wild...they probably filter by location (me: EU).

They tried skimlinks, and some of the users were loud and vocally against it.

IMO Pinterest should have had skimlinks for everyone, and a PinterestPro for the "influencers".

In the early 2010s there was another site called Svpply that did the same thing. eBay ended up acquiring them. My impression was that all these sites were inspired by the original idea of ffffound.

https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/06/ebay-acquires-style-focuse...

Yeah the whole LuLaRoe phenomenon should be pinterest dominated but instead it is Facebook/instagram.

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