Pinterest

**Pinterest** is an American image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically "ideas") on the internet using images and, on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and had 463 million global monthly active users as of April 2023. It is operated by **Pinterest, Inc.**, based in San Francisco.

Pinterest, Inc.
 Type of business
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 Founded
 Headquarters
 Founder(s)
* Paul Sciarra
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 Employees
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 Users

## History

For 2020, Pinterest reported an advertising revenue of $1.7 billion, an increase of 48% from 2019. On March 3, 2021, Pinterest announced "Pinterest Premiere", a video ads product "which will appear in people’s feeds, targeted to their interests and other characteristics." Later in April, chief financial officer Todd Morgenfeld announced plans to spend more money on marketing in order to offset a potential slowdown in activity as the United States economy reopened, with more people getting vaccinated for COVID-19.

On October 20, 2021, Bloomberg reported that PayPal is interested in acquiring Pinterest, with a potential price of around $70 a share. PayPal's board and management decided later that same week to back away from a potential deal.

In December 2021, Pinterest acquired the editing and video creation app Vochi. Following this, In May 2022, it was announced that Pinterest released a new video streaming app “Pinterest TV studio”. The app is aimed at allowing users to live-stream on its platform and use different devices for different angles while live-streaming on the Pinterest platform.

On June 28, 2022, Pinterest announced that co-founder, CEO and President, Ben Silberman would transition to the newly created role of Executive Chairman, and online commerce expert Bill Ready will become Chief Executive Officer and a member of the Board of Directors.

In January 2023 at CES, Pinterest announced its partnership with LiveRamp, a data enablement platform to create data 'clean rooms' for selected advertisers on the platform. These 'clean rooms' will allow Pinterest's ad partners to utilize first-party data for personalized ads without having to share the data with Pinterest. With data privacy a large concern for online platforms and its users, this partnership is an effort to stimulate ad business on the platform while keeping its user's data safe and in compliance with new data collection regulations. The first advertiser to pilot this feature will be grocery retailer, Albertsons with a winter healthy eating campaign.

## Features and Content

The creators behind Pinterest summarized the service as a "catalogue of ideas" that inspires users to "go out and do that thing", although that it is not an image-based "social network". It also has a very large fashion profile. In later years, Pinterest has also been described as a "visual search engine".

Pinterest consists mainly of "pins" and "boards". A pin is an image that has been linked from a website or uploaded. Pins saved from one user's board can be saved to someone else's board, a process known as "repinning". Boards are collections of pins dedicated to a theme such as quotations, travel, or weddings. Boards with multiple ideas can have different sections that further contain multiple pins. Users can follow and unfollow other users as well as boards, which would fill the "home feed".

Content can also be found outside Pinterest and similarly uploaded to a board via the "Save" button, which can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser, or be implemented by a webmaster directly on the website. It was originally called the "Pin it" button but was renamed in 2016 to "Save" due to international expansion, making the site more intuitive to new users.

In August 2016, Pinterest launched a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site.

### Legal status

In February 2012, photographer and lawyer Kirsten Kowalski wrote a blog post explaining how her interpretation of copyright law led her to delete all her infringing pins. The post contributed to scrutiny over Pinterest's legal status. The post went viral and reached founder Ben Silbermann who contacted Kowalski to discuss making the website more compliant with the law.

### Terms of service

Pinterest's earlier terms of service ambiguously asserted ownership of user content. A March 2012 article in *Scientific American* criticized Pinterest's self-imposed ownership of user content stating that "Pinterest's terms of service have been garnering a lot of criticism for stating in no uncertain terms that anything you 'pin' to their site belongs to them. Completely. Wholly. Forever and for always."

At the time, Pinterest's terms of service stated that "By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services." Under these terms all personal, creative and intellectual property posted to the site belonged to the website and could be sold. A *Scientific American* blogger pointed out that this contradicted another line in the terms of service, that "Cold Brew Labs does not claim any ownership rights in any such Member Content".

Several days later, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that, once implemented in April, ended the site's previous claims of ownership of posted images. "Selling content was never our intention", said the company in a blog post.

### Culture of discrimination

In 2020, two former Pinterest employees, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks went public about their experience at Pinterest. Both women recounted experiences of discrimination at work, including racist comments, unequal pay, and punishment for speaking out. Additionally, Ozoma claims that the company failed to protect her when personal information was shared with hate sites by a colleague of hers. In response, Pinterest released an apology statement and CEO Ben Silbermann sent an email to all employees pushing the company to do better.

In August 2020, hundreds of Pinterest staff participated in a virtual walkout in support of two former colleagues who publicly accused the company of racism and gender discrimination.

In December 2020, Pinterest agreed to pay its former Chief Operating Officer a record-breaking $20M+ to settle a lawsuit alleging "rampant discrimination, hostile work environment, and misogyny". The settlement was conditional upon Pinterest publicly acknowledging that it must do more to improve its workplace culture.

In November 2021, Pinterest settled a lawsuit that alleged racial and gender discrimination. The company agreed to pay $50 million on improving its diversity and to release former employees from non-disclosure agreements. The settlement was in regard to allegations made by Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, who went public in June 2020 with accusations of racism and discrimination at the company.

## Logo

The logo consists of a letter P on a red circle. This logo represents the pin.