Marie C. Cassandra

I find it quite baffling that I hear so many people say “Sure, Pinterest is popular right now, but where’s the money?”. Here’s a quick look at a couple of their potential monetization strategies:

Strategy #1: Monetizing Leads to Retailers

Exactly how valuable the traffic Pinterest is sending to retailers remains to be seen. Amazon Researchers are saying it doesn’t generate a lot of sales, but Shopify is telling a different story. Either way, Pinterest is quickly becoming one of the top sources of referral traffic.

Back in February, Josh Davis at LLsocial learned that Pinterest was using SkimLinks to “affiliatize” their links (can I coin that?). However, Pinterest CEO, Ben Silbermann, was quick to reply to Davis that this was just an experiment and that they aren’t focusing on generating revenue just yet.  Jeremy Levine also chimed in to say “Pinterest’s monetization strategy isn’t in the oven and it’s not even off the baking table. We have one hundred ideas, but no execution as of yet.”

This post by Alexis Madrigal hits the nail right on the head when he says that Pinterest is “playing dumb about making money”. He even goes so far as to crunch the numbers to show that continuing on this business model should be more than enough to justify their $200 million valuation. But Rags Srinvasan over at GigaOM posts a counter argument. However, Srinvasan’s whole argument is based on the revenue they are generating solely off of driving traffic to retailers. It doesn’t take into account the potential of any of the other proverbial baked goods waiting on the baking table.

E-commerce godzilla Rakuten obviously sees this potential and no doubt hopes to integrate Pinterest with their system.