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Comment by wting | Hacker News Reader

I think many HN readers have a hard time relating to Pinterest because we aren't the target demographic, but from what I can find they have great metrics.

The question is whether they can monetize despite lack of purchasing intent (as compared to Google, Amazon, Yelp, etc). However from some anecdotal evidence[0], it appears that growing revenue may not be as difficult for Pinterest as it is for Facebook or Twitter.

I'm pretty bullish on Pinterest, and a $3.8B valuation doesn't seem out of line compared to Twitter ($20B) and Facebook (~$80B pre-IPO), Instagram ($500M).

[0]: http://mashable.com/2012/03/28/pinterest-amazon-spam/

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Heh, careful with that "we" - don't leave out those of us who are in the target demographic of both Hacker News and Pinterest. :)

I have less purchasing intent while browsing Pinterest than I do while looking at Yelp or Amazon (or Etsy), but I spend more time on Pinterest than on shopping sites. I've bought several things I had originally pinned just because they were interesting and then later realized would make a good gift for somebody.

Did you end up going back to Pinterest to find them or did you just have it in your head after pinning it? The entire attribution of a pin to a purchase in a store is tough if there's no obvious path from Pinterest to the retailer.

I usually go back to Pinterest to find the specific thing, and sometimes I'm directly browsing through my pins while trying to think of a gift. But it's a leaky system of course; for example, sometimes I've pinned a Flickr photo of the thing instead of an image linked to a website that sells the thing.

Arguably there is a lot of purchasing intent if users are pinning things they wished they owned.

The data alone must be valuable. If you were a brand and you got an idea of who pins your wares, and what else they pin, and their demo, you could really sharpen your marketing messages. You could also uncover affinities you didn't know about.

I disagree re: lack of purchasing intent. Pinterest is, in many ways, a personally curated gallery of things people want.

If I were to sort social media properties by purchasing intent, I'd put pinterest near the top - certainly far above facebook or twitter, probably above google too. Still below Amazon, but Amazon is also not fundamentally social, whereas Pinterest is.

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