Pinterest

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Pinterest
Pin2.png
Pin3.png
Pinterest Official Logo [2]
Type Photo Sharing
Launch Date 2010 [1]
Status Active
Product Line Social Networking Service
Platform Cloud Service, iOS, Android
Website www.pinterest.com
P
interest is a social network image-sharing site that was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp in 2009 as a Silicon Valley start-up.[2][3] Users on Pinterest find and share their favorite styles, tastes, and interests, as well as get inspiration from others. Pintrest has over 10.4 million users.[4] Essentially, the website is a vision board, or a social photo website and application where users can create and manage image collections. Since links are shared to many on Pinterest, ethical concerns of copyright and censorship are apparent.

History

Pinterest Co-founders: Paul Sciarra, Ben Silbermann, and Evan Sharp

Paul Sciarra left his job at a venture capital firm, Radius Ventures, in New York, in 2008. Across the country, Silbermann left his job at customer service and data entry at Google.[3] The two college friends came together to brainstorm ideas for a startup. The two started developing a product called Tote, a catalog for one's phone, but the two struggled to gain necessary funds after the recession. After securing some investors, the two entrepreneurs turned away from Tote and began to work on Pinterest, and recruited Evan Sharp as a cofounder. [5] The three did not find immediate success with it. Pinterest’s initial slow growth concerned the two colleagues, but only a year later, the site skyrocketed to success as it experienced wild growth. Out of a childhood love to collect things from insects to stamps, developed a social media website built to allow people to continue their collections online.[6]

Pinterest began as an exclusive website requiring an invitation to join and participate. In August 2012, Pinterest opened up to the public allowing anyone to sign up for an account and be a user.[7]

Growth

Pinterest continues to grow at an astounding rate. Pinterest became the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark when data reported from comScore indicated the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors on a monthly basis.[8] Since early 2012, the number of Pinterest users to visit the site daily has increased 145%.[9] According to new data from social media marketer, Tamba, the number of daily unique visitors of Pinterest doubled in just two months from 2 million in January 2012 to 4 million in March 2012.[10]

According to the Los Angeles Times, July 2012 astonishingly saw over 29 million weekly visits to the site, over an 2183% increase from the previous year of 1.27 million weekly visits.[11] As of now with over 10 million users, this growth according to Pinterest's CEO is not due to better algorithms or engineering, but is the work of better marketing. Silbermann still believes what was needed and is still needed is simply a better way to distribute Pinterest to users. When Pinterest first started, Silbermann went to many local boutiques and other events and found people who had similar interests to his own and there promoted Pinterest. To his surprise, his work began paying off when he saw people actually conversing about creative projects.[12]

User Statistics

Though Pintrest has become popular among a variety of social groups, in 2012, it was reported that 80% of U.S. users were women. Users in the U.S. are aso more likely to be from Midwestern states. The average Pinterest users are ages 25 to 54, and although its main users are women, the site is attracting the interest of men, who now make up 28 percent of new members compared with 20 percent in January 2012.[10]

Funding

Since the launch of Pinterest, the company has raised millions from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, FirstMark Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners.[13] In October 2011, venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz gave Pinterest $27 million in funding that increased the value the social media site to $200 million.[14] Pinterest received a $100 million investment from a group led by Japanese online retailer Rakuten Inc., further increasing the value of the company, bringing its total value to $1.5 billion.[15]

Privacy

Users can browse any other users’ pins. Pinterest allows users to comment on or pin anything they desire, and visibility is not limited. On October 17, 2012, Pinterest announced that they had responded to the request for more privacy controls by adding new features. Now there is a flag icon on each user’s profile allowing anyone to block or report that individual’s profile for nudity or pornography, attacks on a group or individual, graphic violence, hateful speech or symbols, actively promotes self-harm, spam, or other. The block feature prevents users from the ability to follow each other’s boards, and to repin and comment on one another’s pins. The report user feature alerts the Community team to evaluate the account that has been reported. [16]

