Pinterest Drops Invites, Now Open to Everyone

Pinterest announced Wednesday that it began open registration, dropping its invite-only approach.
Users can now sign up for the social photo sharing website without waiting for an invitation, according to Pinterest’s official blog. Now, prospective pinners can register using their email addresses, or log in with their Facebook or Twitter accounts.
“We’re really excited to have the capacity to offer Pinterest to more people and if you’re a Pinner with friends who’ve been waiting on the sidelines, we hope you’ll let them know,” the blog said.
Prior to opening up, users had to click “Request an Invite” on Pinterest.com, and enter their email address.
The California-based company announced in late July the addition of new categories, including, “Quotes,” “Tattoos” and “Weddings,” which joined old standbys, “Food and Drink,” “Architecture” and “Home Decor.” Some category names were tweaked: “Pets” became “Animals,” and “Prints and Posters” is now “Illustrations and Posters.”
Pinterest also reported that it had improved old categories, so users see less miscategorized pins as they peruse boards
The site, a virtual pinboard where members organize and share photos of their favorite things, is one of the fastest-growing social networks online. Reports suggest that Pinterest is the third-largest social network in the U.S., behind only Facebook and Twitter. It is currently looking to expand into overseas markets, such as France, Germany and Japan.
In May, Pinterest raised $100 million in a round of funding that values the company at $1.5 billion.

Apple Wants To Buy Pinterest Rival, The Fancy

Apple is in talks to acquire The Fancy, a fast-growing social commerce site backed by cofounders of Twitter and Facebook.
The objective: to secure a role for Apple in the growing e-commerce market, putting the 400 million-plus users with credit cards on file with Apple's iTunes Store to work shopping—with Apple getting a cut of the action.
While The Fancy is far smaller than archrival Pinterest, which similarly lets users make lists of things they find interesting, the 20-person New York startup, led by cofounder and CEO Joe Einhorn, is much farther along in linking its users to transactions. The Fancy takes a 10 percent cut of purchases. Last we checked in, sales were exploding.
There is no signed deal and no guarantee one will happen. We do not know the price Apple has proposed to pay for The Fancy or how recently talks took place.
However, given what we've learned, it was apparently no coincidence that Einhorn and Apple CEO Tim Cook met at Allen & Co.'s Sun Valley conference earlier this year. The notoriously private Cook, who does not visibly participate in any well-known social media sites, started using The Fancy shortly afterwards.
The Fancy raised a $10 million round at a reported valuation of $100 million last fall, led by PPR, the French luxury conglomerate behind Gucci. It previously raised $6 million in 2010; $2.7 million of that round went to Einhorn and his cofounder, his brother Jack Einhorn, according to an SEC filing. Investment bank Allen & Co. was an early investor.
It would be reasonable to think its investors would expect a healthy return—call it 3 to 5 times what they paid. (Consider that nothing more than informed speculation, based on similar deals.)
Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes are on the board, along with LeRoy Kim of Allen & Co. and James Pallotta, the owner of the Boston Celtics. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, the co-founders of venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, are also investors.
Apple is not known for making big, splashy acquisitions. But a source familiar with Apple's acquisition strategy noted to us that The Fancy is at a stage where Apple typically buys companies.
For example, in recent years, it has bought several companies to bolster its online offerings, like Chomp, an app search engine; Lala.com, an online music service; and Placebase, a digital mapping company. It is in the process of trying to buy AuthenTec, a mobile security company.
Still, how can a two-year-old company with 20 employees possibly be worth that much to Apple?
Apple's history in e-commerce stretches back almost 15 years to November 10, 1997, when it opened its first online store. On April 28, 2003, it got into digital commerce with the iTunes Music Store. Those foundations in e-commerce let it roll out the iPhone's App Store. As Apple's sales of mobile devices exploded, so did its rolls of online customers registered with a credit card.
But as its tentative moves into general e-commerce have shown, sending those customers on a shopping spree isn't a simple matter. PassBook, a new online wallet introduced in the latest version of iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, lets users store discounts, gift cards, and airline tickets—but it doesn't let people spend money with stored credit cards.
The Fancy could change all that by giving Apple a clear route to converting people's interest in an object into a sale.
Apple could well build an e-commerce layer into its operating system and let application developers hook into it, giving them a way to make money besides advertising.
The Fancy has recently rolled out a system that gives users a cut of the sales their lists of objects generate.
Einhorn's company began life as a project called Thing Daemon, or ThingD, which aimed to be a universal database of things. In February, it adopted a model focused around e-commerce—and its business has taken off since.
The Fancy's offices are situated above an Apple Store in New York City. We don't think that has anything to do with anything, but it's funny, given the circumstances.
Einhorn declined to comment. Apple, Dorsey, Hughes, and PPR did not respond to requests for comment.

