David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…… DoorDash and Instacart, when you see a new paradigm like online advertising, you see the biggest ones that are taken are intent-based search. Then there’s, what we didn’t realize was going to be such a big market, but social media advertising. And then there’s this new thing, discovery-based, or inspiration-based, or curation-based advertising, which is just smaller, it’s just not a bigger thing. I was going to wait to make this point in grading, but since we’re already here, I want to make the point that when I first started researching, I was thinking there’s basically two distinct online advertising markets: there’s social-based and there’s search-based. But Pinterest is really somewhere between there with the curation- and discovery-based. Now, I’m thinking about it more as a spectrum. If you think about it as sort of a smiling curve where there’s way more value with creation if you go pure search or pure social. There is less in the middle because frankly, you’re not spending as much time there and you’re not doing mission critical things there as much as you are during search. But it’s still a super sticky product, a super useful product, a product that monetizes well, it’s just not one of the other two. I think this is building off the end of history and facts here where we alluded to this. I’m not sure that it’s not that the values, I think there’s a ton of value in Pinterest. What they offer to advertisers in this discovery engine works incredibly well and is very unique. The problem though is just the product itself—the consumer product—is a niche product, a very large niche. But we alluded to in history and facts, there are 86 million-ish MAUs in the US and a very, very high percentage of them are women and men, despite years of trying on Pinterest, [...] just don’t use the product in nearly as the higher percentage. They’ve tried to fix it; I just don’t know that it’s fixable with what the product is. Thus, it’s just a smaller market. Everyone is aware that they need to search for stuff and a third of those or a quarter of those people are aware that they need to be inspired and curate stuff based on what inspires them.…

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