Pinterest Business Model Canvas

My research found that Pinterest primarily supports itself through fundraising by seeking out investors. Some key investors are Valiant Capital, Rakuten, Andeerson Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners, and FirstMark Capital. The majority of Pinterest's (about 83%) 40M users are women, I estimate of the remaining 17%, 10% are men and 7% are teens.

Pinterest has significant costs in web development and storage of $2M per month, or $24M per year. Pinterest has about 300 employees, and assuming the average employee, plus any health insurance and other benefits makes about $100,000 per year, the total staffing costs would be $30M per year. I also assumed that Pinterest may pay about $1M per year in security costs.

Pinterest has begun selling advertisements on its website to major corporations such as General Mills, Kraft, Lululemon, and Gap. These advertisements can generate about $2M per six months, so Pinterest could make $16M in Advertising Revenue from those four partners in a 12 month period.

Since Pinterest has the ability to bring in $16M per year in advertising revenue from the above mentioned firms, it could add to that revenue stream by securing additional advertising partners. As things stand, it will not be possible for Pinterest to make money; however, there is potential to make money with additional advertising partners.

In its current state, I estimate that Pinterest is losing about $39M per year, which is less than the approximately $56M per year it was losing before it began brining in advertising revenues.

Strategies for generating additional revenues:
Similar to Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest could develop a "sponsored" pin for which a user could pay a fee to have its pin featured.

Pinterest could add in required viewing videos such as YouTube in order to view certain pages which could also generate advertising revenue.