It seems that Pinterest has had at at least three distinct revenue sources to date.
1. Commission earnings from inserting their own affiliate identifier into pins to things on Amazon. I'm not aware of what other sites they earn commission from, but that has probably dried up some as Amazon's commission structure changed. Notably they now allow users to post/pin things with links containing user's affiliate code.
2. Paid promotion for user pins, something in between "native ads" and "search ads". Pretty common for anything that might be considered a marketplace, but it works on Pinterest I guess.
3. Sponsored video content to play along paid promoted pins, not unlike Snapchat's corp paid video content.
They do, and they also have something Twitter typically does not, which is purchase intent. Lots of people go go Pinterest because they are looking for ideas on something to buy. If they can find it and purchase it all in one place, that makes Pinterest valuable from a direct response marketing standpoint.
Also, Pinterest's demographics are VERY desirable to marketers.
1. Commission earnings from inserting their own affiliate identifier into pins to things on Amazon. I'm not aware of what other sites they earn commission from, but that has probably dried up some as Amazon's commission structure changed. Notably they now allow users to post/pin things with links containing user's affiliate code.
2. Paid promotion for user pins, something in between "native ads" and "search ads". Pretty common for anything that might be considered a marketplace, but it works on Pinterest I guess.
3. Sponsored video content to play along paid promoted pins, not unlike Snapchat's corp paid video content.
4. ???