Pinterest may soon join Uber and Snapchat in the elite class of startups valued at $10 billion or more.
According to The Wall Street Journal—citing anonymous sources—the company is discussing a $500 million round of funding, which would value Pinterest at $11 billion.
Pinterest declined to comment on the WSJ report. But such a valuation would be a huge leap from the $5 billion valuation it received last year, indicating growing faith among investors that Pinterest’s recent dive into the world of digital advertising is working.
Pinterest has been one of the last holdouts of the digital advertising space. It only opened its Promoted Pins tool up to advertisers this January, after vetting it with a select few advertisers last year. Those tests showed that users weren’t as opposed to seeing ads on Pinterest as they have been on other platforms. In fact, they enjoyed the ads so much that they shared them on their own Pinterest boards, expanding advertiser reach by an average of 30 percent.
If the new round of funding is any indication, it seems these initial tests have persuaded investors that Pinterest stands a chance of being a formidable competitor to existing digital advertising platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
The valuation also reflects Pinterest’s grand ambitions to transform the platform into the No. 1 place to discover new things. Looked at from that angle, Pinterest could be classified as a search engine, not for finding a specific piece of information, but for stumbling upon information you might want.
Plenty of people already use Pinterest for that exact reason — to find recipes they didn’t know they needed or DIY projects they never knew were possible. Last week, Pinterest announced a partnership with Apple to make discovering new apps from the sea of options in the App Store a little easier.
All of this amounts to every advertiser’s dream: having direct access to a group of people who are actively browsing for new things to buy and do. According to the Journal’s sources, the funding will help flesh out this business model, as well as help Pinterest expand internationally and manage its explosive user growth.
No comments:
Post a Comment