Photos Increase Facebook Reach, But Does It Drive Traffic?

Photos are said to improve engagement on Facebook, but does that engagement in turn boost traffic or fans? No, our testing found — but there still might be value in using them.
Ever since Facebook started displaying Reach data directly on Facebook fan pages, here at Marketing Land and Search Engine Land we have been diligently watching the fluctuations happen day-to-day.  Knowing that using photos is a sure way to attract a more engaged audience, we started to deliberately manually post more photos on Facebook, and not via our third-party tool. We spent about a week posting photos with links in the caption where it made sense – after all, we’re publishers, and our goal is to drive traffic to our sites.

Photo Posts vs. Link Posts Performance

When we compared photo posts to link posts in a 30-day period in PageLever, one of the many tools we use, we realized immediate results:

• 4x engaged users per post
• 4x the amount of shares
• 4x more consumption
• 4x as many shares
• Twice as many likes
• 2.5x more virality

Great news, right? Concrete actions with concrete results. Lots of visibility, lots of engagement. With more visibility, you can make the assumption that site traffic and followers would see the benefit.

No Big Increase In Fan Growth

From the chart below you can see a bit of a peak in growth the week of July 9, which is when we started posting photos with links. But the Removed Fans metric also increased at that time, so it’s safe to say that there really hasn’t been any impact on Fan growth.

How Was The Traffic?

As you can see below, despite the social success, there was not much to write home about.

Marketing Land Facebook Campaign Traffic

Search Engine Land Facebook Campaign Traffic

Since there didn’t seem to be a blip anywhere on either site, I looked at the top five photo posts and the top five link posts with most reach. I did the same with Search Engine Land. Then I grabbed the top ten Facebook posts from each site that drove the most traffic. What I discovered was this:

• For Marketing Land, six out of the ten top traffic-driving posts were links, not photos.
• For Search Engine Land, seven out of the ten top traffic-driving posts were links, not photos.

But does this mean the efforts were unsuccessful? Brands and businesses everywhere have struggled defining the value of content broadcasted across the social space. Just a few months ago I wrote a post asking the same questions, only using Pinterest as an example. On Facebook we know people are seeing our content, the Insight metrics show that. So I repeat the question, is there a value if it’s not driving traffic or audience?
Absolutely. Content consumption happens everywhere, and publishers need to be ready to have their content read and distributed outside of the confines of their site. And the broader audience, the better. Does it really matter whether your brand engages with you on your turf, or on a site they spend time on? And as you already likely know, the SEO benefits of social activity is there, and in light of all of the link building confusion happening these days, building a reliable, honest social presence will likely benefit long-term.

Google Acquires Wildfire, Will Now Sell Facebook And Twitter Marketing Services

Google has just bought social marketing software developer Wildfire, which lets brands serve marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn. Wildfire has grown to 400 employees over the last four years and now serves 16,000 customers. [Update: We've now learned from a Wildfire investor that the company sold to Google for $350 million, higher than the $250 million price we and others previously reported.]
The acquisition will allow Google to provide advanced software and services to brands who want to run contests, sweepstakes, branded games and more on Google+. Wildfire will still operate as a marketing tool for brands on Google’s competing platforms, including Facebook, putting the search giant in a curious position where it earns money on the success of its rivals.
Google bid on buying Buddy Media but lost the deal to Salesforce. With Oracle buying other social marketing leaders Vitrue and Involver, Wildfire was the last top-tier startup in the space. Today’s deal leaves this moment, another popular marketing platform, as a possible buy for old-world enterprise juggernauts like IBM or SAP.
Now it’s successfully bought one of Facebook’s biggest marketing partners. [Update: Dave McClure of 500 Startups, an early Wildfire investor, this morning commented here that the $250 million price tag we reported was "substantially lower than actual". Now we've learned that another investor has said Google bought Wildfire for $350 million -- nearly a 25X multiple on the $14.1 million it had raised through its Series B.]
But Google hasn’t directly entered the social ad space yet. Wildfire only offers ad buying through a partnership with startup Adaptly. [Update: That's why I've just published "Wildfire Only Sells Ads Through Its Partner Adaptly, So Will Google Buy Them Too?"]

