Is Pinterest the next Facebook?
An exclusive look inside CEO Ben Silbermann's social media sensation. — FORTUNE — Ben Silbermann can't stop staring at the refrigerators. The Pinterest co-founder and CEO and I are standing in the break room of his company's garage-size Palo Alto office.
Context & Ripple Effects
There is little prior corpus history on Pinterest before this piece — the story's weight comes from how far it travelled on release day alone: pickups at TechCrunch, The Verge, BuzzFeed, Digiday, SocialTimes, StartupStats, Pulse2, and Poynter within about a day of Fortune's exclusive visit to the [[a:|garage-size Palo Alto office]]. That breadth signals the market was actively hunting for the next scaled consumer platform in March 2012.
The comparison lands against a specific backdrop: Facebook is confirmed to be preparing its initial public offering this year, so 'is Pinterest the next Facebook' is being asked by investors pricing private social companies against a public benchmark, not just by editors filling columns. TechCrunch's own framing of the piece — that revenue will turn unresolved copyright questions into real problems — supplies the sharpest counterpoint to the hype.
First-order effects
- Ben Silbermann's team now carries a public valuation narrative it did not choose: every funding and hiring decision gets measured against Facebook's trajectory while Facebook's confirmed 2012 IPO dominates the market's attention.
- The copyright exposure TechCrunch highlighted moves from theoretical to operational the moment Pinterest earns its first meaningful revenue off images it does not own.
Second-order effects
- Photographers, publishers, and brands whose images supply most pins gain negotiating leverage they lacked when the site was small and unmonetized — takedown demands become licensing conversations.
- Facebook has been reinforcing its own photo surface (the confirmed shift to high-resolution display by default), and a credible visual rival gives that defensive investment a named competitor.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, U.S. consumer platforms will be priced on engagement scale years before revenue, making intellectual-property law — not network effects — the first hard constraint on curation-based businesses like Pinterest's.
The trend: Consumer-web capital and attention are consolidating around a few scaled social platforms, with each new contender judged against the incumbent's business model before it has one of its own.