Sample of a page
Categories

Features

  • Pins: A pin is an image or video uploaded by the user, or taken from a website. A description can be added to the pin to explain or comment on if the purpose of the pin is not explicitly stated. If a pin is from an outside website, users can visit the website by clicking on the link located below each pin. There is direct user-to-user interaction when others “pin” your pictures onto their boards as a way of collecting pictures.
  • Boards: Pinboards are unique to each user’s page. Users can create and freely name as many boards as they desire by clicking the “Add” button on the navigation bar located on the top right. A pinboard categorizes pins properly onto specific boards in order to help others find your pins.
    • Secret Boards: From late 2012, Pinterest introduced a new type of board which users can mark as 'Secret.' Secret boards are not shared with your followers and cannot be accessed by the public.
  • Comments: Users can add comments to pins on their own boards or others' boards, even if the users do not follow on another. A comment can be added by clicking on the pin and typing in the comment box, or by hovering over the picture of the pin and clicking on "Comment."
  • Follow: Users can follow other Pinterest members. There is the option to follow all of their boards, or individual boards that you like. Friends on Pinterest can be easily found through connecting to Facebook, Twitter, and email accounts.
  • Sharing: Pins can be shared on other social media websites such as on Twitter and Facebook by simple clicking share.
  • Bookmarklet: This “Pin it” button can be added to a browser’s bookmarks bar. Pinterest suggests this feature be installed due to its result of simplistic and easy pinning. Once on a page including a picture you wish to pin, just clicking this "bookmark" opens a menu from which you can pick the image you want to pin.

Usage

Pinning

Pinning is the process of collecting pins and posting them and categorizing them onto boards. Members can pin any image from any website. There are three ways to pin.

  1. The first way to pin is to upload an image to Pinterest straight from a file on your computer by clicking the “Add” button. This is a great option to share personal pictures, ones that are not already hosted on the web.
  2. If a user stumbles upon an image found on another site, like a blog, rather than saving the image to one’s computer, and re-uploading it to Pinterest, there is the option to simply click the “Pin It” button that is installed. Clicking the “Pin It” button gives you the option to pin any of the images embedded on the webpage that you are currently visiting. The url of the original source of the images are automatically set into the link.
  3. The third way to pin is to “repin” something that is already pinned. Browsing makes pinning simple. If one comes across an image of a photo that is desired on your board, one has the option to “repin” or “like” it, which gives you the option to share your likes, without having them pinned on your board. This like will be added to the “likes” section of your profile. Choosing “repin” cues the user to classify the pin to one of the user’s specific boards.

It is an online bridge between the web and the real world. The site’s popularity is due to its simplicity. In general, it is all about ‘pinning’ things you find interesting across the web, and saving them in any ‘Board’ you like.

Pinterest Mobile Applications

Pinterest Mobile Apps

Pinterest has created apps for iPhone, iPad and Android that are available to download on the Pinterest website. The goal of these apps is to allow users to take Pinterest anywhere, so that users can pin, discover, and access information on the go.[17] Pinterest launched the iPhone app and Pinterest Mobile in September 2011 and in May 2012, they redesigned and updated the app.[18] On August 14, 2012, Pinterest announced that an iPad app and Android app is now developed and available for download.[19]

These apps allow users to do almost everything capable on the Pinterest website. The app displays easy and accessible icons for browsing pins of people that user’s are following, exploring various pins from various categories, capturing pictures and instantly pinning them, news with the user’s recent activity, and profile displaying pints, boards, likes, the number of followers, and people followed.

Pinterest founder Ben Silberman recently said that the transition to phones has been one of the biggest ways the company has changed. It started out as a website and now about 80% of its usage is by phone, something he never could have imagined five years ago.

Pinterest for Business

Many businesses use Pinterest as a marketing tool. They are able to use the site to increase awareness of their business and to monitor traffic by looking at the number of followers or engagement measures of likes, repins, and comments.[20] A number of companies such as Procter & Gamble, The Wall Street Journal, Land’s End, Etsy, Ebay, Zappos, and Whole Foods Market use the social media platform for exposure to a large audience, attract new followers, engage with existing followers, increase visits to their websites, and generate sales.[21][22] Pinterest is a great source for consumer insights, allowing businesses to understand their audience, and what they are discussing and sharing. Companies can check out their competition, and compare their products and services.[23] Many brands are using Pinterest as an advertising strategy in order to drive sales via images and displays.[14]

