Pinterest is a different type of social media platform – based entirely around images and short ‘gif’ animations, it provides a visual medium for sharing information among the brands and individuals who make up its user-base. Just don’t say this to CEO Ben Silbermann, who insists his company is not a social media network but a ‘catalog of ideas’. In fairness to him, Pinterest’s strong profitability and clear value proposition to advertisers make it very unusual among newer social media platforms like Snapchat.

First launched in 2009 as a desktop website, Pinterest began to take off after launching an iPhone compatible app in 2011. A decade later, Pinterest is extremely popular for users interested in food, fashion, and a range of other topics. Users can create a ‘board’ of pinned images with descriptions that can be browsed or searched using the built-in search engine.

With over 450 million active users, and annual revenues in the billions, Pinterest turned profitable in 2021, fuelled by advertisement revenue from paid content called ‘promoted pins’. Its sophisticated search function is supported by its major engineering department, and since its IPO in 2019, a growing commercial support team of salespeople.

Pinterest’s 2019 IPO launched on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ‘PINS’ and was an immediate success at a price of $19 per share, indicating a value of $10 billion. In 2021, the company’s market value was $28.6 billion. Founder Ben Silbermann remains the company’s largest shareholder with 38% of Pinterest stock, and the IPO included a controversial ‘dual class’ share structure which ensures the founders retain control of the publicly-traded company. Despite this, Pinterest has attracted significant institutional interest, with T Rowe Price and Vanguard both major shareholders.