Compare / Snap Inc. vs Pinterest
SNAP INC.
Three Stanford frat brothers built an app for sending disappearing photos — which everyone assumed was just fo…
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Snap Inc.
BUSINESS MODEL
Snap Inc.
Snap's revenue comes almost entirely from advertising. Brands pay to run ads between Stories, in the Discover section, and through sponsored AR Lenses and Filters.
The ad business is powered by the time users spend on the platform — over 40 minutes per day for the average user under 25.
Snapchat+ is a subscription product launched in 2022 at $3.99/month, offering exclusive features like custom app icons, Story rewatch indicators, and priority support. It hit 12 million subscribers by 2024 — meaningful but still a small fraction of total revenue.
Snap also sells hardware — Spectacles (AR glasses) — but this has been more of an R&D investment than a revenue driver. Hardware revenue is negligible.
The long-term bet is that AR glasses become the next computing platform, and Snap wants to be the one building the operating system for your face.
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 $3.1 billion in 2024. The company has been profitable since 2023.
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
Snap Inc.
The origin story of Snapchat involves a Stanford fraternity, a disputed idea, and a lawsuit. In April 2011, Reggie Brown pitched the concept of disappearing photos to Evan Spiegel in their Kappa Sigma fraternity house.
Spiegel loved it and brought in Bobby Murphy, a math and computer science major, to build it. The app launched as "Picaboo" in July 2011.
The initial reception was rough — barely anyone downloaded it. Spiegel's mother was one of the first users.
They rebranded to "Snapchat" in September 2011 and slowly gained traction among high school and college students who wanted to share photos without them living on the internet forever. The disappearing message format felt risky, intimate, and fun — the opposite of Facebook's permanent timeline.
Then came the co-founder drama. Reggie Brown claims he originated the core concept.
Spiegel and Murphy dispute this. Brown was pushed out of the company in 2012.
He filed a lawsuit in 2013 claiming intellectual property rights and breach of contract. The case settled in 2014 for $157.5 million — making Brown perhaps the most expensive person ever kicked out of a fraternity project.
Spiegel and Murphy continued building.
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 Columbia classmate) and Evan Sharp (a designer he met at a coffee shop 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
Snap Inc.
Snapchat grew through word of mouth among teenagers and college students. The app spread through high schools like wildfire — kids told each other about it specifically because their parents weren't on it.
The anti-Facebook positioning was powerful: Snapchat was where you could be real, messy, and unfiltered because nothing was permanent.
International expansion drove the next wave. Snapchat invested heavily in localized content, Discover partnerships with local publishers, and market-specific features.
India became one of the fastest-growing markets after they launched Snapchat in Hindi and other local languages.
Augmented reality became the moat. Snap invested billions in AR technology, making the camera the centerpiece of the app.
AR Lenses went from silly face filters to genuinely useful tools — trying on sunglasses, previewing furniture in your room, translating signs in real time. By making the camera "smart," Snap differentiated from text-based social networks and positioned itself for the AR glasses future.
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. This drives massive organic traffic — over 80% of Pinterest's traffic comes from search engines, not the Pinterest app.
Unlike other social platforms that compete for attention, Pinterest benefits from Google's distribution.
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
Snap Inc.
Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is the permanent existential threat. When Spiegel turned down Zuckerberg's $3 billion offer in 2013, Zuckerberg responded by copying every single Snapchat feature — Stories on Instagram, disappearing messages on Messenger, AR filters on Facebook.
Instagram Stories alone now has over 500 million daily users, dwarfing Snapchat. Every feature Snap invents, Meta copies within months and deploys to a user base 5x larger.
TikTok redefined short-form content and stole attention from every other social platform. Snapchat launched Spotlight to compete, but TikTok's algorithmic feed and creator ecosystem are years ahead.
Young users who once spent hours on Snapchat now split that time with TikTok.
Monetization lags behind competitors. Snap's average revenue per user is significantly lower than Meta's or TikTok's.
Advertisers often treat Snapchat as an afterthought — they build campaigns for Instagram and TikTok first, then maybe run them on Snap. The company has been unprofitable for most of its public life, with only recent quarters showing operational improvement.
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
Snap Inc.
Snapchat — the core messaging and social media app with 850+ million monthly active users, known for disappearing messages, Stories, and the Snap Map. Snap Lenses & Filters — augmented reality effects that overlay digital content on the real world through the camera.
Over 3.5 billion Lenses have been created by the community. Stories — Snapchat invented the Stories format in 2013 (24-hour disappearing photo/video collections).
Every major social platform copied it. Snap Map — a real-time map showing friends' locations and local events.
Used by hundreds of millions and particularly popular with Gen Z. Spotlight — Snap's TikTok competitor: a feed of short-form vertical videos from the community, with creators earning a share of revenue.
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
Snap Inc.
Benchmark led the Series A — one of the most legendary early-stage investments in tech history. Lightspeed Venture Partners invested early.
Tencent bought a 12% stake, giving Snap a strategic investor from the world's largest gaming company. Alibaba, General Atlantic, and Fidelity participated in later rounds.
The March 2017 IPO raised $3.4 billion at a $24 billion valuation — Spiegel was 26 years old.
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.