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Hey there. Welcome back to the simplepin podcast. I have often joked that I am part Pinterest strategist, part Pinterest historian, and part Pinterest agency owner. And for years I've wanted to do this podcast that covers the eras of Pinterest. Think about the Taylor Swift tour and her eras tour. I thought it would be fun to go back and look at how Pinterest has changed, how they got started and where we are today. So for you, if that's something you're interested in, pull up a chair, we are going to talk through it and I'm going to give you a couple resources sources for how you can go even deeper after this podcast. Just a reminder, if you are looking for anybody to help support you in your Pinterest marketing journey, whether it is ads or organic, simply book a call with our team. We'd love to meet with you to see if Pinterest is the next right step or your next right step is having this taken off your plate. So click on the link below with Discovery call. Book a call with our team and we'll figure out what path is is right for you. All right, Pinterest through the eras. Before I start, I'm going to let you know that I'm also going to have you listen to that other podcast that's linked down below in the description called Acquired. Acquired is a fantastic podcast. They have current editions like Trader Joe's, ikea, those two incredible. They are long. So if you are looking for something that you need to listen to, or I guess if you're looking for something that's shorter, this is not for you. If you're looking for something that you might need to break up over a couple of days, but it will be a fascinating and captive story. This is definitely for you and I feel like that's what they did here with Pinterest. One thing to note is that they did a deep dive right as Pinterest went public in 2019. So this podcast is seven years old, but the origin story makes it really entertaining. They go so super deep into it. So much deeper than I will be able to go into this episode today. So go listen to it. I'll link directly to it below in the description. All right, let's start at the beginning, the beginning of Pinterest, which we will call the Invite era. This is 2009-2012. Pinterest started in December of 2009 and the site officially launched beta to the public. Actually, I'll say closed beta In March of 2010 beginning founders were Ben Silberman, Evan Sharp, and Paul Ciara. They were the founders. Ben had previous experience at Google, and his wife worked at Facebook. I believe Evan was an architectural engineer. And I know Paul was in tech in New York City, but I forgot what he did at the moment. But he becomes a partner that falls off in a couple of years, so it's not super important what his origin story is. So the three of them were working on a shopping app, like a mobile shopping app called Tote. They wanted it to be seen as, like this virtual visual pin board for collecting and organizing and discovering your products. So they had this vision of, like, taking catalog information and putting it into Pinterest so that people could not only find what they're looking for, but it would be categorized in a way that would make sense. By the way, they uploaded 5,000 catalog listings by hand to Pinterest in order to get this started, which I was listening to that thinking, man, AI really is amazing at certain things like this and uploading things where we need it in a quick way. But in 2009, this is what you did. So how did we get the name Pinterest? So apparently they were trying to figure out a way to move it from the name Tote into something else. Over Thanksgiving, Ben and his wife were watching TV and they were talking about pin boards. A Dos Equis commercial comes on with the most interesting man, Jonathan Goldsmith. And his wife got the name suddenly and said, that's it. We're gonna call it Pinterest. Merging together pin for pin boards and interesting for Pinterest, which is so funny. I love that story because that's how names come about. Sometimes we labor over all of these ways that we can, you know, workshop names, and sometimes you just get it from a commercial. So that's what they did enter the launch in December of 2009 as Pinterest. Evan is the one who came up with the grid layout, which was really, actually innovative at the time. It had this way where you would see vertical photos, not horizontal, which horizontal was where all other platforms were at this point. And note, Pinterest is not an app at this point. It's only on the Web. So they're building everything. They're building out the whole structure of it just on the web. Nine months after they launch. And again, this is invite only. Ben is actually contacting people from his phone to invite them. Ben's mom, apparently is also inviting the ladies that she knows. So there's this whole ecosystem of just very organic growth. And nine months after they have 10,000 users. So it was a chronological feed during this time. I was actually invited during this time as well. I received it from a friend who created a candle holder out of a fence board. There were some really crazy ideas popping, and a lot of them had to do with mason jars, which this candle holder had that you screwed in the little mason jars into the lid, you dropped a candle in it, and you hung it from the ceiling. It was really amazing, actually. I should, like, see if I still have that. But it was confusing. I remember getting on the platform thinking, what am I looking at? Like, what am I supposed to be doing? And I think a lot of that was because we were so geared towards social at the time and Twitter and Facebook were out there and we were used to this feed where we would have to do engagement. And there was no engagement. Right. It was just ideas. In 2011, it finally came to the app store. They finally made it into one so you could get the app for your iPhone or your iPad. It wasn't until August 10, 2012, when they altered their policy so that a request or an invitation was no longer required. This was about two years after the launch, and at this point