The Circuit of Culture of
Visual Discovery Engine
Founder Ben Silbermann
Established 2010
Location San Francisco, CA
IDENTITY
Pinterest feeds are wildly different among users; every user has a unique space on the site to “pin” their inspiration. But each user also has a different purpose for using Pinterest. Some are small-business owners, others are marketing directors, some are looking for their next DIY project, and most are causal surfers who simply enjoy the personalized aesthetics of their feeds. The multifaceted uses of Pinterest make it so appealing as a website and application, and with 442 million users (and counting), its value continues to increase, and its identity becomes more defined. Of the nearly half-billion users, women make up 60% of the audience, with a growing number of male users in the recent years, and there is a fair mix of millennial and Gen-Z users [1].
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Since Pinterest’s popularity comes from the number of users to create and share content on the site, it is important to consider how the site gained so many users to begin with. Businesses that use Pinterest to advertise also benefit from increased site traffic. When Pinterest was first created in 2010, it relied on word-of-mouth advertising, and the creators took the site to community leaders and let them talk about the site with their friends and neighbors. It also gained popularity as a more understated social media network. While other sites, like Facebook and Instagram, are all about showcasing one’s “best self,” Pinterest boards are inherently personal in that users can create private boards to keep their inspiration and ideas to themselves [2]. In order to get relevant and personalized content, Pinterest users are required to be authentic about their likes and dislikes, and each board they create is an expression of their creative self.
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For smaller businesses, like Floor and Décor, Pinterest provides an affordable advertisement option and a way to find new customers. Floor and Décor is a home remodeling retailer that joined Pinterest in 2018 in hopes of connecting with customers and nudging them towards purchases. Since then, the business has tripled its sales, promoted nearly all of its products, and rolled out personalized campaigns for customers [3]. In this way, Pinterest’s identity is made up of not only consumers searching for product inspiration, but also of businesses who can provide those products. For small businesses, Pinterest is essential to establishing themselves to consumers. In a way, the identity of Pinterest defines the identity of businesses on Pinterest.
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[1] “Audience Insights: A Closer Look at Who's on Pinterest.” Pinterest Business, 12 Apr. 2017.
[2] Tan, Jon. “How Pinterest Grew From 3,000 to 73 Million Users.” Referral Candy, 5 June 2020.
[3] “Success Stories.” Pinterest Business, 2020.
An example of a "save pin" widget (top left). An example of a "follow" widget that might be found on a merchant's website or a blog (top).
The Pinterest 100- the most popular Pinterest trends of 2020.
See the PDF version here:
REPRESENTATION
Some small businesses rely on Pinterest for their own advertisement and product promotion, but how does Pinterest market itself to these businesses and to attract new users? When the site was first launched, most people who first encountered the site were unsure of how to use it or its purpose. To encourage engagement, the founders teamed up with a local organizer who created a program called “Pin It Forward.” This was a newsletter amongst bloggers who shared “pins” about creative topics. This publication helped the site take off in the “blogosphere,” and thus inspired new users to join the site. In the last few years, the site presents itself as a new type of social media, focused on sharing creative projects. Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann describes the mission of Pinterest is to “get you offline,” and users should get inspiration for their next great projects from pins on the site. On the official site, Pinterest is listed as a “visual search engine,” again speaking to the idea that Pinterest represents a place for users to find what they love [1]. Pinterest also encourages merchants and other third-party sites that use Pinterest to advertise to link to their Pinterest profiles and pins from their own sites. For example, merchants can add a “Pin it” widget to their sites to allow browsers to save an image of a product that they like to their personal Pinterest boards. Linking back to Pinterest is essentially an advertisement for using Pinterest.
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The popularity of Pinterest lies in the reproducibility of the “pins.” Users are encouraged to try out the recipes, styles, and home-improvement ideas posted on the site and then post their results and reviews. This phenomenon of making “Pinterest-worthy” creations has grown in recent years and more users attempt the most creative projects to reach that “worthy” status. The most popular pins are all aesthetically pleasing and bring a sense of satisfaction, and the push to recreate them has boosted the popularity of Pinterest itself as new users flock to the site to try the newest trends [2].
