Pinterest is not a Virtual Pinboard
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Pinterest is not a Virtual Pinboard. It is the answer to consumers engaging with brands, something Facebook has been unable to do.
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Like Reddit, it's a place to waste endless amounts of time. My girlfriend has gotten a little addicted to Pintrest and has since apologized to me for being mad that I sometimes getting sucked into Reddit on my phone.
However, the beautiful design is tuned for the target audience. I've watched several girls surf Pintrest and they use it very differently than most anyone I know who uses Reddit. Just the way they scan visually and randomly for something that catches their eye, rather than reading down a row or column and scanning for blue links.
All that said, I believe that the female audience will prove much more monetizable than Reddit's. For one, all pins already have a photo, so sponsored pins will fit right in with the flow. Secondly, the types of things people are sharing and looking at on Pintrest are extremely gift and "spoil yourself" centric.
Best of luck to the Pintrest team. Seems like they've got a great run ahead of them!
I keep hearing this, but I find it goes against my own experience on the site and that of other hardcore users that I know. Food, hair, nails, tattoos, quotes, amazing pictures, unique crafts/accessories (via Etsy), aspiration products, and amazing travel pictures yes. Anything being sold by a retailer seems few and far between.
If anyone knows of anything other than anectdotal evidence that users are actually actively pinning products, I'd be really interested to read more.
Users are not pinning the direct BestBuy link to their new headphones, but they are pinning "My new pair of Grado xxxxx are awesome!". Thats where Pinterest has the data, and could go to work to provide easy access to those products.
Pinterest uses Skimlinks to turn all links to retail sites into affiliate links (and in turn they get affiliate money). From the article it looks like this is a good amount of traffic.
Here's where* my paying customers have come from in the past 6 months:
Direct: 69%
Google: 17%
Blog/press mentions: 6%
Pinterest .52%
I recall a blogger recently who reasoned that women are using Pinterest as a substitute for making real purchases. And that the act of pinning things feels similar to hitting the buy now button.
That feels about right to me.
*I know it doesn't add up to 100 - paypal is taking credit as a source of traffic for some reason.
Female perspective: that's not quite true. If you want to buy something for now, you'll buy it. It's more like a keeping a scrapbook of things you like to buy one day, when money and space is not an issue. Like for when you buy a house, or get an end-of-year bonus or gift ideas to remember for later.
Pinterest allows that middle ground that wasn't there before. Those red pumps that you thought were amazing, but never really wear? You could have just pinned up a picture of them on pinterest and revisited them any time you want, without a purchase.
If you really want to -wear- the shoes, then a purchase is necessary. But if you want to look at them more than wear them, then the picture is fine.
Pinterest is a nicely targeted version of things that women have been doing online in other ways for the last decade, and offline for much longer.
There are two drivers for this that I've seen. Either bookmarking clothes to build up a look that they will then go and buy, or bookmarking clothes to buy once they go on sale.
One of the things I struggle with buying clothes online is being able to look at all the things I like on the same screen and then decide what I will buy. (H+M does this well). Some retailers limit the baskets to 10 items (Next used to) so even though I'll only buy a few in the end, the only other way to compare items is to open lots of tabs. This doesn't work at all when it's a flash based store. (Esprit.com suffers from this) So I use pinterest for this.
The other time I pin products is when I want comment from other people. I'd rather have these comments on Pinterest than on Facebook.
One thing that would make me pin products more would be if I could make a board private. Then I would pin ideas for Birthday presents and I would have used it to pin ideas for wedding dresses. But private boards are not what they're aiming for and doesn't fit into the context of the article either I guess.
It's not a story of great relevance here, but I basically built pintrest in 2007 - 2008, and then never launched it. It was pretty much the exact same site; right down to the infinite scrolling, and concept of cards and images. I did not have the concept of 'repinning' they have though, I opted for 'loving' something, and copied the hackernews model of moving things around. My concept was 'what's cool right now'; it was to be a large visual endless board of interesting visual things and products in the real world.
