Caterpillar Cowboy

noupside:

This is a dress I pinned on Pinterest. I like vintage dresses, and sometimes save pics of awesome ones that I’ll never be able to buy. 2379 people have repinned this so far. 

This isn’t a #humblebrag. Seeing all of the repin notices got me thinking about what kind of curation experience Pinterest facilitates, why it resonates, and how monetizeable curated boards really are.

There have been a few great posts making the rounds lately about how user-generated social content on the web has been progressing from creation to curation. Social visual bookmarking has become a very popular tool for sharing and discovering content. Pinterest is by far the largest of the sites dedicated to this behavior, but several of the more niche communities also have a devoted following.

More eyes on a site means more appeal for marketers and businesses, especially when users are telegraphing their interests in a very granular way. Monetate has already released an infographic explaining the value of Pinterest to businesses. “Pin It” widgets are popping up on retail pages, and wedding blogs are rhapsodizing about the “pinability” of the Real Weddings they feature.

But there’s something interesting about what people are choosing to pin. Most of the things I see on these sites aren’t actually purchasable. There’s a lot of content that can best be classified as aspirational or inspirational. People are collecting images of beautiful things. So am I; most of my pins are things I can’t afford or that can’t be bought.

There’s a big divide between aspirational shopping (“window shopping”) and actual shopping (“purchasing something”). Most of the time, actual shopping isn’t all that exciting. The things people are most likely to spend money on are also the things they wouldn’t bother to pin; there’s nothing noteworthy about the socks and beige t-shirt I picked up at H&M today. Some of the specifically shopping-focused pinboard sites are trying to bridge that gap, but their lack of traction relative to Pinterest’s may indicate that for most people, pinning isn’t about a specific transaction.

For brands, gleaning monetizeable information from data is largely about discerning intent, and that’s a difficult problem. It’s particularly difficult in a situation where a person is ostensibly telegraphing their taste, but is really pinning the things they can’t buy. Some boards will signal intent, of course - I made one to keep track of gear I need for an upcoming hiking trip - but pinning behavior leans strongly towards collecting inspirational or aspirational images. It almost feels spammy to pin practical things. The Atlantic published an article wondering whether Pinterest actually makes users less likely to consume. They get the endorphin rush of pinning a $500 purse without the buyer’s remorse of actually purchasing it. It’s window shopping on Madison Avenue from the comfort of the couch.

None of this is meant to imply that there aren’t fantastic monetization opportunities to be had. Pinterest demographics as of late January 2012 indicate that users are 80% female, a majority are between 25-44 years old with 70% falling into the $25-$75k/year income bracket; that’s a market that loves e-commerce.  But it’ll be interesting to see how pinning is worked into a psychographic profile when what most people are collecting is pictures of things they aren’t actually going to buy.

This is one of the reasons why I think Tumblr can crush Pinterest and Svpply in e-commerce if it chooses to.

parislemon:

In the don’t-call-them-comments notes section on my post about Tumblr’s new Highlighted Posts feature, Jenna Wortham brings up a good point:

Def agree its smart of Tumblr to try new things - but the return here seems minimal. You aren’t broadening yr audience by highlighting content to people who already read you. Best case: Someone spends an extra 5 secs looking at your post. Then what?

On the surface, true. But I think there are several interesting things this feature opens up for Tumblr. A “Highlighted” area is the most obvious. Or maybe something like: pay $1 to highlight a post to your followers, pay $10 to highlight to all of Tumblr. That would probably get a bit spammy so maybe you only have the option to pay the $10 to highlight to all only if you got enough “hearts” from the $1 highlight of those following you. 

That’s just a few quick ideas. There is a lot of potential here. 

But even the most simple angle may be interesting. You pay to highlight and your post get more hearts and reblogs as a result, so perhaps that post is seen by many more people than they normally would be. Doesn’t seem like a bad bet for $1.

More importantly, if Tumblr can get more credit cards on file for one-click transactions… a whole new world opens up.

I’d love to see that $10 option but maybe make it pay for performance - you get charged up to $X, depending on the results you see of the promotion. Sort of begs the question, what is a “Like” worth on Tumblr?

I also want to see this tied to tag / search pages. Then you can set up something more like AdWords - I can buy keywords to get highlighted in those results.

Regardless of what happens, huge kudos to Tumblr for having the balls to try stuff. I know from my time at Etsy that pissing off your community is a real and tangible fear. Keep trying guys, see what sticks.

noupside:

Above is a screenshot of the SharesPost Venture-Backed Private company index. It’s composed of seven Companies of Interest, which have changed several times this year as the big names in private tech companies have IPO’d.  Since FB is obviously going to be removed from the index fairly soon, I thought it’d be fun to do some Russells-inspired guessing on what the replacement company would be.    

The methodology is a little bit opaque…no company can be more than 25% of the weight of the index, though FB has >10x the “index value” of Twitter, its closest neighbor.  Considering last price for EHarmony and Linden Lab would lower their value substantially, but the last trades were in Sept 2010 so they’re outside of the 120-day input period. Intriguingly, index member with the lowest value (Serious Energy) has no disclosed numbers at all for any of the four inputs. 

The companies with current buy-side interest at the moment are Dropbox, Eventbrite, SolarCity, Square, SugarCRM, Yammer, and Yelp.  On the sell side, we have a different list of companies, a bit longer…household names include Ideeli, Path, and Chegg.  The only one that overlaps is SolarCity.   

The problem with this index is that ‘research’ based on unknown factors (and maybe private data) is what really determines the index values. My guess is that the addition will be Yelp, which has a last trade on 11/9/11 “valuing” it around $1.6B.  Silver Spring and SolarCity are also contenders based on quasi-recent trades and indicated interest.  But really, this seems like a vanity index with little quantitative rhyme or reason to what’s included.  What is clear is that FB has been driving this business.

On a related noted: NYT has a Dealbook piece today about what happens to secondary markets when FB goes public. SecondMarket has built a solid business in other asset classes.  It’ll be interesting to see how SharesPost fares.

Agreed - Yelp would be my pick from this list. Chegg isn’t really well known enough to generate interest from non-techies. LivingSocial seems to have lost it’s luster, especially since Amazon disclosed they lost $558M last year.