they had 11 million users. They were written up in a lot of magazines as one of the fastest growing companies. Also during this time, Ben had figured out the magic was in working with bloggers. He had worked with a specific blogger in the Bay area. She was doing meetups and he attended Alt summit and realized that bloggers were going to be the ticket to growing this platform. So we have the beginning where it's invite only. We have him just calling his friends and his mom doing the work for him all the way to 2012, where we have 11 million users. That's incredible. So now we have the business era, and this is 2012 to 2015. Pinterest is now distinguishing between regular users and marketers. We have our beginnings of a change in the feed, promoted pins and business accounts. So here's that where how that went down. But first, Paul Sierra leaves the company, one of the original founders, totally amicable. He goes to work for another company. So now we just have Ben and Evan left at the helm. Later in fall, in the fall Of October of 2012, Pinterest launched business accounts. This was allowing businesses to either convert their existing personal account into a business account or start a business account from scratch. Tim Kendall is brought over from Facebook and he is there to add monetization and ads because at this point, nobody's making money. They've definitely Raised a bunch of money. In fact, the acquired podcast talks a lot about their fundraising rounds and who they got that fundraising from. So again, if you're interested in that, go listen to that podcast. So then Tim introduces Promoted Pins as their very first ads product. We now have Pinterest ads, but you can still promote a pin on the pin by hitting promote side note. Don't do that. You want to run an actual Pinterest ad if you want to be strategic about it. So it's kind of like boosting a post on Facebook is like promoting a post on Pinterest. Don't do that. Learn about Pinterest ads. Okay, back to the story, Back to the business era. So an interesting point in the story happens here is that Pinterest is strategically building their administration, which a lot of companies weren't doing that were scaling that fast at that time. And they're finding a lot of their employees are coming from Facebook and they are heavily focused on bringing in female engineers. Now, I loved this part of the story. I didn't know it. So they understood Ben and Evan, that Silicon Valley was predominantly male engineers and they wanted to change that. So early on they believed in pursuing and hiring female female engineers enough to where they were getting their engineering team about 25% female, which was not the norm in Silicon Valley. So I loved that early part of their story that they were heavily focused on bringing in women to the team. Also during this time they introduced rich pins to enhance the customer experience. When they're browsing through pins that are made by companies, business pages can essentially add various points of data and topics and information. And we have recipes. Now there have been mixed reviews from the moment these have been introduced. Some love it, some hate it, some don't even know it's there. There's been a kind of a non stop debate ever since. If you are a business account, rich pins are automatically added as a part of you claiming your business. You can mess with them, but I'm not going to talk about that today. But that is a point of contention. But this is where they are introduced as part of their plan to continue to lean into seeing a business user and a regular user. Then we have the move from a chronological feed into a smart feed in 2014. This is also when we get our very first article about deleting pins and how it would help increase your performance. This post went crazy. It was not my post, it was someone else's. But the whole idea was that you could delete pins and it would actually end up increasing Your engagement. The idea behind deleting pins is actually never died. So it's been with us now for 12 years. All right, this brings us to 2015 to 2019, which we will call the Shopping and Awesome Traffic era. We have viable pins, we have visual search and we have people making a lot of money starting in 2015. There's a holdover from something that happened previously in 2012 that I didn't mention. This had to do with affiliate links. There was something called skim links where people could monetize off of links on Pinterest, but it caused a massive uproar with other affiliates. But I do remember these people back then were making so much money money because it had a massive following. There was only a chronological feed, there wasn't the smart feed. It had been a point of contention ever since. So in 2015 they banned affiliate links from the platform and said no more. We are not going to have issues around this. We are done. They do release that later. So you can use affiliate links now, but just know there was a little bit of a winter when it comes to affiliate links. So 2015. Why did I call it the awesome traffic of era because. Or the awesome era of traffic because people were crushing it, if I'm being honest. This was the glory days of the Internet. It was the wild wild west where people made a lot of melt wealth off of the traffic that they could receive. It was very common for people to say you could do Facebook ads and essentially print money and particular creators who were ads monetized on their website were making a killing. There's a lot of people who pine for these days. They were incredible. Even though the feed was was a smart feed, still so much traffic coming to websites. In 2017, Pinterest introduced visual search and at this point they had 250 million monthly users. 