2k20, what's the worst enormous tech company?

They've been trying to make AR/VR/etc. happen for almost 30 years now (the first Wired I ever read had a big thing on VR in... 1995? '96?) and it's just a bust over and over. Nobody wants an extra layer of shit on top of buying their morning coffee.

damn this is grim: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/01/28/suicide-hotline-silicon-valley-privacy-debates-00002617

"META" stock down 26% today. Hundreds of billions of dollars in paper value wiped out all because iPhones made it harder for advertisers to follow you around the internet. Fucking wild.

anyone here read Tim Hwang's Subprime Attention Crisis?

snap down 25% during the day (presumably on the basis that they suffer the same problems as meta due to ios 14.5) and now up 55% after hours having reported results. (pinterest down 10%, up 20% a/h on results.) nobody knows anything.

breh

Pinterest is so weird, it only exists for me now as an annoying site that pops up in Google image searches.

there were people who built entire careers on pinterest traffic. a lot of people!

I've never quite understood Pinterest's business model, but I'm told that interior designers use it or something? Pin it!

Anyway, their fierce gatekeeping kept me from ever even looking around the site (without an account), so now I too just find it a mysterious annoyance

I know a guy who got rich off pinterest but he’s one of the main shareholders so idk

They built a brand-new building a few years ago on Brannan Street and now I understand they're giving all or most of it up

apparently it used to be a great place to work, relative to other big tech companies. obviously the product is moribund now, but it's also had a bunch of bias/abuse scandals a la amazon/uber.

I only got pinterest once we had to do home renovations. It's a really good way to keep track of stuff you like and also find ideas. I get why it generates ad revenue, because we would be like "we like this maple colored vanity cabinet" or whatever, and then you could find other similar maple colored vanity cabinets, save them, possibly follow through and purchase one, etc.

Also you have your vanity cabinets, your shower fixtures, your tiles, your mirrors etc all on one "board" and can move them around and put them next to each other to see how they look together. At the same time, it's really *only* useful to me for something like that, like I can't come up with any regular use case for it. I guess someone who is exceptionally into clothes could use it for that.

Pinterest does a weirdly bad job of generating money from its users, given the dominant use case is exactly what you say, ie deciding what to buy

$PINS : A Love Story

Starting with the Numbers

Latest Quarter ARPU (North America):$FB: $48.03 per MAU$TWTR: $23.65 per DAU$SNAP: $7.37 per DAU$PINS: $3.99 per MAU

Pinterest is in the first inning of monetizing it’s user base - pretty straightforward

/1

— Ragnar Danneskjöld (@RagnarSkjold) July 23, 2021

i used to use it for briefing graphic designers on what sort of style to go for. very easy to just google a bunch of stuff that was in the right ballpark and have it all pinned to a page.

was just clicking through tech stocks on yahoo and realized Fiverr is still valued at almost $3 billion. Lol. Remember Fiverr? I didn't until just now.

thiel out at facebook.

he'll rebound. after all, you can't keep a multi-billionaire down for long

to spend more time promoting fascism, apparently

"Pinterest is in the first inning of monetizing it’s user base" - it's existed for like 15 years, didn't occur to them to do it before now?!

Pinterest does a weirdly bad job of generating money from its users, given the dominant use case is exactly what you say, ie deciding what to buy

Collecting pictures of pretty things is the dominant use case. How many people are going to actually buy a macramé plant hanger after pinning a photo of a 70s living room?

More than you'd think if it's supposed to be a multi-site "Amazon wish list" with pretty pictures.

I'm actually kind of curious when/how they get credit for a purchase and how much (vs just a click). I've definitely bought a fair amount of stuff I saved on pinterest, but I'm not sure whether I actually bought it by clicking through from pinterest, and even if I had, I wonder how much credit pinterest gets. I also wonder how much they *should* get since in a lot of cases I just found stuff on wayfair or build.com or whatever and then saved it there so I could remember it.

They’re not all shopping but most of them are imagining what they’d like to own and they seem like they should be worth a lot to AdWords-type advertisers than eg Twitter users.

iirc the endgame for pinterest was supposed to be not just referrer links but partnerships with companies where it'd be a direct click-through purchase, but I don't know how much of that panned out since I stopped paying attention over a decade ago

imo if I was running it and wanted to monetize, I'd drop any semblance of ethics and just aggregate the most popular styles and sell the early access data to companies making product knockoffs

ah, the pinterest to wayfair pipeline

pinterexpress

about 50% of everything i see on Pinterest feels like it's sponsored or promoted. don't they make money on that?

