Pinterest S-1 (opens in new tab)

Pinterest brings Facebook's walled garden to a whole new level, seriously wish them to die for good.

Add -site:pinterest.com to your default search.

Because you are clearly wrong.

Forgive me for being blunt, I just think it’s a bit obvious: they have grown through means other than someone going to google.com and typing “Pinterest.”

I can think of a dozen reasons why that would be the case. Google Trends does not match 1:1 popularity, usage, or growth of all products.

Personally, I’m only a casual Pinterest user and have no stake in this, but the service has gotten a lot better over the last couple years.

The story looks different (albeit short of YoY +60%) if you look at Trends for Image Search: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all_2008&geo=U...

Could be a couple of things: 1) Growing native app usage 2) More users starting on pinterest.com rather than google

Thanks for linking the Trend data. I was trying to figure out a way to express this myself. Colloquially, I feel like Pinterest used to be mentioned in conversations 5+ years ago with some frequency. For example, I would have someone mention some recipe they saw there or see links to Pinterest shared on other social networks. But in the past few years, I don't know if anyone in my circles has actually mentioned it at all. This Trend data seems to reflect what I felt through my anecdotal experience.

That said, this is US data if I am not mistaken, and Pinterest seems to have a lot of activity happening internationally. Other comments state they have more MAU outside the US than within.

I don't know how this squares with the the significant rise in traffic to their site:

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/pinterest.com

Maybe as someone else mentioned, much of this is international growth? (india, Brazil?) If it is, then the traffic is a lot less valuable.

If you look international you can see the momentum

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=pinteres...

It's not hot and new any more in the USA but it seems to be spreading world wide

Facebook has the same trend. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=f...

"If they can improve international monetization then there is a lot of room for revenue growth it would seem."

A universal truth in the social network space. Unfortunately, not even FB can really extract much value outside of North America.

Advertising on Pinterest is really tough. Their system is buggy and paying for the ad nearly impossible internationally, last time I checked. Due to these reasons, we put our all ads into Facebook instead of splitting some to Pinterest a couple of months ago.

Reeks of Yelp all over again.

So many businesses failed before which relied on SEO. This one could go really bad if Google pulls the plug.

For tech companies, most people are investing in to founders - the company itself is just a medium. If I was an investor in tech company I would actually want dual class structure so its protected from short sighted bigger investors, likes of Icahn and hopefully pressure from Wall Street analysts to whatever extent possible. This puts some confidence in me as investor going for longer run.

The Indicator podcast from Planet Money covered this topic this morning. If I remember the conclusion correctly it was that these sorts of dual class stock deals were on the way out...except for tech firms.

The verdict on dual class shares is not as unfavourable as is frequently made out in the press as attested to by a recent study in the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation:

"The limited empirical evidence on the technology and emerging growth companies that are the target of these regulations is insufficient to support the adoption of new regulations, as the evidence that is available indicates that the most recent group of dual-class companies may have performed as well, if not better, than those with a single class of stock". [0].

[0] https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2018/04/15/are-dual-class-co...

This seems like a weird structure, why would anyone ever convert Class B stock to Class A?

Wow, I would love to know how they can make so much revenue and make a loss.

I only know Pinterest from annoying search results where it immediately asks you to sign up for an account, and I immediately leave - does anyone have any insights into how on earth they are spending almost a billion dollars in a year?

Curious how this would change if R&D was capitalized. Of course it would just make ebitda a less accurate proxy for cash flow but we’d still be looking at it very differently.

I've clicked on Google results several times, but every time it asks me to sign up or login before I've seen much of anything - eh... no.

How does it manage to rank so well? I'm not a user of it but whenever it appears in searches it feels like endless popups and walled content that tries to make you sign up. I would have thought Google would discourage links like this.

Once upon Pinterest was great. But now it's just atrocious and toxic. Even logged in.

It's the worst outcome for solving a problem which could be naturally aced on the web. Instead we got a cancered platform causing headaches to everyone.

Full rant: https://twitter.com/bourquinary/status/1026877583772790784

I was curious how Pinterest addresses that in their S-1. Here’s how they put it:

> We depend in part on internet search engines to direct traffic and refer new users to our service. If search engines’ methodologies and policies are modified or enforced in ways we do not anticipate, or if our search results page rankings decline for other reasons, traffic to our service or user growth, retention or engagement could decline, any of which could harm our business, revenue and financial results.

