Compare / Discord vs Pinterest
DISCORD
Jason Citron built a failed mobile game studio, realized the best thing about it was the voice chat he built f…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Discord
BUSINESS MODEL
Discord
Discord makes money primarily through Nitro — a $9.99/month subscription that gives users bigger file uploads, HD video streaming, custom emoji, animated avatars, and profile customization. There's also Nitro Basic at $2.99/month with fewer perks.
Server owners can pay for Server Boosts that unlock premium features for their community. Discord also added a cut of server subscriptions — creators can charge monthly membership fees and Discord takes 10%.
The key insight is that Discord's core product is completely free. Voice chat, text chat, screen sharing, communities with thousands of members — all free.
Nitro is cosmetic and convenience upgrades. Most users never pay and Discord is fine with that.
The free users create the network effects that make the platform valuable.
Pinterest makes money through advertising — specifically through "Promoted Pins" that look nearly identical to organic content. This is the magic of Pinterest's business model: ads don't interrupt the experience because the experience IS discovering products and ideas.
A promoted pin for a kitchen knife set appears right alongside organic pins of kitchen designs. The user doesn't distinguish between "ad" and "content" because both serve the same purpose.
Shopping ads are the fastest-growing segment. Brands upload their product catalogs, Pinterest matches products to user searches and boards, and users can buy directly through the platform or click through to the retailer's site.
Pinterest gets paid per click or per thousand impressions.
Revenue reached $3.65 billion in 2024, up from $3.05 billion the year before, and 2024 was its first genuinely profitable year. Average revenue per user is growing but still well below Meta's — the upside is enormous if Pinterest can close that gap.
HOW THEY STARTED
Discord
Jason Citron had already built and sold a gaming company — OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile, which GREE bought for $104 million in 2011. After that, he started Hammer & Chisel, a game studio that was supposed to make mobile games.
The game they built, called Fates Forever, was a mobile MOBA that got great reviews but almost nobody played.
What Citron noticed was that gamers were using terrible tools to communicate. TeamSpeak was clunky.
Skype was laggy. Nothing worked well for groups of people who needed to talk while gaming.
The internal voice and text chat tool that Hammer & Chisel had built for their own team worked better than anything on the market.
Citron and co-founder Stan Vishnevskiy pivoted the entire company. They stripped out the gaming stuff and launched Discord in May 2015 as a free voice, video, and text chat platform for gamers.
It spread through Reddit first — a post on the r/gaming subreddit went viral and crashed their servers on day one. Within a year they had 25 million registered users.
Ben Silbermann was a former Google ad operations employee who quit in 2008 to build apps. His first attempt was an iPhone app called Tote — essentially a mobile catalog that let women browse and bookmark products from fashion retailers.
Nobody downloaded it. But Silbermann noticed something in the data: users were saving products obsessively.
The collecting behavior was more interesting than the shopping behavior.
He teamed up with Paul Sciarra, a classmate from Yale, and Evan Sharp, a designer who was studying architecture at Columbia. Together they built Pinterest — a visual bookmarking tool that let people "pin" images from around the internet to organized boards.
Think of it as a digital mood board that anyone could make.
Pinterest launched as an invite-only beta in March 2010. Growth was painfully slow at first.
Silbermann personally wrote to the first 5,000 users, giving them his phone number and asking what they wanted. The early community was overwhelmingly women interested in home decor, fashion, recipes, and DIY projects.
By 2011, Time magazine named Pinterest one of the 50 best websites. By 2012, it was the fastest site in history to reach 10 million unique monthly visitors.
HOW THEY GREW
Discord
Discord grew through communities, not ads. The first users were gamers on Reddit and Twitch who were sick of TeamSpeak and Skype.
Streamers would set up Discord servers for their fans, and every viewer who joined brought their friends. The growth was entirely organic for years.
The bot ecosystem was the secret weapon. Discord made it trivially easy to build bots — automated programs that add functionality to servers.
Music bots, moderation bots, gaming bots, utility bots. Developers built tens of thousands of bots, each one making Discord servers more useful and sticky.
A server with good bots became a mini-app platform.
COVID and the "beyond gaming" shift were massive. When lockdowns hit, study groups, book clubs, art communities, crypto communities, and just friend groups all started using Discord.