Wildfire claims there will be no disruption or immediate changes to the service it offers, which includes ad buying (via Adaptly), feed publishing, Page management, social app and contest development, analytics, social monitoring:

“We remain focused on helping brands run and measure their social engagement and ad campaigns across the entire web and across all social services — Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn and more — and to deliver rich and satisfying experiences for their consumers. To this end, Wildfire will operate as usual, and there will be no changes to our service and support for our customers.

That puts Google in an odd spot, where it will benefit if social networks such as Facebook and Twitter rise in popularity amongst brands. This hedges it against failure of Google+ as play to gain ad-targetable social data, but could heat up the on-going API battles between the top social platforms.
What if Facebook denied Wildfire API access? That could sting Google but it’s unlikely as it would send a shockwave through Facebook’s developer ecosystem. Facebook may have to grit its teeth and watch Google cash in on brands trying to infiltrate the news feed and its mobile apps. Though since it decides who gets early access to new features that can attract clients, Facebook could subtlety hurt Wildfire by favoring its competitors.
Wildfire will help handle owned marketing, such as handling Pages and other properties brands control, to complement Google’s DoubleClick AdX/Admeld paid marketing service for buying ads on search and other websites. The acquisition shows that Google understands that ads can’t do it all. Tons of brand spend is going towards managing their presences on social networks, and now it will get a slice of that pie too.
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For more on Google’s acquisition of Wildfire, read: “Wildfire Only Sells Ads Through Its Partner Adaptly, So Will Google Buy Them Too?“
I’ll also be discussing the acquisition on stage this Friday with Facebook’s VP of ads engineering Greg Badros at TechCrunch’s Facebook Ecosystem CrunchUp in the Bay Area. There’s still a few last tickets available.

Pinterest Effect: Pinfluencer Raises $1.4 Million For Its Pinterest

Pinfluencer, as you may have guessed by its name, is a newly launched startup offering an analytics solution for the up-and-coming social network Pinterest. Prior to today’s public debut, several brands have been using the service in private testing, including 1-800-FLOWERS.com, GNC, HauteLook, Piperlime, Rent the Runway, Minted, Beau-coup, Shop It To Me, and wikiHow.
Alongside the launch, the company is also announcing it has closed on $1.4 million in seed funding in a round led by Freestyle Capital and Baseline Ventures, and which included investment from angel investors Jess Engle (former CEO and co-founder of CoTweet) and Mark Ghermezian (Appboy CEO, and whose family owns Mall of America), and others.
Like many building analytics for the Pinterest platform. Pinfluencer gives brands the ability to track metrics around pins, in order to see which ones are trending, who the brand’s most influential pinners are, and which boards are the most popular, among other things. But it goes a bit further, too, and allows brands to compare their efforts with those of their competitors, to see who’s pinning the most, what the top pins are, or who’s getting the most pins and re-pins, for example. This last bit is important, because it’s the ability to compare one set of efforts with another that helps provide the context. It’s still early days for Pinterest, so it’s not common knowledge what constitutes “good,” or at what threshold something can be deemed having gone “viral.” In total, Pinfluencer now tracks over 25+ performance metrics.

Founded in February 2012, Pinfluencer’s co-founders include CEO Sharad Verma, who previously led product manage for Yahoo’s social search and monetization and who started TripAha and eventsTonight; Suvda Myagmar, who was previously a relevance analyst at Bing; and Naveen Akunur, who founded e-commerce site Sheyna, and whose experience includes key roles at Yodlee and SendMe.
Verma says that up until January, he was working on eventsTonight, a mobile app to discover nearby entertainment, and it’s there he began experimenting with Pinterest to find out if people liked to pin events. “What we noticed instead was a humungous amount of product sharing on Pinterest,” he says. “That’s when it occurred to us that Pinterest is a database of shopping intent, it’s another home for a retailer’s catalog. We got really excited about its potential to transform the way e-commerce is distributed and discovered.” So he brought the team together and they created Pinfluencer in just five months’ time.
And lest you think Pinfluencer is just another bandwagon-jumper, Verma stresses that Pinterest is not a fad. “It replaces what women have been doing for ages – clipping images and putting them in a binder,” he explains. And it will continue growing, especially internationally, he says, because pinning images is a common language. Pinterest also has time-spent and shopping intent, he adds, “but its core demographic is women who make all the purchasing decisions.”
Studies have shown that women are indeed Pinterest’s core audience. But Verma says he thinks the service will eventually expand from that. “There are more categories on Pinterest that appeal to female audience than males today, but we think that will gradually change.” Men might be slow adopters on Pinterest, the way it’s designed today, he says, but he’s certain that Pinterest is now thinking about how to tap into male psychology and give them strong reasons to use the product, too.
Pinfluencer’s pricing is on a SaaS-basis and not set in stone yet, with tiered levels based on number of pinners per month, data storage, and other features, but companies can try it out for the first two months for free.
Going forward, the team will use the new funding for product developments, which, in the near-term includes a self-serve platform for retailers to reward their most engaged pinners. Further down the road, they’ll develop “top on Pinterest” widgets to add Pinterest-infused social shopping to retailers’ own websites. The company is also using the infusion of capital to hire in sales, marketing, engineering and design.

