Pinterest Gets $200 Million Funding at $2.5 Billion Valuation

[engine]

Pinterest, the popular social scrapbooking site, has completed a massive $200 million funding, which values the company at $2.5 billion, according to sources close to the situation.

Pinterest Gets $200 Million Funding at $2.5 Billion Valuation [allthingsd.com]

UPDATE

Pinterest confirmed the funding and released this statement from CEO Ben Silbermann: “Our focus is on helping millions of people discover things they love and get inspiration to go do those things in their life. This investment gives us more resources to help realize that vision.”

[swa66]

2.5 billion (even if only 10^9 and not 10^12), is way over the top for what they do.
It should be 0.
Seriously: pinterest is worth nothing more than pirate bay or anything else building success on stolen intellectual property. Surely it's intermixed with genuine content, but that's such a small fraction that it's easy to discard that use.
Even trying to embrace them does not work as their users are NOT interested in following any off site links, they just absorb your content and share it among themselves - no clicks to the source follow (or so few it's easy to discard them).

That their traffic doesn;t work is not just me, even Brian Madden, executive director of social media for Hearst Corp.'s Hearst Digital Media, said in an interview with WSJ [online.wsj.com]:

Overall, 3% to 5% of traffic to Hearst's various brands was through Pinterest

They have a executive director of social media, and that's all they manage to get ?

My hope is on them getting sued into oblivion. Unfortunately "wall street" has not yet realized it's a bottomless pit.

[chrisv1963]

$2.5 billion for a scraper site with tons of stolen intellectual property. How much longer before this financial bubble will burst?

[helleborine]

Hahaha, yes, this bubble will burst from a legal PIN prick.

[topr8]

>>Hahaha, yes, this bubble will burst from a legal PIN prick.

i'm not so sure though, i do think it over valued, but look at youtube - where the original model was basically pirated videos ... all seems to have worked out for them.

[HuskyPup]

To me the US seems to have extreme double standards with copyright unless one has a $200 million legal team ... farcical.

[ChanandlerBong]

50% of the largest websites in the US are built on a rock solid basement of theft, pure and simple. And the US has the TEMERITY to insist on IP protection clauses in any new trade agreement.

It's beyond Monty Python now.

[physics]

I would say it's definitely worth 2.5x as much as Instagram was when it was bought.

[backdraft7]

Great - 200 million more to pollute the web with more scraped content.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Hey, don't hate on Pinterest, at least someone submits those images where other engines just take them all.

All Pinterest needs to do is offer a search feature with rankings and it's not worse than any of the big three at this point.

[swa66]

All Pinterest needs to do is offer a search feature with rankings and it's not worse than any of the big three at this point.

Their users are not interested pinterest being a search engine IMHO.

[Digmen1]

Not all images on Pinterest are copyright.
(luckily there i snow a thread ion that subject)

And with an Alex Ranking of 37 I can't ignore it.
I just have to work out how to get people to watch my pins.

I probably need to do more pins!

[matrix_jan]

Pinterest is no joke and it's here to stay at least for couple of years. I agree that it's worth way more than 2.5x as much as instagram. Remember that the value of the company is not the content but it's users.

Now all they need is to offer special accounts to those who want to protect their images. You upload your pictures to the server (not visible to the public), and they take down every unauthorized pin of your pictures... You get the point, something like youtube offers...