Why Pinterest Sucks Now

Because “free" always comes with a price

It’s time we talked about this, because man, oh man, have I got something to say!!!

And for those that don’t already know *exactly* what we’re talking about here:

@mollybhome#greenscreenvideo there has always been lots of ads on my main feed but this is just ridiculous #pinterest #pinterestinspo

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Pinterest used to be good. Great, even! It was the coziest corner of the internet where procrastination somehow felt productive. Endless scrolling felt…wholesome? You could happily plan three different weddings, your dream home, and your fall capsule closet all before lunch.

Now it’s just ads. All ads.

And the wild part is that we all seemed to notice at the exact same time. Pinterest didn’t suddenly stop working, but the vibe shifted hard.

It’s actually quite noticeable when you search TikTok or Reddit for something like “Pinterest is all ads now” or “What happened to Pinterest?”. We all started talking about it in early 2024 — and haven’t really stopped since.

The complaints are loud and very valid. Pinterest feels borderline unusable at this point.

But the truth is: Pinterest didn’t make a “mistake” or otherwise betray us against its best interest. They just finally sent us the bill.

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The myth of “free”

Stick with me on this: no one in their right mind would ever walk into a store, pick up a product and see the price tag, just to gasp: “I can’t believe you’re trying to charge me for this!?”.

And yet that’s exactly the expectation we’ve placed on the internet. It’s all just imaginary bits and bytes, right? It doesn’t cost anything, so why should I pay anything?

This first point should be obvious to anyone with an ounce of critical thinking, but let me just say it out loud as the co-founder of a consumer tech product: it costs something.

A team of people who design, develop, and market the tech product costs something. Even at the most basic infrastucture level, storing and delivering images costs something. I’ve personally stared at an Indyx P&L, stressing over how we were ever going to cover tens of thousands of dollars a month handling y’all’s images. This is all real.

I will say: it is true that tech products have a much greater ability to efficiently scale than physical products. Physical products come with a built-in, real-world cost every time you make and sell one. Tech products don’t work that way. Once the thing is built, you can (mostly! ignoring some of that basic infrastucture!) sell a million copies without a million new expenses.

This is one of the reasons why tech companies can become effectively money-printing machines (see: Google). This is also precisely why venture capitalists mostly invest in tech, and why it was so batshit crazy for them to have ever attempted to invest in direct-to-consumer (think: Casper, Glossier, Everlane, Away, etc.).

But it doesn’t make it free.

Even tech companies must find a way to pay the bills, and there are really only two options:

1. Ask their users to pay with money (i.e., membership)

2. Force their users to pay with attention (i.e., advertising)

I was recently faced with a classroom of fashion students who had just completed a semester-long project digitizing their closet on Indyx and analyzing their own wardrobe data.¹ I was asked multiple times, all in well-meaning ways, some version of:

I mean Indyx is really cool and all, but why don’t you just get brands to pay for it? That seems a lot better. That way I wouldn’t have to pay.

Here’s the thing, y’all: why do you think “the brands” would pay for it? What justifies that expense?

Brands are not making benevolent donations to Instagram. They pay for advertising only because enough of us buy the shit that is being advertised. That’s the only way it works!²

Whether you swipe your card for a membership or for the stuff in the ads, the money that supports the technology still comes from you. We, the consumers, always pay for everything. There’s no third option where someone else magically foots the bill.

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Pinterest’s long-con

Okay, so everyone intuitively “gets” that every business has costs and must somehow come up with the money to at least cover those costs. That’s not a secret.

But in tech, there’s another layer. A gravitational force that quietly bends the whole playing field. It’s what (often) creates the winners and losers, and has completely skewed our perception of what’s “normal” as consumers.

Venture capital strategically dumps huge sums of money into companies like Pinterest, enabling them to choose to just…not make money. For years. Decades!

It’s now a very well-established strategy to use VC investment to grow at all costs. And one of those “costs” is to simply not charge users very much at all, even if only in advertising that might turn them off. This allows them to grow faster, less encumbered by any possible friction. Here’s the path:

Acquire millions (or billions!) of happy users. Freeze out the competition (who may not have the same privilege of dumping money down the drain). Build your moat. And look at that! Now you have an unimaginable amount of attention to monetize. Doesn’t matter how! You’ll definitely find at least one way.³

This results in the modern-day phenomenon of huge companies not being real (profitable) businesses until well after they’ve achieved kitchen-table level recognition.

• Facebook: Founded 2004. Not profitable until 2009 (+5 yrs)

• Etsy: Founded 2005. Not profitable until 2017 (+12 yrs)

• Twitter: Founded 2006. Not profitable until 2018 (+12 yrs)

• Spotify: Founded 2006. Not profitable until 2024 (+18 yrs)

• Airbnb: Founded 2008. Not profitable until 2022 (+14 yrs)

• Uber: Founded 2009. Not profitable until 2023 (+14 yrs)

• ThredUp: Founded 2009. Not yet profitable⁴

• The RealReal: Founded 2011. Not yet profitable⁵

Shocking, right? I already knew about this overall pattern, and was still surprised at the reality of these specifics.

“But what about our good friend, Pinterest?”, you might ask.

Founded in 2010, Pinterest first reported its financials in 2016.

If you’re a big fat nerd who is DYING to know what happened in 2021 and why 2019 & 2024 are asterisked, check this footnote.⁶

For the rest of us, what really matters here is that Pinterest was mostly burning $100M+ every year up until 2024, when profits jumped straight up to nearly $1B.

Hey, remind me what else happened in 2024?

Oh, yeah: ads overwhelmed our feeds and we all started asking “what happened to Pinterest?”.

