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Silbermann is on the lookout for returns on the considerable investment that the rapidly expanding link- and photo-sharing portal has made on completely revamping the Pinterest site.
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Ben Silbermann, CEO and co-founder of the popular link- and photo-sharing portal Pinterest has long been aware that he is fighting for his share of the market against the biggest guns in social media marketing.
Pinterest, by succeeding to create a home town, folksy feel to the website has constantly drawn visitors, with 55 million potential shoppers visiting the site in April 2014, an increase of 17 per cent from the previous year.
Silbermann will be hoping to cash in on that traffic, by both expanding abroad, having recently launched in the UK, France and Japan, as well as offering visitors an increased choice of products to mull over, as well as an improved and simpler navigation system.
Most importantly, Pinterest will now be offering visitors a self-serve platform, that will allow advertisers to create customized “Promoted Pins” that will allow for specific marketing campaigns and product descriptions,
Now valued at around $5 billion, Pinterest has become the darling of the venture capitalists, raising another $200 million as recently as last month from companies including Bessemer Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz to round of a twelve month period where they raised $425 million, the most of any technology based online marketing company.
Ben Silbermann continues to carve out new frontiers for Pinterest through harnessing the company’s ability to effectively utilize the information it gathers on people’s interests in order to draw advertisers, who are well aware that, unlike some of the other social media sites, statistics have consistently shown that people log on to Piniterest with an already defined intent to buy, or at least make up a wish lists of items that they may well acquire later.
Previous to the launch of the extended site, under the personal supervision of Ben Silbermann, Pinterest carried out a number with a handful of highly controlled tests of their most popular “Promoted Pins” with their largest advertisers taking part, among them retail giants Old Navy and Target, consumer goods specialists Kraft and General Mills, online travel site Expedia as well as Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.
With the information gleaned from that cooperation, Pinterest have now begun rolling out a scaled down but a similar self-serve platform to be used by smaller companies who want to market their goods the Pinterest way,
Ben Silbermann was born and raised in Des Moines, Iowa. After leaving high school Silbermann went on to attend the acclaimed Research Science Institute at MIT, later graduating from the University of Yale in 2003 with a degree in political science.
Before forming Pinterest, Silbermann spent some time in the sales operation at Google, where he admitted to not been remaining a “Google rat” for too long before leaving to start his own company with a friend from college friend, Paul Sciarra, with the aim of developing iPhone apps.
