Explain to a non-designer - web success

Out of context: Reply #16

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  • showpony4

    Even if ffffound was still around, they'd never be worth a fraction of what Pinterest is. First of all, Ffffound was niche (which is part of what made it great, of course), but that radically lowered its total addressable market. Pinterest has 250 million MAUs and has grown every quarter for nearly a decade. That's a proper product with real reach and a proven resonate offering.

    Further, Pinterest can evidence business value massively. There's a strong correlation between pinned products and purchase intent. Massive. This small difference — that Pinterest represents what the user wants to buy/be/do in the future is qualitatively different in every way from ffffound, and direct ROI can be derived from user behavior.

    Lastly, and this is the big one, Pinterest isn't about Pins exactly. Every Pin is "enriched" with the user's description and its source etc. From a data perspective, this means that they have essentially created one of the world's most sophisticated images search and taste graphs. The user behaviors are structuring otherwise unstructured data. That's a profound thing.

    tl;dr — Pinterest is successful because of scale (large TAM), proven adoption (increasing MAUs), proven and measurable business value (direct and measurable purchase intent), and differentiated datasets that can be leveraged endlessly. Ffffound never had — nor could have had — any of those assets or qualities, though I love and miss ffffound so much.

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    • I really enjoyed Pinterest up to about a year ago. It's not even the ads that bother me, it's all the "click-bait" links that go to spammer websites.utopian
    • I made the original comparison because it seemed like both sites are just doing the job that bookmarks used to do before we had all this stuff. Both sites arecherub
    • letting you save content that you found, as opposed to uploaded yourself. But your 2nd paragraph makes me realize the difference goes far beyond any of this.cherub
    • A more fair comparison wou;d've been between ffffound AND the old Svpply website (acq by eBay and shutdown)grafician
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