When I researched how I should categorise, I arrived at almost exactly the same categories pintrest now has (90% overlap). I put those categories together by the same method I can only presume pintrest did; by highest advertising CPC rates and revenue driving metrics. I guess the slight deviation is because I was working on 2007 figures.
When I came up with the concept, it was when digg was king, and reddit was still highly techie. I used to browse this site every single day; http://www.notcot.org - and noticed there was huge gap in community driven linking based towards images and products. They didn't work well with text links.
Anyway, after initially planning simply to advertise for revenue (I made my image columns the same size as a standard advert banner) I arrived at the same conclusion; The only real way to make a solid stream of revenue from this is to create some kind of way to tap into the revenue created from the 'products' linked to.
I stumbled and stuttered on how to implement this. I couldn't figure out how to blend the concept of products in without trashing it. Then I got caught up in implementing new features when things like facebook connect were announced, and then, due to unfortunate personal events, never got around to finishing the last 5% and going live, it just sat on a staging server for years.
Something clicked for me recently when I saw was fab.com are doing. I realise with hindsight that had I simply launched when I had a basic product I could have come to these challenges later; which is exactly what pinterest will be in the process of doing now; but it's not an easy problem to crack.
Makes me happy to see pintrest doing well. I'm not in the valley, and I never really had any grand plans, obviously they had the vision I didn't! I doubt I'd have gotten much beyond a few hundred visitors haha :)
For anyone interested; http://i.imgur.com/eEJva.jpg It's not as pretty as pintreset, I was keeping comments on the permalink and cropping image but it was an early beta.
It was a small screenshot of a site, and on of the thumbnails visible had a picture from an artist which you can see a nipple in. I didn't spot that. I have removed it.
Strangely I'm mostly hearing about Pinterest so far from the women in my life, and not the guys so much.
We were just talking about how it is not considered as acceptable to share as much mundane stuff on Facebook and how that is what Pinterest is all about. Facebook has no way to easily categorize or review what you have shared in the past, so it gets lost. Women especially seem to enjoy this.
One odd thing is Pinterest doesn't seem to combine all pins of a single image together. For a single image, you may have 20 different pins, each of those with their own set of repins and comments. See: http://pinterest.com/source/thinlyslicedcucumber.com/
I know Google made an offer to Pinterest and clearly it wasn't enough. They should have put all of their eggs in this basket because this is the true alternative to FB's power house advertising that is soon to be bolstered by the inevitable search capabilities.
Personally, I think men will "catch on" in the future. Many of the Pinterest users I know use it as a catalog of things they like around the web. Sometimes it's clothing/craft/recipe related, and sometimes it's a workout program, news story, or other interesting (and gender neutral) read, that they want to come back to.
The fairer half are a grossly underserved audience, there are lots of opportunities and I hope Pinterest is the first of many to build on it.
EDIT: although second thought. Pinterest strong side is that women (more than men) like to collect stuff. Nice thing about Pinterest is that you can pinboard your collections, join others, etc. I am not sure if the same effect would work on "mens pinterest".
I don't think a men-only version would work anyways. Men just don't tend to 'window shop' like women do. Men also don't like sharing as much as women do.
Pinterest could create real social shopping and users want it. They'd love to to be able to purchase the items they repin. That would be easy to monetize and eventually could even allow for payments to go through pinterest to make it a slicker solution and without the need for lots of accounts.
I also wonder if the guys behind Pinterest are doing some sneaky things like creating fake users and making them Like your pins immediately after you create them. When I first started, I had a few people immediately follow me, and like some of my pins.. but then it died down as I continued to use it. I wouldn't be surprised.. my dopamine levels shot right up when I got an email notification than 3 ppl liked a pin of mine.
I have figured I could get around 1000 visits to my site daily from Pinterest by pinning around 200-300 items, assuming 10 of them become hits. But the traffic is not really sticky.