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Pinterest profiles are an amalgamation of the user’s personality and a collection of unique ideas. In this way, Pinterest represents individuality and inspiration. To casual users, it is a place to relieve boredom, find inspiration, and “discover beautiful things.” While Pinterest was originally founded as a shopping app, it has transformed into a social networking site, and users can share pins, images, and other content on the site.[3] For businesses, Pinterest represents a platform for advertising their products and target marketing to the audiences who are most likely to engage and purchase them. Similarly, bloggers find Pinterest to be a place to share their thoughts and tips to readers who are looking for advice. These different representations of the site all come back to how Pinterest can be associated with different types of users, which leads to the identity of Pinterest.
[1] Carlson, Nicholas. "Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became the Web's Next Big Thing.” Business Insider. April 24, 2012.
[2] “Pinterest Trends.” Pinterest Business, 2020.
[3] Carlson, Nicholas. "Pinterest CEO: Here's How We Became the Web's Next Big Thing.” Business Insider. April 24, 2012.
CONSUMPTION
Since its launch in 2010, Pinterest has become a staple for design inspiration, new project ideas, and even relieving boredom. Nearly 98% of users report that they use Pinterest to “try new things,” and 89% of weekly users buy products using Pinterest.[1] According to Mull and Seung-Eun, the three most popular pin topics are organization, entertainment, and fashion. The majority of users are on the website for personal use, but businesses and marketing agents are most frequently also selling products in these categories.[2] The growth of Pinterest has relied on the amount that users consume the content on the site. Because the site and app have “infinite scrolling” users virtually never run out of content to view. Similar to the way Tik Tok and YouTube recommendation algorithms work, Pinterest's "smart feed" shows users content based on previous searches and engagement. When users create their accounts on the site, they can select their interests from 12-15 topics, and their feed is usually based on pins in these categories. The longer users spend on the app, the more attuned the feed becomes to their tastes. Even the promoted products are personalized, and most advertisements are placed in the feed because of previous searches for similar product categories. Users can engage with pins by liking, commenting, or repinning to continue seeing similar content.
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Since users are always seeing new posts and trends, they keep returning to the app and establish platform loyalty. The effects of this were seen especially during the Covid-19 quarantine in the US. The PINS stock on NYSE has been amassing worth over the last few months, mostly due to the explosion of social media during stay-at-home mandates. In a way, browsing on Pinterest is akin to digital window-shopping, which was the perfect distraction during such an uncertain time. By June, the number of users with “commercial intent” increased by 50%.[3] Users have increasingly been dedicating their newfound time to try out new recipes, organization, and projects. The increase in users and collective scrolling time has allowed Pinterest to be integrated into everyday lives, to the point where it has more monthly users than Twitter.[4] This trend of consumption is also intertwined with the production of pins, as with more users on the site, more posts are created and distributed. The production of Pinterest is explored in the next section.
[1] “Audience Insights: A Closer Look at Who's on Pinterest.” Pinterest Business, 12 Apr. 2017.
[2] Mull, Ian R., and Seung-Eun Lee. "“PIN” Pointing the Motivational Dimensions behind Pinterest."
[3] David Moadel. "Pinterest Is a Covid Play That You Didn't See Coming." Nasdaq. October 13, 2020.
[4] David Moadel. "Pinterest Is a Covid Play That You Didn't See Coming." Nasdaq. October 13, 2020.
PRODUCTION
The Pinterest interface is integral to its brand, and the characteristic image grid is a trademark of the site. However, the site is largely based on original content from bloggers, merchants, influencers, and other creators. Users create “pins” containing images, recipes, videos, links to other webpages and any other “inspirational content.” These pins can be tagged by content, and the Pinterest algorithm places the pins on the feeds of users who show interest in the categories listed in the tags. Additionally, the pins can be searched by tags or creator username. Pins can be made in the app or on the site with original images, or they can be saved from websites with Pinterest widgets enabled. This is primarily how businesses, merchants, and bloggers create pins—they link images or articles from their respective sites. In advertising their products, businesses and merchants can pin pictures of featured products with links to the shop directly embedded in the pin.[1] Bloggers post recipes, DIY projects, and other creative content. Casual users and other bloggers recreate the content and post their results.