84 million of them were in the US and there was a little bit of a worry happening. How were they going to continue to expand globally? Was US growth stalling and I'll even say North American growth stalling with the US and Canada and then how were they going to get men to join the platform? They were really concerned that this was a female centric platform and they just didn't know how to get men into interested in it. So worries about global expansion, worries about monetization and worry about getting men to use the platform. In 2018 they had a massive boom and the global expansion started to continue to happen. That doesn't make sense. Let me say that again. In 2018, it all changed. And we saw a continued global expansion. So now we have 2019 to. I would say, well, I'm going to add 2019 as just its own era. We're going to call it Pinterest Goes Public era. So there was a lot of worry at this time about Pinterest going public, how that would change, how that would make the founders beholden to stakeholders. And there's a lot of details behind why they did this. But one really important thing to note is they secretly filed in February 2019 for their IPO. What's notable about this is that the two founders were fairly quiet. They weren't like Zuckerberg or the Google guys that were out there talking all the time, making changes every other Tuesday. They were slow movers, they were very methodical, and they very much thought about this ipo. Again, the acquired podcast talks about how they could have done something a little bit different, given that they had so much cash on hand. They had definitely raised enough money, they were headed towards being profitable. So there was a lot of people who questioned why were they even going public, did they need to. But this was right about the time that we have Lyft and Uber and we have Airbnb also going public. So it seems to be a big push at this time that made it pretty important for people to make that next move in their business. So the company's continuing to expand and they're going public. They also introduced during this time frame the introduction of Lens, which is in addition to the visual search. So they're very much forward when it comes to visual search as compared to other platforms. That brings us to 2020, the COVID era, aka everybody's making sourdough. And we're also doubling in users. Pinterest spikes tremendously. People are at home, they're looking for ideas. They're suddenly having to school their kids at home, and Pinterest is a place they go to look for ideas. It's amazing, right? Also during this time, we have the rise of TikTok. We have short form video, and Pinterest is essentially trying to keep up with that. They introduced the Today tab in 2020. And we also have this really weird, drastic shift in traffic right around 2020. Pinterest is getting a lot of search results and a lot of traffic from Google. In fact, we would find that images or links to boards or links to pins would often be indexed in Google searches. In 2022, Google claimed to have performed changes to increase, quote, unquote, diversity in search results. Pinterest claimed that as a consequence of those changes in November of 2021, which they did it in 21, but they claimed it in 22. Us Monthly Active Users coming to Pinterest from the web, desktop and mobile web declined 30% year over year. And this impacts traffic a lot. We saw a lot of traffic coming from Google to Pinterest and that was significantly down for creators who were previously making money in our Gold Rush era. And all of a sudden that was turned off. Right. So I want you to think about kind of what's happening during this time. We have the pandemic and then in, in 2020 and then in 2021 we have the shift that is happening with Google, but Google hasn't admitted it yet. And then we have 2022 when Google finally admits it. And then we have late 2022 with the introduction of Chat GPT. So, as you can imagine, this year for creators who have previously been doing great on the platform are suddenly hitting a brick wall and going, what just happened? Where did my money go? What am I going to do? And there becomes this question of is Pinterest still a viable marketing platform that can drive traffic? For some people it's still working. For some people it's not. So I'm just going to put that in a pin there. As to this is the conversation that is also in 2021, Pinterest announced its Creator Fund with a stated aim of supporting creators and their ability to preserve engagement interactions on the platform. Interesting note that preserve engagement and interactions on the platform. Why? Because what's happening over on TikTok is that people are spending hours and hours and hours and hours on the platform. Which means if you run ads on that platform, you're making more money because people are seeing it and time spent on the platform is higher. But you have people on Pinterest who are spending concentrated amount of time, but they're leaving for a couple of days. It's not like you go to Pinterest to spend all your time on it. So we have the Creator Fund and right at the same time we have the introduction of idea pins in May of 2021. They don't have a link. Why? Because that keeps people on the platform, but it really frustrates users and it really frustrates businesses. So yes, the Creator Fund is monetizing people and also they've made a commitment to invest 1.2 million into underrepresented creators via cash, grants, ad credits and equipment during this time as well. But you have now the introduction of a very frustrating user experience and we just have this bomb of 21 and 22 with kind of like what is happening? What has Pinterest become? This is not the Pinterest I know of 2019 when they went public. Totally makes sense. Also we see rumors floating around at this time that PayPal is going to buy Pinterest. That has never transpired, but it's definitely something that's in the background. That brings us to 2022, the new CEO era. And what is going to happen next? Are they going to be TikTok? Bill Ready has been added as a CEO to Pinterest. Evan Sharp leaves the company and Ben Silberman steps down to just have a board position. But he steps down as CEO and puts in Bill Reddy. Ready was the president of Commerce, Payments and the next billion users, which is emerging markets at Google from 2020 to 2022. Before Google, he was the chief operating officer at PayPal and CEO of Venmo and Braintree, leading both startups