PayPal is in desperate need of wall art decor. The payment giant is in talks to acquire the wedding-and-soup inspirational site Pinterest, according to multiple reports. The deal would likely value Pinterest at $45 billion, and shares jumped roughly 13% yesterday.
What is Pinterest?
In 2012, Pinterest broke out to become a wildly popular site and app for collecting media across the Internet. People pin photos into collections called boards, which serve as big catalogs of objects. Pinterest, in effect, decomposes web pages into the objects that are embedded in them.
For users, it’s a way to think about and plan the future, or to show off one’s taste for free. And that’s where most people stop thinking about Pinterest. It seems like a shopping site minus the exchange of money part.
But it’s on the backend where things really get interesting. Think about what Pinterest is collecting: it’s a database of consumer intentions.
Quite frankly, Pinterest is the world’s largest set of objects that people care about.
Does PayPal Acquiring Pinterest Make Sense?
PayPal is on a quest to become an all-in-one “super app” like China’s Alipay, so it’s looking to tack on more services, like product discovery, to its current menu. Plus, it’s got money to play with. Thanks to all those nap dress orders during the pandemic, PayPal’s stock has more than doubled since January 2020.
For Pinterest, this could be a huge boost for its push into commerce. The company has moved aggressively to get more people to shop on its site with initiatives like a $20 million investment into its “Creator Rewards” program.
Pinterest: a Social Shopping Gold Mine for E-commerce
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