Promotions

Companies use Pinterest to promote their brands with contests and sweepstakes to improve user experience for their audience base. Companies like Honda, Kotex, Sephora, Gilt, AMC Theaters, and Victoria’s Secret have used Pinterest to connect with their audiences by offering giveaways.[24] Contests allow brands to engage with consumers in a personal and cost effective way as well as to help collect customer information, preferences, and feedback.[20]. The great majority of the above companies cater to women much more so than to men. Because of this, Pintrest, with its high percentage of users being women, was a successful and appropriate outlet for such promotions. With this, the collected consumer information, preferences, and feedback were for an appropriate population of the companies' markets.

Marketing Tools

PinReach Sign Up Site.

There are tools that have been developed after the quick popularity of Pinterest growth. These marketing tools provide users with ways to measure their efforts and make it simple to pin content to boards, share and track better on Pinterest. Businesses use Pinterest to their advantage as the site provides the insights that they need to measure and optimize their content and engagement efforts on Pinterest.[25]

  • PinReach provides insight and analytics to assist users examine trends, and measure the success of the page. It allows users to see what their top five pins and boards are, and provides the number of pins, boards, likes, followers, likes, repins, and comments.[25]
  • Repinly is a site that analyzes Pinterest users and content providing insights on popular content for pins and boards, how users spend their time, and most followed users.[26]
  • PinPuff is a site that allows users to explore social influence. It calculates a score and gives you the number on a scale of 1-100 that indicates a user’s “pinfluence” measuring popularity, influence, and activity. The site gives you suggestions of other users collecting similar content. This number can be used for marketing strategy for businesses and startups.[25]
  • Pin A Quote allows users to easily pin any text found on the Internet.[27]
  • Reachli is an analytic tool that helps keep track of repins, and likes that pins are receiving. It has an easy-to-use dashboard interface for browsing and pinning.[25] The site helps devise the best strategy for content to increase user’s sales and increase traffic.[28]
  • Pinspiration is an app developed for Pinterest users on Windows Phones.[27]
  • Pintics provides the tools needed to manage activity and sales and help track and optimize their Pinterest traffic.[25]
  • PinAlerts is a site that alerts users via email when someone pins an image from their website onto Pinterest.[29]
  • Pinalyzer is a service that suggest to users pins and people to follow based on analyzing the user’s followers and following people.[29]
  • Pinwords allows a caption, description, or text to be added to an image instantly before it is pinned to Pinterest.[28]
  • Pin Search is a tool for Chrome that allows you to find the original source, or similar images of the pinned image.[28]
  • PinDown is an application which allows users to download multiple pictures at once from their Pinterest account.[30]

Ethical Concerns

Copyright Issues

There have been many copyright concerns since the founding of Pinterest. Unfortunately, many users do not know if they are at risk for infringing copyright laws. The issue at heart is that Pinterest’s social network model is based upon users linking to any image found on the Internet. Many of the images that are uploaded are copyrighted. Since users pin texts or pictures onto their profiles without the permission of the copyright holder, this is an infringement of copyright law.

To combat copyright infringement, Pinterest has implemented their own Copyright Policy that is in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which is provided in their Terms of Service. Under the Pinterest Copyright Policy, “Pinterest respects the intellectual property rights of others and expects its users to do the same.”[31] With the policy, at its discretion, Pinterest may disable or terminate accounts that are repeatedly charged with infringement issues. Pinterest also has a protocol employed for copyright owners who would like to report copyright infringement within Pinterest, which includes writing to Pinterest and identifying the copyrighted work and the subject who infringed the copyright. When Pinterest complies with a copyright complaint, the pin and its content is removed from Pinterest.

