Pinterest Wants to Show Advertisers It Can Run With the Big Dogs “It takes a shift in habits, which takes time.” The company was also hampered by taking off “at the tipping point of the desktop-to-app transition,” GroupM, the media investing arm of ad giant WPP, said in a report this year, adding, “It’s likely that its commercial progress was slowed by its immaturity and a need to build for the desktop platform for which it was conceived.” Google dominates search advertising, which brings in tens of billions in revenue for the company a year — and it too has a visual search technology called Google Lens. (Mr. Silbermann said in April that the company was not feeling pressure to go public, adding, “We’re just kind of focused on building a business out and we’re fortunate that we have capital.”) “The pitch to advertisers is explaining what people do on the platform,” Mr. Silbermann said. That’s always a good place to be; Google’s pitch is, ‘People find stuff here.’” While they can be more effective than ads that interrupt photos of friends on social networks, it’s a different kind of work for marketers and means that they have one more platform that they need to specifically design content for. Already among the nation’s most highly valued start-ups, it raised another $150 million last month for a valuation of $12.3 billion, and is expected to bring in more than $500 million in revenue this year.
