Smoke and Mirrors: How Snap and Pinterest Hide User Attrition
beth.technology
beth.technology
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...)
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.
-site:pinterest.*https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.mobilemarketer.com/news/google-pushes-deeper-int...
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).
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://github.com/LiveMethod/pinterest-adblock
It's just some hacky JS right now, but I'd like to improve it in the future – suggestions about functionality and code quality are very welcome.
But that would lower their margin on the $10.
And you might not agree to inflation level increases over time which will just sort of happen wrt advertisers if they are industry-wide.
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.
Aaah, ok kinda make sense now. Been hearing about this site for years, and I still don't 'get' what it actually is.
I think the part of my brain that understands social media is broken.
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'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".
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...)
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.
Now multiply that by 327 million people
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Both roughly account for a 2x difference, total difference of 4x between EU and US
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.
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.
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.
Huh. In other words, what we used to call "affiliate links". Phrased like that, I'm now more skeptical.