Pinterest Now Valued at $5 Billion

As of right now, Pinterest has over 70 million users globally (up from 48.7 million users in February). Americans seem to be more active than international users; 40.1 million of them log on at least once monthly. Of course, there are also many who log on much more often. As it's replete with great suggestions for all sorts of projects in your life, Pinterest has become the go-to place for many looking for a bit of inspiration.

If you've never used it, you may not have a clear idea of what Pinterest is, so here are a few words and a few screenshots to give you a sense of what Pinterest looks like and how it's used.

Pinterest is an image-based social media site, a digital scrapbook that allows users to collect tiles or "pins" and organized them into "boards." The site is actually very easy to use. (It's also quite popular with users of mobile devices; according to Callum Delo at AdAge.com, 75% of usage is via apps.) As you have probably noticed online, the Pinterest look has been adopted by other social media sites, recipe sites, etc. Web sites, Wizzley among them, became image-driven in the wake of Pinterest's success and the wide adoption of smartphones and other latest-generation mobile devices.

Here's how it works: You search for what interests you and then click a "Pin it" button to add an image to one of your existent boards. You can easily create a new board from the popup window. You can amass this way large collections of recipes, quotes, etc., as I have. Once you have created boards and added pins to them, you can easily move the boards around by dragging and dropping them. You can also choose an image for the board or let a random one become the board cover.

Pinterest is also a nice option to have when promoting items from Wizzley articles or from Zazzle, especially now that Pinterest has instituted rich pins, which allow you to pin images that show prices as well, are updated when their source product on Zazzle, for instance, is updated, etc. They also allow you to make a commission on those Zazzle products pinned to Pinterest.  

To learn more about rich pins, see JoHarrington's and Sheri_Oz's articles here on Wizzley:

Setting up Rich Pins to Promote Your Wizzley Articles on Pinterest

and Rich Pins Increase Zazzle Sales

Pinterest has tested promoted pins and will soon start implementing them. According to Cotton Delo at AdAge.com, it has already made agreements with Kraft, General Mills, Ziploc, Nestlé, Gap, Expedia, and other companies. Campaigns will last three to six months, and the promoted pins won't show up in the Home Feed (with pins from boards and people you follow) or on your own boards. They will show up only when you search for pins using keywords or Pinterest's categories (and they will be marked "Promoted Pin"). According to the cited article, Kraft targets 25- to 54-year-old women for their next Pinterest campaign. Given that 85% of Pinterest's users are female and that they seem to be interested in recipes, Kraft seems to have found a good venue for their products.

Pinterest was founded in March 2010. By August, it had 5,000 users. That all spiked to 17 million in April 2012 and 750 million this month (May 2014).

The founders are Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp. Ben Silbermann is the CEO. He was born in 1982/1983 (yeah, I wondered about that, too) and grew up in Des Moines, Iowa. His parents are ophtamologists and he had plans to become a doctor as well but after the Research Science Institute at MIT, a Bachelor's in Political Science at Yale, a stint at Google in the sales department (another source, based on one of Silbermann's speeches, says customer support and a few things besides that: data analysis, product design suggestions, etc.) and another one designing iPhone apps (info from Wikipedia), he decided to bet his future on Pinterest.

The Pinterest story started with an iPhone app called Tote that Ben developed with a friend from college, Paul Sciarra. Tote was meant to help users find products from their favorite stores easier, save them, learn about price discounts, while also keeping track of the latest fashions. Getting the money to launch a bigger thing was hard, as the word was hit by recession. In fact, it all began a week after he quit his job at Google, where he kept complaining about not being given free rein to develop products.

Soon, however, one investor embraced the Pinterest idea, and others followed. It was at this time that "a friend of a friend," Evan Sharp, joined Ben and Paul in their venture. Ben said in his 2012 speech (see an article here) that "It was like he was the only one who understands [understood] what I was saying." The tile grid was Evan's idea.

It all gained momentum in May 2010, when a certain Victoria Smith came up with "Pin It Forward," an initiative that spread among bloggers. She also organized the first Pinterest meet-up. She then got to be, for a while, Pinterest's community manager.

The rest is a success story.

Cotton Delo, "Pinterest Launches First Paid Ads with Kraft, Gap and Others," AdAge.com, May 12, 2014, http://adage.com/article/digital/pinterest-launches-paid-ads-kraft-gap/293142/

Nicholas Carlson, "Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became The Web's Next Big Thing," BusinessInsider.com, April 24, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-founding-story-2012-4?op=1