My current feed, before & after an ad-blocker does it's thing

Pinterest spent 10 years tinkering with its ad engine⁷ without the pressure of actually covering its own expenses. All the while lying by omission that the super enjoyable, relatively ad-free experience we had gotten used to was at all sustainable.

It came time to finally become a real business, and Pinterest simply turned the dial up to eleven. We all noticed. Pinterest had its best year ever.

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Reclaiming the catalog of ideas

This isn’t just about Pinterest. Zooming out, this is all part of a larger pattern.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., all follow the same cycle: launch as an amazing “free” (!!!) experience that we fall in love with. Delay monetization. And inevitably…crank down on ads and commerce until the platform feels totally broken.

And it’s such a shame! I feel the loss of Pinterest especially deeply—as I’m sure many of you do, too—because the original product was really the best source of fashion inspiration we’d ever had. A true “catalog of ideas,” as founder Ben Silbermann once called it.

I know that commerce (i.e., shopping) has become such an ingrained pattern in the fabric of our society that it can be hard to imagine any other way. But our consumer reluctance to pay for tech has reduced every large platform into a portal through which we buy things. That’s it! All the human connection, all the exchange of ideas, all the “this is going to solve your problems and change your life!” imagined by the early Internet⁸ sidelined by the thrust to simply add-to-cart.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Beyond the deception of “free for now, but pay with your eyeballs later”, the real problem is that on any ad-based platform, you are the user but not the customer. Advertisers are the customers. Which means your experience will always come second to theirs.

Pinterest really doesn’t care about our moaning and groaning over how “bad” it’s gotten. And they actually don’t want you to solve your problem, like making it easier to get dressed in the morning. Because if you truly solved it, the promoted pin for the “solve-it-all” blazer stops converting.

As long as we still scroll enough, click enough, buy enough. That’s all that matters.

Is this what we want?!?

I’ll hold your hand while I say this: if we truly want tech products that stick with us, we have to start sticking with them. We have to stop chasing “free!” and start making ourselves the customer. And that means pulling out our wallets at the paywall.

Imagine what fashion platforms would look like if your goals were the ones they were built to serve. If the center of gravity flipped from “how do we get users to spend more time?” to “how do we help users get what they came for?”. This might mean:

• No endless push to engage: to like, comment, and subscribe. Notifications only appear when they can offer something genuinely helpful, not just when the algorithm senses your attention slipping. You don’t get a ping because someone you once threw a “like” to posted something new. You get one because a friend sent three new outfits built around the skirt you said you were struggling to style.

• No scroll spiral, no “you liked one minimalist outfit, so here’s 400 more”. Because platforms optimize for closure, not open-ended time spent. Instead, it might surface just 5 minimalist outfits that overlap most with your wardrobe and ask “want to shop your own closet to try this?”.

• No incentive to treat your fury as fuel. The content that spreads is the kind that’s most useful, not just the loudest or most polarizing. There’s no reward just for peacocking the most expensive closet or for dunking on someone’s outfit.

• No impulse triggers, as it doesn’t matter to them whether you buy anything else! A dress pinned to your wishlist comes with a gentle nudge: “You already own two similar silhouettes. Want to try styling it first?”. Instead of the push to “complete the look” with a new item, you’re given three options that work just as well (or even better!?) with what you’ve already got.

My brothers and sisters: is this not worth $10 a month!?

Are we willing to pay for things we love, even when we can’t physically hold them in our hands and hang them in our closets?

I can’t promise that this would fix everything. I can’t promise that every user-supported platform would always do the right thing by its users.

But, I think it’s a start.

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1. Very cool, right?! I mean, I know I’m highly biased, but…I would have eaten up this assignment.

2. I understand that advertising has an ‘advantage’ in that it enables collective payment. As long as enough of us buy the ads, some individuals can skate by not paying anything (besides their attention/annoyance). This allows the poor college student to have access to a lot more than they would if it were all strictly paywalled. But also…uh, who among us hasn’t bought because of an ad we’ve seen online? We pretty much all pay for it with real money, but we seem to societally balk at advertising a lot less.

3. Right? Right?!??!

4. For this exercise, I am looking at the first full year in which each company reached GAAP net income profitability. ThredUp reached positive adjusted EBITDA in 2024. No telling yet on GAAP net income.

5. Same note here: TRR reached positive adjusted EBITDA in 2024.

6. 2019: Pinterest IPO’d in this year, which triggered some significant accounting distortions. like a one-time RSU “catch-up” charge. These distortions were so large (and so truly one-time) that the recorded net income for the year feels much more noisy than helpful. Let’s just say, they were definitely unprofitable in 2019. We don’t need to argue about exactly how much.

2021: This was Pinterest’s first truly profitable year. While they were certainly already on the right track in rationalizing expenses, this sudden spike into profitability was generally seen as a COVID bump, driven by 1. users stuck at home with nothing to do but build moodboards and 2. users stuck at home with nothing to do but to spend discretionary income on a metric butt-ton of stuff shipped to their doorstep.

2024: Similar to 2019, there was a one-time accounting adjustment in Pinterest’s favor ($1.5B worth) that gave them a huge bump in reported GAAP net income. I decided it would be more misleading of me to just leave that in. So what is shown here for 2024 is adjusted EBITDA, which accounts for that one-time allowance. They were still strongly, demonstratively profitable without it.

7. The first ads (“promoted pins”) came to Pinterest in 2014

8. Including the founders of the very same platforms we’re talking about here! Remember when Zuckerburg was all about Facebook’s raison d’être being to “connect people”? This April, Mark testified that actually “the friend part has gone down quite a bit”, replaced with entertainment and shopping.