Pinterest Raises $367M at $11B valuation

You know when you hear about a lot of insane valuations and your jaw sort of drops in disbelief?<p>I feel the opposite when I think about Pinterest. My immediate reaction here is &quot;yeah, makes sense.&quot; I guess it must stem from my marketing agency days. I had SO MANY clients begging me to get them into Pinterest ads when they released. I also sit at home and see how much time my wife spends on the site and how dedicated she is to discovery through the app, especially as she makes many purchasing decisions after seeing things she likes pinned, from food to furniture.<p>Seems like a no-brainer that this one is going to end up crossing the IPO finish line at some point, and I would imagine they have bigger and better plans moving forward. I barely think they&#x27;ve scratched the surface of profitability.

I love pinterest because the type of people on Hacker News are obviously not the target audience and so can&#x27;t understand it.<p>Someone gets engaged. Almost every day between that day and their wedding will be on pinterest to get great ideas on every single item &#x2F; food &#x2F; clothing involved.<p>It&#x27;s like amazon referrals on steroids

For anyone who thinks this is high: when my wife (and lots of other women in her social group) is in the market for clothes, or wedding ideas, or baby&#x2F;nursery ideas, she goes to Pinterest first. That is <i>huge</i> potential for monetization from advertising and affiliate sales.<p>Pinterest is where shopping starts for tons of young women (primarily) with money.

&gt; Since launching in 2009, Pinterest has raised $764M dollars; once this round closes (whether or not they raise the full $578M), they’ll have surpassed the billion dollar mark.<p>For the sake of this comment let&#x27;s assume that Pinterest has never had any income at all... can someone please explain what they have spent, or plan on spending, over $1B on? If there isn&#x27;t a plan to spend this money, what other motivations could they have for raising so much money and why are investors still pouring it in?

I work for a magazine corporation that does 86 million visitors a view a month. From the publication and media industry, this makes total sense. Within content circulation, Pinterest is often in the top tier of traffic referrers. They are often right after Facebook and in some cases even higher.

I wish they would just hurry up and IPO so I could invest in them. Anyone who thinks Pinterest isn&#x27;t worth much, or it&#x27;s just a scrapbook website, clearly doesn&#x27;t have a woman in their life. My wife (and really every woman I know) use Pinterest all the time WITH THE INTENT TO PURCHASE things. Planning weddings, and nurseries, and houses, and remodeling, and and and...<p>That is why Google is valuable. People go there with intent to buy things. Facebook has learned how to make money. Twitter has learned how to make money. Pinterest has a much much easier road than either of those did. The people investing in this round will absolutely make money.

I&#x27;ve said it before.<p>Pinterest is what Delicious should have been, if Yahoo had any vision at all.

Isn&#x27;t the holy grail of advertising perfect targeting? Users aren&#x27;t annoyed by the perceived degradation of the platform where the ads are served, ad companies don&#x27;t waste money on ads the user isn&#x27;t interested in, and the clicks result in far more revenue. Pinterest is a leap in this direction. They have enormous potential and a brilliant team.<p>I can&#x27;t remember a time I&#x27;ve purposefully clicked an ad on Facebook&#x2F;Twitter. The only problem with Pinterest is that it seems plagued by duplicate content.

A lot of people here dismiss Pinterest as just a &quot;digital scrapbook&quot; or &quot;marketing tool&quot;. And while Pinterest is those things, it&#x27;s also a new way of searching. And that&#x27;s where the real value of Pinterest is. Their search technology has the potential to rival Google. I think that&#x27;s worth a valuation of several billion dollars.

nearly a million per employee. what the heck do they plan on using that much capital for... especially with forthcoming ad revenue.

What are they going to do with the money? How good can they make their website?

Anyway to see how much of the company is still in the hands of founders?

Does anyone else think 11B is insane? Higher valued than Dropbox and Airbnb? They must have pitched hell of a monetisation plan.

Getting some more money in before the bubble bursts. Intelligent move. Everyone should do that before it&#x27;s too late.

I&#x27;m surprised they didn&#x27;t get acquired yet. Surely they must have turned an offer or two down by now.

Good, world needs more consumer internet startups. All the B2B has been getting depressing.

its a visual search engine that is taking share from google. It&#x27;s ad formats perform as well as search ads. $11B is undervalued, especially compared to whatsapp et al.

seems weird to raise so much money at this point in the game... a third of a billion dollars...

This shows that we are in a major bubble...finally poised for a major major market correction.

I can&#x27;t stand Pinterest or any other site that forces me to login to see content that they copied from other sites.

This seems like an amazingly high valuation for a company that basically does digital scrapbooking.

That&#x27;s larger than the market cap of LG, Citrix, Mitsubishi, Isuzu, Nvidia, to name a few. And those are companies that produce real goods and have real assets.<p>But is it overvalued? Only time will tell

It&#x27;s getting awfully frothy around here. I keep getting reminded of headlines like these (except that the numbers are even more insane now):<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1999/10/26/business/excite-home-to-acquire-bluemountain.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;1999&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;business&#x2F;excite-home-to-ac...</a>

Good. In the age when the planet is faced with overpopulation, climate change, pollution and a myriad of other issues, including the shadow of ww3, the investors bet on a photo-sharing startup.<p>Down-voters rejoice, but I couldn&#x27;t care less about pinterest and what it offers. Maybe I&#x27;m getting old or maybe being a parent gives me a different perspective, but 11B for nicely arranged list of photos is idiotic.<p>I&#x27;m sure it makes a lot of business sense to the investors, which is the really sad part of it all.