from pre revenue to billions of dollars in revenue through their acquisition by PayPal. So interesting fact about Bill Ready is that Pinterest valuation doubled in to 28 billion in 2024. I'm trying to connect the dots for you. So he's hired in 2022, by 2024 Pinterest valuation jumps to 28 billion. However, by January of 2026, just a couple of months ago, Pinterest valuation has now dropped to 15 billion, which I would imagine would be pretty rough as a CEO. But Bill Ready has so much experience in commerce and so when he is hired on, we see a significant move towards shopping, we see a significant move towards buying. Companies like the. Yes they are. They were an AI powered fashion shopping platform. They were showcasing some of their commitment to AI, showcasing their commitment to shopping and adding them. And their technology is what has allowed Pinterest to now level up their AI powered search. Because they bought this company. In 2023, Pinterest announced a partnership with Amazon again. We're getting more products and they wanted to show third party advertisements on the website which allowed you to be redirected to Amazon to make purchases. And finally in May of 2023, Idea Fins are being phased out much to the light of pretty much everybody. You will see idea pin language around certain places, but they have officially been phased out in May of 2023. But video does remain the top consumption medium on the platform. This brings us up to 2024. Our errors are getting closer and closer together and that is simply because there's so much change happening in this time. So I'm going to call this the AI Slop era and the identity crisis era. During this time we see an increase of AI slop and it's garbage. Lots of ways to game the system scrape content and it has a continued deep impact on creators. Reminder they were already impact in 2022 and now in 2024. You see people scraping their content or creating junk content that goes to websites filled with ads and this content is getting engagement. It is maddening, it is frustrating. I will say that Pinterest is definitely been working to try to figure out how to get rid of it. They began to remove pins and ban large accounts but this also got them into trouble during that time where they banned a bunch of good accounts. They added an AI modified label to curb slobber. But honestly, developers could figure out a way around it and AI slop even ends up on John Oliver's show. So we have this converging of this amazing platform that so many of us know and love. It feels like this sacred harbor. And I should also say too, they're very focused on positivity at this time. They're putting in time limits for kids. They're getting dedicated kid accounts for people who are 16 and under. They're partnering with schools. Bill Ready is making positivity a priority. They are saying we are not going to be a social media platform that is driven by enragement, but we want to be driven by the engagement of what people find useful. The problem was at this time is that AI Slap was entering onto the scene. So it felt like what is happening? Where are we going? How do we get our content in front of the right user? How will they show up? It is for, I would say a lot of business owners a time when they had to make a decision about whether or not they were going to stay or they were going to go. And I think some people are still in that phase. This brings us up to today in 2026 where we don't have a name for this area yet because frankly it's pretty early on. We're just. I'm recording this in Q1 of 2026. We don't know a lot about what will happen, but we do know In January of 26, Pinterest cut about 15% of its workforce as it struggles to compete for advertising dollars and its shares were down quite a bit. This also brings us to the heavy push for Gen Z shopping and new language that defines itself as the AI powered search platform. So for those of you who've been around for years. It's important to see how your traffic has been impacted by that. And different niches are impacted, different mediums of pins, different types of content. It's been a lot to process. I do think Pinterest still remains a very viable marketing arm for your business in this current environment. One thing I would like to note is it's not like Facebook stayed as a high traffic driver or Instagram state as a high traffic driver. We now have more platforms to focus on. Now we have AI. And so I think what has happened to Pinterest has very much happened on other platforms as well as we've had to navigate algorithms. So I love that Pinterest in the last couple of years has owned its identity and I think that really came with Bill Ready. It has owned its understanding of not being a social platform, of being a positive place on the Internet and and not being a place where politics or anything, anything else, we're going to enrage people on the platform. I do think that ownership has been amazing. I also think for product sellers, this is the place to be. This is a place where you can really get seen, get exposure. And ads for products are doing amazing. So there's still possibility. But what's next? I don't know. So did I miss any moments that you remember? Well, we'd love to hear from you. If you are on YouTube and you have been listening to this and you are like, Kate, you totally forgot this era, make sure that you tell people about this. Make a comment below. Would love to hear from you. If you are listening to this podcast and you want to leave a comment, go to the blog post. Leave a comment Again, we would love to crowdsource more ideas, more things that you remember, especially if you've been on Pinterest for a while last. I hope this was entertaining for you. I hope this story helped connect you to the platform, help you understand it a little bit more and give you some things to think about as you go forward into 2026 and beyond and using the platform for marketing. As always, thank you so much for listening. And if you haven't yet, please leave a review on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thanks so much for listening.