What you end up with is an intermediary who is content agnostic because they are not a content creator. Google and Facebook should be worried, very worried. If they can do that with photos how hard will it be to add a real time contextual layer that incorporates infinite semantic categorization - think IBM's Watson-like big data analysis on top of a fully applied ontology, and a geo-temporal layer - across all content? The result is a formidable content curation and recommendation engine. Their model differs from Netflix or Amazon recommendations because the human element on both the suggestion (pin) and consumption (reads) forms a tighter loop in their data collection and measurement in real time. Recent initiatives have targeted visual search recognition (VisualGraph) that allows object (idea) recognition and machine learning that determine similar content for product recommendation (Kosei). Pinterest is already, arguably, a market leader in discovery. If they are successful the result will be a discovery and recommendation engine that could very well disrupt current publishing models. Pinterest can apply the same deep learning to the way Instapaper users curate content that they applied to their own users. Why? Instapaper users come and read their articles. The acquisition of Instapaper lets Pinterest extend their play into the world of online content. The result is that Pinterest users are highly engaged, 110 of the 176 million registered users are active monthly users. Their model is based on content discovery through human curation, but they have supplemented that human element with a nearly invisible (to the user) ai/machine learning recommendation engine that connects users, products and companies in a "see-it-buy-it" transaction. Pinterest has done this as well, although in a different, till now, space. In this regard, as discovery tools, Google and Facebook are now at odds with publishers, inserting themselves and their curation (aka seo/algorithm) between author and reader. Publishers realize that their value add is driving discovery and the tool of choice is SEO. Then the web disrupted that, enabling anyone with an idea to post it on a web page, with the result that there is so much noise it is difficult to tell the wheat from the chaff.Īs most online content approaches commodity status (nearly perfect substitutes and complements), making the message stand out among all the other noise is now the hurdle.
Making an idea discoverable required a ready, willing and able publisher to print and distribute the idea. Publishers were the intermediary between author and reader.
Publishing used to be about controlling the message by controlling the presses. Pinterest has announced that it plans to keep Instapaper separate? Obviously Pinterest does not share the same outlook of the media business.
It is not an acquihire and it is not buying a tech solution. If the wisdom on the street is that publishing is in its death throes why would a forward-thinking idea collection tool acquire a content collection tool. Yesterday Pinterest announced that they were acquiring Instapaper, an online content collection and curation engine.
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