Pinterest's monetization will do great. Seriously, Pinterest could and should IPO in coming years.
I'm bullish on Pinterest not only because my wife and I use Pinterest for everything from planning our wedding to finding outfits and meals, but because I market on Pinterest for a few clients all day long. It consistently brings in more traffic than other sources when you do it right, even for clients that are ranked in the top 5 in high-traffic Google SERPs.
The crazy thing about Pinterest traffic is that it never dies off. If you get a bunch of repins today, traffic will be showing up from those pins months later; it's kind of absurd, and very unlike Adsense or other discovery advertising platforms in that way.
The difficult aspect for Pinterest will be getting the worth of Pinterest ads down to a final cost per action since it is such a long wait before you see how much each pin is truly worth. And that really is the goal for any advertiser: If I know this click will bring me $2 I'll pay up to $1.99 for it. A lot of Pinterest users are in hardcore discovery mode, and as such Pinterest traffic doesn't convert as well as search traffic immediately, but in the long run it always seems to be worth it.
>It consistently brings in more traffic than anything combined when you do it right,
How do you do Pinterest "right"? Just curious.
You're absolutely right about the traffic trend. When Pinterest was first getting a major buzz, I was pinning regularly and those pins are still getting actively repinned.
After a period of no pinning, now when I do pin things, I hardly see any activity.
It's a long process that took me forever to figure out, but here are the basics. I'll probably write a blog post about it.
Pin something, get a couple of repins, then repin that to a very popular community board (it takes work to get invites to those with followings of 150,000+). Follow, like, and comment (sincerely) on the pins of people who repinned your pin.
Rinse and repeat. On the average day for a newer site/account I'll drive between 1,000 and 2,000 visits and get about 100-150 new followers. The average product I pin will get 20-50 repins on day 1. But the crazy part is, as you mentioned, that all compounds over time.
The most important piece of information I'm willing to share is that if I could advertise on Pinterest I would switch all of my clients' ad spend from Adsense to Pinterest today. Promoted pins are going to be worth mad cash.
Pin something, get a couple of repins, then repin that to
a very popular community board (it takes work to get
invites to those with followings of 150,000+).
I'm not intentionally being dismissive, but isn't this a little like saying "Pin something, get a couple of repins, [magic happens]"?
I would imagine that if you can get content posted regularly to any platform with 150,000+ followers/readers/subscribers, the traffic rolls right in.
Is there something particular to pinterest that makes it easier to get content posted to these community boards, vs. getting content posted on a popular blog or retweeted by a popular account?
There's no secret there, there's just a gatekeeper you have to get past, and it's a little bit different for every one. Some will let you right on through, but usually you get to know the board owner really well, interact with them a bunch on Pinterest, and ask for an invite. You can also create generic Pinterest accounts and use a bot to load them up with very similar content to what they're looking for with a couple search functions, but that's probably not worth explaining on this forum.
Also, getting on the community boards is only the beginning of the battle.
They're different products. Adwords ads go on google.com, Adsense ads are put on the display network (blogs, gmail, etc.) Now you can create both through the Adwords tools, but they're still separate offerings.
AdSense is a product for publishers that allows to monetize their traffic.
AdWords ia a product to place ads on google search and google display network which includes google properties (youtube, gmail). They are two sides of the same coin, directed on publishers and advertisers respectively.
it sounds like they mean using AdWords but targeting the content network, which is effectively the AdSense network. That is different then search engine traffic that you can also buy through AdWords.
AdWords is the overall interface. Adssense is the website-owner-focused product that lets people put ads on their website. AdSense is for all intents & purposes google's display network, but is definitely served up through Google's AdWords platform.
Your first sentence is ambiguous. I'm still not entirely sure you mean it in the startup world usage of "killing it" - i.e. doing really well (though I think you do), or the more mainstream usage of "destroy it."
Pinterest, I'm not a direct user, but my wife is, and it's had a better impact on my life, even indirectly, than any of the other social networks. It's our cookbook, craftbook, and misc idea book. I am willing to give you money. Probably far more than you'll get from serving us ads.
Premium accounts could work for Pinterest. I think ads will make them a lot more, their model is well suited towards ads. Not to say they couldn't do both.
Yes, I expect ads will make them more on average, but they could certainly make more from me (well... my household) if we could just pay them to remove the ads, and perhaps have some other premium features.
My wife is a normal computer user. A savvy one, but still a normal one. She's a bit behind me on the curve of getting pissed off about ads, but not as far behind me as Pinterest et al might hope. If Pinterest fills up with ads, I'm not sure she'll stay.