> We depend in part on internet search engines, such as Bing, Google, Yahoo! and Yandex, to direct a significant amount of traffic to our service. For example, when a user types a query into a search engine, we may receive traffic and acquire new users when those search results include Pins, boards, Pinners and other features of our service that cause the user to click on the Pinterest result or create a Pinterest account. These actions increase Pinner growth due to signups of new users and increase retention and engagement of existing Pinners.

> Our ability to maintain and increase the number of visitors directed to our service from search engines is not within our control. Search engines, such as Google, may modify their search algorithms and policies or enforce those policies in ways that are detrimental to us, that we are not able to predict or without prior notice. When that occurs, we expect to experience declines or de-indexing in the organic search ranking of certain Pinterest search results, leading to a decrease in traffic to our service, new user signups and existing user retention and engagement. We have experienced declines in traffic and user growth as a result of these changes in the past, and anticipate fluctuations as a result of such actions in the future. For example, in the first quarter of 2018, Google de-indexed our keyword landing pages, which negatively impacted traffic and user growth in the quarters that followed. Our ability to appeal these actions is limited, and we may not be able to revise our search engine optimization (“SEO”) strategies to recover the loss in traffic or user growth resulting from such actions. Changes in policies or their enforcement may not apply in the same manner to our competitors, or our competitors’ SEO strategies may be more successful than ours. In addition, some of these search engines are owned by companies that compete with various aspects of our business. To offset the impact on our user growth, we would need to increase our investment in other growth strategies, such as paid marketing or other initiatives that drive user acquisition, which may cost more and be less effective. Any significant reduction in the number of Pinners directed to our website or mobile application from search engines could harm our business, revenue and financial results.

I noticed that if you just right click on the google image search result and select "view image" you'll get the img src right away, in Firefox at least.

Not just image searches, the entire website is basically unusable, especially without proper filters to block whole screen popups, unwanted login prompts, and modal windows obscuring everything. Not to mention the JS messing up the browser history so you can't go back to any page, because their scripts will fuck that up and only store the first and last page in the chain.

Plenty of folks have years worth of recipes, fashion ideas, etc. saved, so you'd need a good Pinterest-to-new-service importer, which I suspect Pinterest's API (which is, in my experience, actively hostile to developers) makes quite difficult.

Seems weird I would think if they were serving ads they would not want to potentially turn away some users.

"We review the number of monthly active users (“MAUs”), which we define as a logged-in Pinterest user who visits our website or opens our mobile application at least once during the 30-day period ending on the date of measurement [...]"

Pinterest's primary demographic is women

> We define a monthly active user as a logged-in Pinterest user who visits our website or opens our mobile application at least once during the 30-day period ending on the date of measurement.

There is a surge of awfully unprofitable businesses with poor business outlooks that are going public with very large valuations.

How is pinterest going public going to impact my life?

This is standard and required language by the SEC for each IPO prospectus for companies without a clear history of profitability.

Dude. All S-1s say that. I haven't read the first one that didn't.

This is standard statement on many s1s.

We can surmise your gender from this comment :-D

It's amazing what having enough money to put you on the front page of every google search can do.

To be more accurate California is an at will state (for everybody: low level employees and CEO's) and non-compete are illegal. Other states are different. It exists to protect the interests of employees. The flipside is if you do resign you don't have to wait 2 months before you leave. It is good practice though to give at least a two week notice.

That's standard language.

And no non compete? CEO's are one of the few employees where a non compete could be enforceable.

Yes, very. That's boilerplate.

I’m in the US and know it exists, but I don’t know anyone who uses it. It seems like it’s used predominantly by women to collect and share photos taken by other people (e.g. photos of clothing, makeup, fashion models, crafts, weddings, food, etc.).

The fact that I don’t know anyone who uses it does not imply that Pinterest is unpopular. I just know so few women.

Pinterest is relevant and generalist enough to be useful to most people, allowing different usecases from a free cloud storage of pictures to a social network.

Reasonably well-known in Brazil among crafts-interested general audience and related areas.

I don't know anyone in the US using Pinterest. It seems like a search engine gaming scam to me.

that's everyone's branding, not just the S-1 :)

Nope. But will short after 2-3 weeks.

Wait until lockup period ends for discount prices.