This is an accepted version of this page Pinterest is an American social media service for publishing and discovery of information[5] in the form of pinboards.
[9] Pinterest emerged from an earlier app created by Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra called Tote[10] which served as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs.
At the time, mobile payment technology was not sophisticated enough to enable easy on-the-go transactions, inhibiting users from making many purchases via the app.
The behavior struck a chord with Silbermann, and he shifted the company to building Pinterest, which allowed users to create collections of a variety of items and share them with each other.
[17] In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week.
[22] On March 23, 2012, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that eliminated the policy that gave it the right to sell its users' content.
[27][28] Although starting out as a "social network" with boards, in later years the company has put increasing emphasis in visual search[29] and e-commerce,[30] such as shopping catalogs.
[31] In February 2019, The Wall Street Journal stated that Pinterest secretly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock.
[34] 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.
[51] 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,[52] or be implemented by a webmaster directly on the website.
[53] In August 2016, Pinterest launched a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site.
[56] Promoted Pins are based on an individual user's interests, things done on Pinterest, or a result of visiting an advertiser's site or app.
This rollout is following the review by NBC News by Stephen Sauer of the nonprofit Canadian centre for Child Protection, who found that "his homepage 'almost immediately' filled with images of children often dressed in similarly revealing attire, several of which had received sexually suggestive comments".
[76] In order to further the agenda of protecting young users, Pinterest has added more affordances for reporting 'spam', 'inappropriate cover images', and options to 'call-out when content may involve a minor'.
[92] In early 2011, the company secured a US$10 million Series A financing led by Jeremy Levine and Sarah Tavel of Bessemer Venture Partners.
[93] Co-founder Paul Sciarra left his position at Pinterest in April 2012 for a consulting job as entrepreneur in residence at Andreessen Horowitz.
[94] On May 17, 2012, Japanese electronic commerce company Rakuten announced it was leading a $100 million investment in Pinterest, alongside investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital, based on a valuation of $1.5 billion.
[101] In August 2020, Pinterest paid $89.5 million to cancel a large office space lease on a to-be-completed complex in San Francisco's SoMa area, near its current headquarters.
[38] In June 2022, Pinterest announced its definitive agreement to acquire San Francisco based AI-driven fashion shopping platform, The Yes.
Pinterest users cannot claim safe harbor status and as such are exposed to possible legal action for pinning copyright material.
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.
[117] The post went viral and reached founder Ben Silbermann who contacted Kowalski to discuss making the website more compliant with the law.
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.
[118]According to Monoyios, Pinterest's claim to a broad license to sell user content potentially undermined artists' ability to monetize their own work.
[119] 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.
While Pinterest is not known for its political content, experts identified the ban as consistent with Chinese government efforts to use website blocks and the "Great Firewall" as an industrial policy tool to promote Chinese tech companies (e.g., Baidu, Youku, Weibo, and Renren) by censoring foreign tech companies.
[126] In January 2019, Pinterest stopped returning search results relating to vaccines, in an effort to somehow slow the increase of anti-vaccination content on the platform.
[126] Prior to the measure, the company said that the majority of vaccination-related images shared on the platform were anti-vaccination, contradicting the scientific research establishing the safety of vaccines.
"[127] In December 2019, following a campaign from the activist group Color of Change, Pinterest announced that it would restrict content that advertises wedding events on former slave plantations.
[129][130] In August 2020, dozens of Pinterest staff participated in a virtual walkout in support of two former colleagues who publicly accused the company of racism and gender discrimination.
