Compare / Yelp vs Pinterest
YELP
Yelp gave every person with an internet connection the power to destroy a restaurant with a one-star review — …
Ben Silbermann built a virtual pinboard for collecting pretty pictures and accidentally created one of the mos…
AT A GLANCE
FUNDING HISTORY
Yelp
BUSINESS MODEL
Yelp
Local advertising. Yelp is free for consumers and free for businesses to claim their listing.
Revenue comes from selling advertising products to local businesses — sponsored listings that appear at the top of search results, enhanced profiles with photos and call-to-action buttons, and Yelp Ads that target users searching for relevant businesses. Approximately 95% of revenue comes from local advertising, making Yelp essentially an ad platform for small businesses.
The company also earns from Yelp Reservations, Yelp Waitlist, and transaction-based fees on food orders. Revenue is recurring — businesses pay monthly for advertising packages — but churn is high because small businesses often cancel when they don't see immediate ROI.
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
Yelp
Jeremy Stoppelman got sick after eating at a restaurant and wanted to find a doctor recommendation online. There was nothing useful.
He and Russel Simmons — both former PayPal employees — started Yelp in 2004, originally as an email-based referral system where you'd email friends asking for recommendations. That didn't work.
But they noticed that the reviews people wrote as part of the referral process were the actual valuable content. They pivoted to a review platform where anyone could write reviews of local businesses — restaurants, dentists, plumbers, mechanics, anything.
The social element was key: reviewers had profiles, could be friends, and the best reviewers became "Yelp Elite" with status and perks. By 2008, Yelp had turned reviewing restaurants into a hobby, a social activity, and for some people, an identity.
Google reportedly offered $500 million to acquire Yelp in 2009. Stoppelman turned it down and took the company public in 2012.
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
Yelp
User-generated content created a flywheel: more reviews attracted more consumers, which attracted more businesses, which attracted more reviewers. Yelp Elite Squad gamified reviewing, turning prolific reviewers into evangelists who hosted events and recruited new users.
SEO dominance — Yelp pages rank highly on Google for local business searches, driving organic traffic that costs nothing to acquire. City-by-city launch strategy with community managers in each market building local reviewer communities.
Advertising sales team calling local businesses directly — a labor-intensive but effective model for monetizing the platform. Mobile app became critical as smartphones made "find a restaurant near me" a constant use case.
Expansion into services (plumbers, contractors, mechanics) beyond restaurants to increase addressable market.
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
Yelp
Google is the existential threat. Google Maps reviews have overtaken Yelp in volume and are embedded directly in search results, intercepting users before they ever reach Yelp.
Stock performance has been mediocre — shares are roughly flat over the past five years while the broader market doubled. The business model depends on selling advertising to small businesses, which are notoriously difficult and expensive to sell to (high churn, small budgets, skeptical owners).
Yelp has been accused of manipulating reviews to pressure businesses into advertising — allegations the company denies but which have damaged its reputation. Review fraud (fake positive reviews, competitor sabotage reviews) is a constant battle.
And the broader shift to social media for recommendations (Instagram, TikTok, Reddit) is eroding Yelp's relevance with younger users.
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
Yelp
Business listings and reviews — 265+ million reviews across every local business category. Yelp for Restaurants — reservations, waitlist management, and ordering integrated into business pages.
Yelp Ads — advertising platform letting businesses target users by category, location, and intent. Yelp for Business Owners — dashboard for responding to reviews, tracking page views, and managing business info.
Yelp Elite Squad — gamified community of prolific reviewers who get invited to exclusive events. Yelp Guest Manager — restaurant management tool combining waitlist, reservations, and table management.
Yelp Knowledge Program — data licensing to power local search across third-party platforms.
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
Yelp
Pre-IPO investors included Bessemer Venture Partners, Max Levchin, and Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. Yelp went public on the NYSE in March 2012.
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.