Business Model Canvas for Pinterest

Silberman, Pinterest’s chief executive, how the company made money¹-“Right now we don’t. But the big-picture assumption of the company is that there is a direct link between the things you pin and the things that you eventually spend money on. In there, we think, lies a model where we can actually make Pinterest more useful. And we can help businesses by bringing in more customers and helping them sell things and connect with people.”

Pinterest, a social, web-based scrapbooking application launched in 2009², lets users virtually “pin” images they like to various “boards”. It serves two sets of customers- first users have the ability to virtually “clip” and “pin” various products/ services/ pictures of interest and share it within the community, this is provided at no charge and second- it allows retailers and businesses to pin point their customer’s interests and market to them. It is this second set of customers who will help generate revenue. Through a recently tested “promoted-pins” offering, Pinterest plans to charge for advertisements based the user’s pins.

Pinterest, has shored up some key partners- VisualGraph a cloud-based image recognition and search platform was acquired in January 2014. Piquora (previously Pinfluencer) an analytics firms that tracks brands on Pinterest is a key partner. Twitter, Facebook, Google and Bing are also key partners who drive traffic and content. Pinterest also needs image content creators and managers like Getty Images. But its primary key partner is the large community of users who build content and share it. As of June 2013 there were over 70 million users, 80% of them women³.

Their key resources are people and the server infrastructure. They currently use Amazon’s EC2 and S3 for servers and storage (over 400 Terabytes) respective. This saves on capital investment and provides easy scalability⁴. As of March 2014, they have 300 employees. These also form their primary costs, people, office spaces (US & International) and infrastructure. In addition they have made a number of defensive acquisitions (punchfork and livestar- both of which are content discovery and sharing platforms). Their channels are primarily web-based with websites and mobile apps on IOS and Android.

Pinterest, has not posted any revenues, however is poised to make good on its promise to investors through ad revenue which specifically targets users based on their interest and “pins”. Pinterest allows retailers and firms to market to specific users knowing what they exactly want, .