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Image: Jamel Toppin for Forbes
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Left brain, right brain: Co-founders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp at the Pinterest headquarters
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T
he Cannes Lions advertising festival has become as big among the Madison Avenue crowd as the Riviera town’s iconic film event is for Hollywood. So as Steve Stoute nursed a drink with a friend at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc on the balmy June evening that opened this year’s boozing and schmoozing, the Cannes Lions veteran braced himself for an onslaught of media and technology executives. Stoute’s ad agency, Translation LLC, has clients like Anheuser-Busch, State Farm and McDonald’s—the kinds of whales that would have him fending off supplicants left and right.
But the roles of supplicant and master reversed when Stoute spotted Ben Silbermann walking into the bar. The soft-spoken Pinterest CEO was attending Cannes for the first time. Silbermann, 32, had just checked into his hotel and was planning to have a quick drink with his team before turning in to prep for his keynote speech the following morning. A few weeks earlier, his social media service began experimenting with selling ads to show to its 70 million users. With more demand than it could satisfy, Pinterest had limited its test to a mere dozen sponsors, wringing commitments of more than $1 million from each.
Stoute was desperate to get his newest client, discount shoe store chain DSW, into the programme (fashion is the third-most popular type of content on Pinterest). “I didn’t want this thing to go by without us getting in front of it,” he says.
Stoute’s drinking buddy that night was Ben Horowitz, whose venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, had just participated in the $200 million funding round that had propelled Pinterest’s on-paper valuation to $5 billion. Horowitz called Silbermann over, and Stoute ordered rosé for everyone, raised his glass toward his new acquaintance and offered a paean of praise and blessings: Rise above, be great, stay great.
After accepting Stoute’s flattery, Silbermann agreed to take his money, too. An hour into his Riviera debut, the new prince of Cannes had already bagged his first deal, just by showing up.
That’s pretty much how things have been going for Pinterest lately. A visual social network where people create and share image collections of recipes, hairstyles, baby furniture and just about anything else on their phones or computers, Pinterest isn’t yet five, but among women, who make up over 80 percent of its users, it’s already more popular than Twitter, which has a market capitalisation of more than $30 billion. Pinterest’s US user base is projected to top 40 million this year, putting it in a league with both Twitter and Instagram domestically, and it’s moving fast to catch up with them overseas, opening offices in London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo over the past year. International users now make up nearly half of new sign-ups, according to research firm Semiocast. Pinterest even doubled the number of active male users in the past year.
To date, Pinterest’s users have created more than 750 million boards made up of more than 30 billion individual pins, with 54 million new ones added each day. During the 2013 holiday season, Pinterest accounted for nearly a quarter of all social sharing activity. Among social networks, only Facebook, with its 1.3 billion users, drives more traffic to web publishers.
All that activity sounds big, but it understates the money-making opportunity in front of Pinterest. While it’s the earliest of days still, many analysts believe that, on the basis of average revenue per user, it’s only a matter of time before Pinterest blows past Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social pack. “It’s going to bring in billions of dollars a year,” says Dave Weinberg, founder of the social marketing company, Loop88.
To marketers, Pinterest represents a unique proposition, a new medium of a sort that’s never existed before. One difference is temporal. As Silbermann explains it, Facebook “is about your connections, your past events, your memories”. Users on Facebook volunteer a staggering amount of retrospective information such as birthplace, alma mater and vacations, data the company can use to power its highly targeted ad offerings. Twitter can’t offer that level of detail, which is why its revenue per user, at around $3.50, is only half that of Facebook’s. Twitter’s value remains stuck in the now, promising advertisers a presence in real-time conversations about the World Cup, a presidential election or Orange Is the New Black
But the roles of supplicant and master reversed when Stoute spotted Ben Silbermann walking into the bar. The soft-spoken Pinterest CEO was attending Cannes for the first time. Silbermann, 32, had just checked into his hotel and was planning to have a quick drink with his team before turning in to prep for his keynote speech the following morning. A few weeks earlier, his social media service began experimenting with selling ads to show to its 70 million users. With more demand than it could satisfy, Pinterest had limited its test to a mere dozen sponsors, wringing commitments of more than $1 million from each.
Stoute was desperate to get his newest client, discount shoe store chain DSW, into the programme (fashion is the third-most popular type of content on Pinterest). “I didn’t want this thing to go by without us getting in front of it,” he says.
Stoute’s drinking buddy that night was Ben Horowitz, whose venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, had just participated in the $200 million funding round that had propelled Pinterest’s on-paper valuation to $5 billion. Horowitz called Silbermann over, and Stoute ordered rosé for everyone, raised his glass toward his new acquaintance and offered a paean of praise and blessings: Rise above, be great, stay great.
After accepting Stoute’s flattery, Silbermann agreed to take his money, too. An hour into his Riviera debut, the new prince of Cannes had already bagged his first deal, just by showing up.
That’s pretty much how things have been going for Pinterest lately. A visual social network where people create and share image collections of recipes, hairstyles, baby furniture and just about anything else on their phones or computers, Pinterest isn’t yet five, but among women, who make up over 80 percent of its users, it’s already more popular than Twitter, which has a market capitalisation of more than $30 billion. Pinterest’s US user base is projected to top 40 million this year, putting it in a league with both Twitter and Instagram domestically, and it’s moving fast to catch up with them overseas, opening offices in London, Paris, Berlin and Tokyo over the past year. International users now make up nearly half of new sign-ups, according to research firm Semiocast. Pinterest even doubled the number of active male users in the past year.
To date, Pinterest’s users have created more than 750 million boards made up of more than 30 billion individual pins, with 54 million new ones added each day. During the 2013 holiday season, Pinterest accounted for nearly a quarter of all social sharing activity. Among social networks, only Facebook, with its 1.3 billion users, drives more traffic to web publishers.
All that activity sounds big, but it understates the money-making opportunity in front of Pinterest. While it’s the earliest of days still, many analysts believe that, on the basis of average revenue per user, it’s only a matter of time before Pinterest blows past Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social pack. “It’s going to bring in billions of dollars a year,” says Dave Weinberg, founder of the social marketing company, Loop88.
To marketers, Pinterest represents a unique proposition, a new medium of a sort that’s never existed before. One difference is temporal. As Silbermann explains it, Facebook “is about your connections, your past events, your memories”. Users on Facebook volunteer a staggering amount of retrospective information such as birthplace, alma mater and vacations, data the company can use to power its highly targeted ad offerings. Twitter can’t offer that level of detail, which is why its revenue per user, at around $3.50, is only half that of Facebook’s. Twitter’s value remains stuck in the now, promising advertisers a presence in real-time conversations about the World Cup, a presidential election or Orange Is the New Black
