The total valuation of the company at the time reached $12 billion. In February 2019, The Wall Street Journal stated that Pinterest secretly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock.

Īlthough starting out as a 'social network' with boards, in later years the company has put increasing emphasis in visual search and e-commerce, such as shopping catalogs. Users' existing indexes of liked posts were converted into a collection ('board') named as such. In April 2017, Pinterest removed their dedicated post 'liking' feature as it seemed redundant to 'boards', which are user collections of posts.

In October 2012, Pinterest launched business accounts allowing businesses to either convert their existing personal accounts into business accounts or start from scratch. On August 10, 2012, Pinterest altered their policy so that a request or an invitation was no longer required to join the site. On March 23, 2012, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that eliminated the policy that gave it the right to sell its users' content. įounder Ben Silbermann (left) at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March 2012 Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011. This was followed by an iPad app and Pinterest Mobile, a version of the website for non-iPhone users. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in more downloads than expected. Silbermann said he wrote to the first 5,000 users, offering his phone number and even meeting with some of them. Nine months after the launch, the website had 10,000 users. The development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype as a closed beta in March 2010. The behavior struck a chord with Silberman, 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. Tote users were, however, amassing large collections of favorite items and sharing them with other users. 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. Tote struggled as a business, significantly due to difficulties with mobile payments. The idea for Pinterest emerged from an earlier app created by Ben Silberman and Paul Sciarra called Tote which served as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs. It is operated by Pinterest, Inc., based in San Francisco. The site was created by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and had 433 million global monthly active users as of July 2022. Pinterest is an image sharing and social media service designed to enable saving and discovery of information (specifically 'ideas') on the internet using images, and on a smaller scale, animated GIFs and videos, in the form of pinboards. US$3.038 Billion ( Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2021) US$3.537 Billion ( Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2021) US$316.438 Million ( Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2021) US$326.187 Million ( Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2021) US$2.578 Billion ( Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2021)

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