Pinterest is an American image sharing and social media site that uses pinboards to allow users to save and explore content on the internet using images and, to a lesser extent, animated GIFs, and videos.
Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp created the platform, which had over 400 million monthly active users as of August 2020. Pinterest, Inc., is headquartered in San Francisco. The site’s implementation began in December 2009, and the prototype was released as a closed beta in March 2010. The website had 10,000 subscribers nine months after it was launched. According to Silbermann, he wrote to the first 5,000 people, giving his phone number and even meeting with some of them. The release of an iPhone app in early March 2011 resulted in a higher number of downloads than expected. Following that, an iPad app and Pinterest Mobile, a non-iPhone version of the website, were released. Until the summer of 2011, Silbermann and a few programmers ran the site out of a tiny apartment.
At this time, Pinterest exploded in popularity. Pinterest was included in Time magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2011” report on August 10, 2011. According to Hitwise numbers, the site became one of the top ten biggest social network services in December 2011, with 11 million weekly visitors. At the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards, Pinterest was named Best New Startup of 2011. According to comScore, the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors in January 2012, making it the first site ever to surpass the 10 million unique user marks. Pinterest won Best Social Media App and the People’s Voice Award for best functioning graphic interface at the 2012 Webby Awards.
Pinterest revised its terms of service on March 23, 2012, removing the policy that allowed it to sell the content of its users. Pinterest changed their policies on August 10, 2012, removing the need for a submission or invitation to access the platform.
While it began as a “social network” of boards, the organization has shifted its focus in recent years to visual search and e-commerce, such as shopping catalogs.
The Wall Street Journal reported in February 2019 that Pinterest had quietly applied for an initial public offering (IPO) of shares. At the moment, the corporation was valued at $12 billion in total. On April 18, 2019, they went public at $19 per share, ending the day at $24.40 per share.
Pinterest posted $1.7 billion in advertisement sales in 2020, up 48 percent from the previous year. Pinterest revealed “Pinterest Premiere” on March 3, 2021, a video advertising feature “that will appear in people’s feeds, tailored to their tastes and other characteristics.” Todd Morgenfeld, the company’s chief financial officer, announced plans to spend more money on ads to counter a possible downturn in activity as the US economy reopens and more people get Covid-19 vaccines later in April.
Pinterest’s developers describe it as a “catalogue of ideas” that motivates people to “go out and do that stuff.” It also has a sizable fashion following. Pinterest has often been referred to as a “video search engine” in recent years. Pinterest is mostly made up of “pins” and “boards”. A pin is an image that has been posted or connected from a website. Re-pinning is the act of copying pins from one user’s board to another user’s board. Boards are sets of pins organized around a common theme, such as quotes, travel, or weddings. Multiple-idea boards may be divided into parts, each of which contains multiple pins. Users will follow and unfollow other users and boards, which will populate their “home feed.”
Outside of the feed, content can be found and uploaded to a platform using the “Save” icon, which can be saved to a web browser’s bookmark bar or introduced by a webmaster directly on the page. It was formerly known as the “Pin it” icon, but due to international growth in 2016, it was changed to “Save,” making the site more intuitive to new users.Pinterest introduced a video player in August 2016 that allows users and brands to post and store images of any length directly to the web.
Along the way Pinterest has also faced so many criticisms and legal issues. Hundreds of Pinterest employees took part in a virtual walkout in August 2020 in favor of two former coworkers who openly accused the organization of bigotry and gender inequality. Pinterest decided to pay a record-breaking $20 million to its former Chief Operating Officer in December 2020 to settle a lawsuit alleging “rampant bigotry, toxic work climate, and misogyny.” Pinterest agreed to the deal on the condition that it openly acknowledges that it has to do more to strengthen the corporate atmosphere.