100% Ad Revenue Growth Powers Pinterest To 'Unicorn' Status

Visual search engine Pinterest has announced details for its April initial public offering (IPO), based upon 100% increases in marketing revenue and burgeoning user engagement.

Valued at $12.7 billion in 2017, Pinterest has been attracting marketing investment at an increasing rate for the past two to three years, in particular from SMEs. Pinterest posted ad revenue of $755.9 million in the year ending December 31, 2018, up from $472.8 million in 2017.

It has also roughly doubled its monthly active user count since early 2016, hitting 265 million late last year.

Locally Pinterest has around 5 – 6.5 million active monthly users, across AU and NZ, giving it a wider reach than almost all newspapers and magazines regionally.

Over recent years Pinterest has transformed its product and business model, nowadays having more in common with Google than Facebook.

Pinterest: Think Search Not Social

In fact, to define Pinterest as a social network would be anathema to Pinterest’s leadership team.

Co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann has gone to great pains, since 2016, making it clear that Pinterest does not see itself in the mould of ‘Big Blue’, telling the Guardian:

‘Social networks are about communicating with other people. Pinterest is really about planning and getting ideas for your own personal life.

With social networks, it’s them time. With Pinterest, it’s me time.

The biggest thing about Pinterest is that people are there saving ideas for their personal lives, not to rile up other people or make a big statement.’

Pinterest, at least currently, has a very different approach to other social/messaging/tech platforms. Although how this survives public markets will be interesting.

For example, it has long refused ads for weight loss products and services, prescription drugs, tobacco, weapons and gambling among other things. A move which bigger platforms have increasingly adopted.

Marketer/Agency Adoption Will Probably Be Slow

While Pinterest does not offer marketers mass reach, it does offer an engaged, captive audience, which generally sits lower in the funnel.

Driving more conversions and offering economical opportunities, in part because Pinterest’s revival has gone largely unnoticed by many major brands and agencies.

Low buy-in at the agency level could actually represent a problem for Pinterest, as it has for Snapchat. Snapchat, like Pinterest, has strong, if not niche, metrics and usage, however, many marketers struggle to think past the Facebook social ecosystem.

Snap’s UK boss, Ed Couchman, formerly of Facebook, recently decried an almost universal lack of understanding of Snapchat from agencies, with minimal exceptions.

Pinterest will no doubt experience something similar. As the old adage used to go, ‘no one ever got fired hiring IBM’.

Mind you, IBM never live-broadcasted mass murder.

So who knows, some fed up marketers might find a plucky, high converting, ten-year-old unicorn, which is very popular with 25 – 45 females, appealing…