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This leads into the aspect of reproduction, and more specifically, “repinning.” When a user adds a pin a personalized board, this is called repinning. The board is a compilation of images, videos, articles, and links usually grouped by a category. The boards can be made private for personal use or public for other users to view and share. Public boards encourage the reproduction of pins, building off of the boards, and sharing content. Similar to how Twitter “retweets” or other reposts on social media, the number of times the original pin is repinned, the more value it gains. A study by Hall and Zarro about the site traffic on Pinterest found that repinning was the most frequent action, even more than following other users, adding comments, or creating original pins.[2] Repinning is essentially a tool for the user to save images and projects that inspire them and speaks to what content is most interesting.
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For businesses and merchants, Pinterest offers “rich pins,” which contain information about a product or brand, and the information is reproduced when the pin is repinned. For example, a clothing shop might choose to include pricing information, measurements, availability, or garment fabric. The extra metadata is embedded directly into the pin and is searchable on Pinterest and other search engines. The feed algorithm boosts rich pins since they are more informative than regular pins and therefore more engaging. Pinterest also validates rich pins and vets them for accuracy and quality, which leads to the regulation of pins, content, and advertisements.[3]
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[1] “Getting Started with the Pinterest Platform.” Pinterest Developers, 2018.
[2] Hall, Catherine, and Michael Zarro. "Social Curation on the Website Pinterest.com."
[3] Maris. “The Complete Guide to Pinterest Rich Pins: What Are They, Why You Need Them & How to Set Them Up
An example of a recipe rich pin with the metadata embedded into the pin description.
Reproduction: this is a collection of boards organized by topic. Pins that are posted by any user can be saved into boards.
REGULATION
As a social networking and content sharing site, Pinterest does not have a paywall or paid accounts for most users, they need only sign up with an email address and information about their interests. The only payment structure currently used is for advertising and marketing, for businesses that choose to run ads or promote products through Pinterest. Pinterest has a standard set of community guidelines, including prohibition of explicit, hateful, violent, harassment, or other harmful content in pins, stories, or comments. However, some of the stricter guidelines apply specifically to content creators and businesses running advertisements. Pinterest promotes the sale of physical products and prohibits the sale of inappropriate products like alcohol, weapons, drug paraphernalia, “adult products,” and medications, as well as advertisement of services or pyramid schemes.
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Because Pinterest caters to a wide demographic, it values authenticity and has taken steps to limit misleading and low-quality content. The Community Guidelines explicitly state that spam content, misinformation, clickbait, and accounts accused of impersonation are removed or blocked. As a marketing tool, businesses utilize Pinterest to link to affiliate sites, run contests, and popularize their brands, which can quickly become “spam-like.” Especially because some businesses use “pay-per-click” or “pay-per-pin” structures, Pinterest has implemented restrictions on creating false accounts to promote businesses or “pin” images, directly asking users to save or share pins to “hack the algorithm,” and posting irrelevant content to make money.[1] There are even more guidelines for advertising pins, specifically prohibiting ads that target users for "sensitive conditions" or inappropriately. Advertisements are also required to be labeled with "#ad" or as promoted content to keep users informed.
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For merchants who utilize the shopping feature of Pinterest, there are additional restrictions on how they can sell their goods. Pinterest is not involved in the transactions between consumers and businesses. Merchants can apply to become “verified,” indicating that Pinterest has deemed them a trustworthy store. These merchants must have a strong online presence, show accurate pricing and availability information, and positive reviews from consumers. This is another place that Pinterest vets the quality of merchants and their products to provide the richest consumer experience for users.[2] Generally, content that has been verified is also boosted in the Pinterest “smart feed” algorithm, which provides merchants increase exposure and promotion.
[1] “Community Guidelines.” Pinterest Policy, 2020.
[2] “Merchant Guidelines.” Pinterest Policy, 2020.
The pin outlined in red is an example of a promoted pin. This board has very similar looking thumbnails, so Pinterest keeps its users informed by tagging the advertisement as a promoted pin.
Merchants can get this coveted "blue check" by getting verified through Pinterest.
CULTURAL IMPACT
These humorous examples of Pinterest-worthy versus Pinterest-fail images have circulated around the web for years, changing with the most popular trends. They span all different topics, from baking to "artsy" decor projects. The prevalance of these memes and their attachment to Pinterest and the creators that start the trends is indicative of how embedded Pinterest is in internet culture.