Wayfair has the whole child trafficking side biz going on, and that's definitely profitable

xp
they do make money: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/PINS/financials?p=PINS

just not as much as you might guess is what I think people itt are saying, but digital advertising is an absurd industry in many ways

yup. FB is not a great comp because they make revenue from things other than advertising.

but it seems very weird to my that they make so much less per user than twitter and snap. the claim in that tweet is that they're just getting started but it was founded 13 years ago (i.e. they're older than snap and barely younger than twitter).

wait I thought FB made like 90% of their revenue from ads

like 90% actually 97.9% in 2020

well, that's not 0% from not ads. i was thinking of revenue from weird hardware bullshit and partnerships, but i guess the weird hardware bs loses money and pinterest has partnerships too.

ok the the FB comparison is fair. and they make > 10x per user. assuming this is not an ad tech shell game, what is pinterest doing wrong?

ftr I agree that Pinterest seems odd! They should *not* be doing worse than Twitter at selling ads, though thinking about that makes me wonder what Pinterest's mobile numbers look like. There's a lot of value in travelling with people throughout their day that Pinterest maybe can't offer.

But it's hard to say really. FB has tons more data on their users due to the much wider variety of things people do on their platform plus all the tracking infrastructure they've built (sign-in with your FB id stuff) to follow users around the internet without cease. All that data lets them present themselves as much better at microtargeting consumers than Pinterest, despite the consumer friendliness of P's functionality. I wouldn't discount a kind of marketer herd mentality here either: we need to advertise on FB because our competitors do.

Also, "ad tech shell game" is sort of correct actually, especially if we bring in Google as the other half of the online advertising duopoly

good post. do you work in this area? (cards on table, i'm at twitter, but i'm not on the revenue side and have no idea what i'm talking about.)

Sort of yes and no. I'm currently, ill-advisedly getting a phd in communications, which in my case means studying technology through a social science/humanities lens so I try not to weigh in too much around here on the technical stuff. My dissertation won't be about advertising, but my master's was in part (plus "emotional recognition" tech) and I've kept up with it for other projects.

Funnily enough I just spend a few weeks researching Twitter's ad system and policies for a law firm that is suing twitter over their political ads policy uh sorry

ah, theorizing the web etc.?

I never attended that but yeah that's in roughly the right ballpark. I think the guy who ran that now publishes this https://reallifemag.com/, which is def an accurate para-academic version of what I'm up to. Have you read Safiya Noble, Virginia Eubanks, Kate Crawford, or Ruha Benjamin? Or like Fred Turner, Wendy Chun, Paul Edwards...I can go on if you want!

Basically comms is such a grab-bag field that you can kind of pursue whatever you want, however you want—there are people in my dept doing ethnographic fieldwork, other people are making video games, I read HR software trade mags lol

cool! i went to ttw a couple of times when i was in new york, and got interested in the FATML stuff via that. i'm less familiar with the comms/sociology/anthro side than the legal/fairness stuff (and even then).

Honestly the law review papers on these subjects are often the best, not sexy and theory-fun but super otm and neither optimistic nor pessimistic

my gateway drug was this bad boy https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2477899

That’s a banger

It seems a bit unfair to have people who work for the tech companies in the thread about the worst tech companies but maybe that's just me.

I really want the Odd Lots Podcast to do a deep dive on how Pinterest does/doesn't make money now.

It seems a bit unfair to have people who work for the tech companies in the thread about the worst tech companies but maybe that's just me.

― we need outrage! we need dicks!! (the table is the table), Thursday, February 10, 2022 7:16 AM (two hours ago)

I totally get that, but two things:

1) Unlike, say, the spotify spokesperson who used to frequently post in the spotify thread, I don't recall ever seeing caek being defensive about Twitter criticism. I don't know if you read my hidden text, but caek didn't even respond to that. Anyway, ILX is small enough these days that I think it's fair to take this on a case by case basis?

2) I'm sympathetic to a fuck them attitude tbh, but organizing/radicalizing/educating tech workers is one necessary way to tackle the power these companies have, so I'd rather talk to caek about algorithmic harms here than push him to feel defensive.

Unfortunately, given how massively powerful and largely unaccountable these companies are right now we need tech employees to find out things like this: https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/rml-politicalcontent

Otm. Aside from officially sanctioned critique/analysis, hasn’t most of the best info on precisely how bad these companies are come from leaks from whistleblowers? (I’m thinking especially Meta and Alphabet, haven’t heard so much about leaks from Twitter or others.)

To an extent yes. Though you also have the related, aggravating phenomenon where governments and the media continue to over-value the voices of tech executives who have seen the light, many of whom tend to push more technology (an app that limits your screentime, etc.) as the solution to tech-company-created problems rather than policy or regulatory solutions.