Pinterest content is fairly similar to ads. I recall something where the founder described it as digital magazine clippings--I figure that actual magazine clippings were more than likely originally promoting a product.
The way I'm imagining it, the ads could fit in very well. You say you're already using it as your cookbook. If a chicken pays to promote recipes involving chicken, this hasn't really effected your usage in a negative way.
If the execution is good, I'm not sure where the objection is coming from. Of course, the execution could be bad; but you seem to be implying that ads would be very negative either way.
Pinterest's users are mostly women. Women click on ads far more often than men do. Combine that with the added appeal of pictures and you realize that the efficiency of ads on Pinterest could dwarf anything offered by Adsense and the likes.
Bottom line, for the next couple of years there are some serious bucks to be made from ads on Pinterest. After that, spam will take over.
Pinterest should sell internal data on which items get pinned the most from which retailer in which time period.
IE: This necklace got pinned the most from Macys.com during the week before Valentine's Day. I'm sure JCPenny, BlueNile etc would find that data useful.
I'm already seeing Pinterest tags on clothes at Nordstrom's. Your idea would definitely help move that along. They have a unique opportunity here to help a lot of retailers. I'd like to see the company do more than just advertising.
This seems like a natural move for Pinterest, and due to the nature of its content I think the ads have the potential to be highly relevant to the user. Maybe long-tail products could get an even better channel to reach interested customers?
How about reversing it? Help users search through various products, using what you know they like as a guide. Find deals for them. Instead of collecting data on users and using it for advertisers, make vendors give you tons of data and use it for your users.
That is a very interesting idea. I am wondering if monetized recommendations can be done algorithmically, which might be the case with their interest graph. However, if not and they are targeting long-tail ads it might be better to follow googles lead and do something similar to adwords. Do you have an intuition on this?
If you're chasing long-tail, it might be better to do something like Pandora. Let people fill in aspects they like (or figure it out from their pins), then find products that fit the criteria. "We see you like sky-blue and polka dots. Here's a purse from a designer you've never heard of, all the people who like it, all the pinboards it appears on, and an exclusive 5% discount if you buy through this affiliate link."
Unless you can convince people to pay for your service, you can either openly use them as advertising platforms or you can be sneaky and sell your data to advertisers behind the scenes.
> sell your data to advertisers behind the scenes.
Doing this is way too risky. It puts your company at risk to secretly sell this data. Imagine if word slipped about this. It could easily landslide into losing half your user-base and eventually the rest of them.
Pintrest is mostly made up of (1) images/photos and (2) real world merchandise of some kind. They could create a platform for selling printed copies of images/photos on pintrest and they could take a cut of the revenues, and maybe even go into easy distribution and scale of physical products shown on pintrest with a cut of revenues as well. Probably other services they could combine with the content as well in other ways with some creativity.
How big is the market for printed photos? How is taking a revenue cut from products really that different from advertising? It is non transparent affiliate marketing which is worse than transparent advertising.
I cannot imply that advertising should be removed, unless the customer financially pays for the service - any company (especially public) will use advertising in some form, or else it is just lost revenue.
I guess the only other option would be to build paid services, like app.net, but that is a completely different revenue model.
Anyone in here know who I can talk to to join as an early advertiser? I am a co-founder at a beauty startup. We wanna give Pintrest our money. - josh@nyla.us
They mostly don't. I recall they used to make some money off of affiliate links on products people posted. They abandoned it for various reasons. They've survived off of VC money.
They were going to become an advertising machine eventually. I think they would have been better off turning all those amazon links into referral links.
I'm bullish on Pinterest not only because my wife and I use Pinterest for everything from planning our wedding to finding outfits and meals, but because I market on Pinterest for a few clients all day long. It consistently brings in more traffic than other sources when you do it right, even for clients that are ranked in the top 5 in high-traffic Google SERPs.
The crazy thing about Pinterest traffic is that it never dies off. If you get a bunch of repins today, traffic will be showing up from those pins months later; it's kind of absurd, and very unlike Adsense or other discovery advertising platforms in that way.
The difficult aspect for Pinterest will be getting the worth of Pinterest ads down to a final cost per action since it is such a long wait before you see how much each pin is truly worth. And that really is the goal for any advertiser: If I know this click will bring me $2 I'll pay up to $1.99 for it. A lot of Pinterest users are in hardcore discovery mode, and as such Pinterest traffic doesn't convert as well as search traffic immediately, but in the long run it always seems to be worth it.