FACEBOOK FALLOUT: After The IPO, Late Stage Investors Are Getting Tighter

Yesterday, Square finally closed its latest round of funding. The valuation, $3.25 billion, was huge, but not the $4 billion+ Square was reportedly looking for.
Meanwhile, we've heard that Spotify is likewise finding it difficult to raise yet another round of funding at a multibillion dollar valuation.
New York ad tech firm AppNexus, talked about as though it is a very successful company worth billions to a buyer, also spent the past few months looking at term sheets with valuations lower than its management had expected to see.
What's going on?
Fallout from the Facebook IPO, is what. It didn't go as planned for lots of late stage investors who bought into the company at a very high valuation during its last few years as a private enterprise.
General Atlantic, for one, bought in at $65 billion valuation in March 2011. That's right around Facebook's market cap now.
One person close to these kinds of late stage startup investments says that late stage investors are actively bringing up the Facebook IPO in negotiations with other late stage startups in an effort to drive down valuations.

"Potential investors are trying to use it to depress value – why not?"

Another source, this one a prominent Silicon Valley VC, says the Facebook IPO was "a reality check" on the "trivialization of the billion dollar valuation."

"The world is waking up that 'the sky is the limit" doesn't work."

Our first source – one who helps startups fund raise – says that some late stage startups are holding off on fundraising till the Facebook deal moves from the forefront a bit.

He believes it will in the medium term.

"Water will find its level. No company is powerful enough to affect the entire market."

Facebook itself has a chance to expedite this leveling when it reports Q2 earnings tomorrow.

Pinterest for Sale as Co-Founder joins Google

Well, it looks like the market for social media analytics has gotten a little less crowded, for now at least: the Pinterest analytics startup PinReach – which had originally been called PinClout until a cease & desist from Klout forced it to change its name – has just put itself up for sale on Flippa. You can buy it now for $10,000, or bid against others to see where you get.
Chris Fay, one of the co-founders, says that the reason for the sale is because he has accepted a position with Google, “and to avoid a conflict of interest my co-founder and I have decided to sell.” Included in the sale is the site’s technology “powering the aggregation and analysis of Pinterest data,” as well as the PinReach brand and domain.
We are reaching out to Fay to find out exactly what his role with Google will be — and whether it will have anything to do with building either a Pinterest-style service, or one that helps analyse and monitor activity on social media sites.
PinReach currently has 22,000 registered users, and claims it was the first of the Pinterest analytic services on the market, launching in early 2012. It got the cease & desist “within a few days” of our launch, Fay writes. That led the company to rebrand and also extend itself from just Pinterest influence measurement to the wider role of analytics. Up to now, the service has been free, “and as such we have virtually no revenue to show,” although Fay does point out that demand for the service is seeing usage numbers continue to rise.
As you can see from the site’s statistics, embedded below, its traffic was on the rise. The falloff in the last day, I believe, could have been down to the site itself going down for maintenance. (It’s back up at the time of writing, though.) Most of its users are in the U.S. and Facebook is the biggest provider of incoming traffic.
While social media sites like Pinterest continue to grow, the number of companies springing up to make sense of the data swirling around in them have been sprouting up, too. One of them, Pinpuff (which says it measures ‘Pinfluence’), recently got bought by the LA-based tech incubator Science. Another, Curalate, picked up a $750k seed round from NEA and others.
With Pinterest referral traffic now beating sites like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing and Google (but not Google Organic), you can see where big data might well smell an opportunity.
There are currently 39 sites tagged “pinterest” for sale on Flippa, ranging from straight-out Pinterest clones to those marketing themselves as SEO and Pinterest business services.