Pinterest has attempted to comply with websites that do not want their content to appear on the site. They have implemented a "nopin" meta-tag that websites can put into their HTML codes that prevents users from pinning images that appear on that website. If a user tries to pin an image from a website that has the "nopin" meta-tag in place, the user will see a message that says "This site doesn't allow Pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!"[32]

Censorship

The Pinterest website describes the process of picture content removal if a user receives an excessive amount of copyright infringement notices:

If you receive a notification that a Pin has been removed due a copyright complaint, it means that the Pin’s content has been deleted from Pinterest at the request of the content’s owner. If your account receives too many copyright complaints, you may lose the ability to Pin new content on Pinterest, and your account may be disabled completely.[31]

In a scenario where the user was not posting copyrighted material but was still asked to remove their content, the scenario reflects censorship by Pinterest. With digital editing materials available to users, it is hard to decipher the origin of pictures and other online material. Thus, it is hard to say who originally created or posted pictures, and the removal of pictures that do not infringe upon copyright laws could be described as censorship.

Opponents believe stricter guidelines should be implemented with regards to properly citing or adding a source to the picture. Many pins have links attached to direct the viewer to the correct page, but if they have been screenshots or downloads there should be an option to add details regarding the origin of the picture.

PinDown

Pindown is an application which allows users to download multiple images at once from their Pinterest board. This can possibly promote the idea of copyright infringement, as they could download an image, and post it elsewhere. Because they did not actively search for the image to download it, they may not even know where it originated, and cannot give credit.

Another concern is the idea that some may not want their work to be shared on Pinterest, but are not given the option as the number of members submitting is too great.

Awards

Pinterest Wins Best Startup

Pinterest won the Crunchies 2011 fifth annual competition award for Best New Startup of 2011. Hosted by GigaOm, VentureBeat, and TechCrunch, the Internet community is invited to choose the winner.[33]

At South by Southwest Interactive 15th Annual Awards, Pinterest won the award for best Breakout Digital Trend 2012.[34]

At the 2012 Webby Awards, Pinterest won awards for Best Social Media App and People’s Voice Winner in Best Visual Design Function.[35]

Competition

Some competitors of Pinterest include: Fancy, Bo.lt, Clipix, Woodmark, Swell for Tumblr, Friendsheet, Pixable, and Hunuku, Trippy. All of these sites are some variation of social service for photo-clipping, which allows users to capture, share, and organize anything on the web.

See Also

External Links

References

  1. Pinterest on Wikipedia
  2. Forbes
  3. 3.0 3.1 Founders: A group of eclectic collectors
  4. Inside Pinterest
  5. [1]
  6. Meet Ben Silbermann
  7. Pinterest Finally Ditches Invitations, Now Lets Anyone Sign Up
  8. Pinterest Hits 10 Million U.S. Monthly Uniques Faster Than Any Standalone Site Ever
  9. This Is Everything You Need To Know About Pinterest
  10. 10.0 10.1 Infographic Interest in Pinterest
  11. Pinterest, Instagram continue meteoric growth
  12. The Secret Behind Pinterest’s Growth Was Marketing, Not Engineering, Says CEO Ben Silbermann
  13. Pinterest pins down $100M in new
  14. 14.0 14.1 Pinterest valued at more than $1bn after raising $100m funding
  15. Pinterest Funding
  16. Announcing Blocking & More Controls
  17. Pinterest for Iphone
  18. Pinterest to Launch Android App at Google I/O 2012?
  19. Introducing Pinterest for Android, iPad and iPhone
  20. 20.0 20.1 9 Businesses Using Pinterest Contests to Drive Traffic and Exposure
  21. Pinterest tightens copyright rules
  22. With Pinpointing, Zappos hooks up Pinterest with e-commerce
  23. Pinterest Contests and Sweeps, Turbocharged by Tech: This Holiday Season, Brands rely on Pinfluencer Promotions Platform to manage Holiday Promotions on Pinterest
  24. Five Ways Pinterest Can Benefit Your Business
  25. 25.0 25.1 25.2 25.3 25.4 Getting Insights Into Your Pinterest Efforts
  26. 5 tools to help you master Pinterest
  27. 27.0 27.1 Pinterest Terms of Service Get Updated
  28. 28.0 28.1 28.2 13 Essential Tools To Help Pin, Share & Track Better On Pinterest
  29. 29.0 29.1 8 Tools for Marketers Using Pinterest
  30. Pin Down for Pinterest
  31. 31.0 31.1 Pinterest Copyright & Trademark
  32. Prevent Pinning from your site
  33. The Crunchies Awards 2011
  34. SXSW Interactive Awards
  35. The Webby Awards

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