By 2020, non-gaming usage overtook gaming usage. Discord quietly dropped the "for gamers" tagline and rebranded as a platform for communities of all kinds.
Pinterest grew organically through women sharing boards with each other. The weddings use case was the killer app — brides-to-be would create boards for dresses, venues, flowers, and invitations, then share them with their wedding parties.
That viral loop drove millions of signups.
SEO is the secret weapon. Pinterest pages rank extremely well in Google Image Search.
Someone searching "modern living room ideas" often sees Pinterest results on page one. That drives a large stream of organic traffic from people who were not looking for Pinterest at all.
Unlike other social platforms, which compete with Google for attention, Pinterest quietly benefits from it.
The shopping pivot has been the growth unlock. Under CEO Bill Ready (former Google and PayPal executive who took over in 2022), Pinterest aggressively invested in shopping features — catalog integrations, buyable pins, merchant verification, and visual search for products.
The thesis: Pinterest users are already in a shopping mindset, so removing friction between "I like this" and "I bought this" is the straightforward path to revenue growth.
THE HARD PART
Discord
Monetization has been the eternal question. Discord has 200 million monthly active users but has never turned a profit.
Nitro subscriptions are growing but most users are happy on the free tier. Unlike Facebook or Twitter, Discord doesn't run ads — they've explicitly said ads in DMs or chat would destroy the product.
Finding ways to monetize without betraying user trust is the core challenge.
The Microsoft acquisition saga. In early 2021, Microsoft reportedly offered $12 billion to buy Discord.
Citron and the board walked away. The thinking was that Discord could grow into something worth much more independently.
Whether that was the right call depends on whether Discord can eventually figure out profitability — Microsoft would have solved that problem instantly with its distribution.
Content moderation at scale is brutal. With millions of servers and hundreds of millions of users, Discord has struggled with harmful content — extremist groups, CSAM, doxxing, and harassment.
They've invested heavily in trust and safety teams and automated detection, but the decentralized nature of servers makes moderation much harder than a centralized feed like Twitter or Facebook.
Pinterest's demographics are both an advantage and a limitation. The platform skews heavily female (over 60% women) and is strongest in home, fashion, food, and weddings.
Expanding beyond these categories to attract male users, younger demographics, and different use cases has been slow.
Competition for ad dollars is fierce. Pinterest competes with Meta, Google, TikTok, and Amazon for advertising budgets.
Most advertisers allocate the bulk of their spend to Meta and Google first, then consider others. Pinterest needs to prove its return on ad spend is competitive to win larger budget allocations.
Creator economy is underdeveloped. While Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have massive creator ecosystems with monetization tools, Pinterest has historically been about content discovery, not content creation.
Users pin other people's content — the original creators often don't even know their work is on Pinterest. Building a creator program and driving original content creation on the platform has been a recent focus but lags far behind competitors.
THE PRODUCTS
Discord
Discord's core is servers — community spaces organized into text and voice channels. Think of a server like a clubhouse with different rooms for different topics.
Voice Channels let you drop in and out of audio conversations like a walkie-talkie. Stage Channels are for live audio events with audiences.
Forum Channels organize discussions by topic. Discord also has direct messaging, group chats, video calls, screen sharing, and a growing app/bot ecosystem.
Activities let users play games and watch videos together inside Discord calls.
Pinterest Home Feed — the core discovery surface showing personalized pins based on user interests, boards, and search history. Pinterest Lens — visual search technology that lets users take a photo of any object and find similar items to buy on Pinterest.
Pinterest Shopping — integrated e-commerce allowing users to browse and purchase products directly from pins linked to retailer catalogs. Pinterest Boards — the organizing system where users save and categorize pins into collections, used for wedding planning, home renovation, recipes, fashion, and more.
Pinterest Shuffles — a collage-making app for Gen Z users to create aesthetic mood boards, driving younger user adoption.
WHO BACKED THEM
Discord
Benchmark, Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Spark Capital, Fidelity Investments
Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz were early investors. Fidelity and Valiant Capital participated in later rounds.
Rakuten invested strategically. The April 2019 IPO raised $1.4 billion at a $12.7 billion valuation.
Elliott Management, the activist investor, took a large stake in 2022 and pushed for operational improvements that contributed to the company's path to profitability.