Today, Pinterest said it hit 150 million monthly active users, up from the 100 million it announced in September 2015.<\/p>\n
However, as TechCrunch previously reported, Pinterest in 2015 was targeting that it wouldhit 151 million monthly active users by the end of 2015<\/a>.\u00a0We reported the story in October last year, and the information was used by Andreessen Horowitz to solicit limited partners to invest in a special investment fund for Pinterest earlier in the year.<\/p>\n With Pinterest growing by half this year, it looks like it may miss\u00a0on its 2016 projections that it set earlier last year as well. Leaked documents reviewed by TechCrunch at the time also projected that Pinterest would end 2016 at\u00a0218 million monthly active users. The Wall Street Journal today also reported<\/a> the company is expected\u00a0to triple last year\u2019s revenue to $300 million in 2016. That, too, falls below projected estimates of $663 million for 2016 from those leaked documents.<\/p>\n Again, these projections came in early 2015, and companies are constantly revising them as the years progress. Pinterest CEO Ben\u00a0Silbermann, in response to those projections, told The Wall Street Journal that \u201cthere were some early projections when we were just a couple months into building the business, but we\u2019ve learned more about it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cStart up life is dynamic, and years old projections aren\u2019t particularly relevant to where companies are today,\u201d Andreessen-Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan, who is on Pinterest\u2019s board, told TechCrunch. \u201cWe\u2019re thrilled with Pinterest\u2019s performance \u2014 strong continued user growth, best-in-class user engagement, and an increasingly robust platform for advertisers that\u2019s leading to rapidly expanding revenue. We\u2019re very excited about what\u2019s to come.\u201d<\/p>\n Revenue of\u00a0$100 million for 2015, and potentially $300 million for 2016, are enviable numbers for a consumer ad-driven startup that\u2019s only 7 years old. This isn\u2019t really a reflection of poor performance for Pinterest, it would seem \u2014 just that the expectations may have been\u00a0set a little high. Many startups are sometimes\u00a0valued, to some extent, at a multiple of next year\u2019s revenue. While Pinterest\u2019s valuation is likely also relative to the latent pent-up marketing and user\u00a0demand, as well as its growth and overhead, it would still seem the company needed\u00a0to reset its expectations.<\/p>\n While these were early projections,\u00a0they\u00a0may represent a service that \u2014 while incredibly popular with certain demographics and very attractive to advertisers \u2014 will face some challenges as it continues to look forward. The company has traditionally been very popular with women, but Pinterest is saying that\u00a040% of global sign-ups are men, growing at 70% year-over-year.<\/p>\n Last week, the company announced that it had brought on its first chief financial officer, former Twitter executive Todd Morgenfeld. But at that time, The Wall Street Journal reported that the company had generated $100 million in 2015, which fell below its projections of $169 million<\/a>. To be sure, 50% growth year-over-year would be an enviable clip for any service with more than 100 million users (as in, Twitter), but there has always been a question as to what the upper bound of Pinterest would be beyond really powerful use\u00a0cases like wedding planning or recipes.<\/p>\n There are a lot of potential reasons for this. With Facebook still immensely growing, scooping up new communications\u00a0platforms and offering a wider array of advertising products, advertisers may be more inclined to simply stick to what they know. And the experimental budgets that these firms have, which previously may have gone to Pinterest, may\u00a0be shifting to other emerging platforms like Snapchat, which has 150 million daily active users. Snapchat, a 5-year-old company, is already projecting revenue as high as between $500 million and $1 billion for 2017<\/a>.<\/p>\n The souring on alternative platforms to Facebook and traditional advertising has been made increasingly apparent as Twitter\u2019s valuation has dropped off a cliff. In recent weeks, reports came out\u00a0that suitors have emerged (and slinked back, and emerged, and so on) to buy Twitter. That sent Twitter\u2019s shares rocketing up, but it\u2019s since cratered back to a market cap of around $12.5 billion. That\u2019s not too far off from Pinterest\u2019s valuation of $11 billion in its previous financing round.<\/p>\n Pinterest has increasingly offered an advertising tool that serves a larger funnel than other services. While Facebook \u2014 and likely Snapchat \u2014 are very effective at awareness and brand advertising, Pinterest has billed itself as a way for marketers to push users further and further toward conversion. It can get their attention at the awareness phase, their intention to purchase with search, and finally a conversion when they are pinning products or even purchasing them. For many kinds of products, particularly fashion, Pinterest is one of a very small set of marketing tools that touches users at every point in a purchasing life cycle.<\/p>\n That\u2019s also why it\u2019s been aggressively investing in tools surrounding visual search, including a tool\u00a0that would allow users to search for products with photos from their smartphone cameras. Those sort of things are designed to capture the moment of an impulse purchase, increasingly offering alternative marketing products to its partners \u2014 and potentially to draw advertising dollars away from Facebook (or Snapchat).<\/p>\n