[zacharyz]

"The start-up, which has no revenue to speak of yet"

This is the aspect of the site that always made me scratch my head and say "huh?"

It is no doubt a well designed site that engages women. Despite being in beta and invite only I know a bunch of women who are really into it. I don't think being engaging is enough though - where do they go from here? How do they actually justify the valuation? Are they going to have "paid" posts for advertising? Are they going to some how sell the data mined from their users? Paid accounts?

This site seems like it is going to be even harder to monetize than reddit.

[KevinEldon]

I can vouch for the engages women... Pinterest has the secret sauce. My wife and her friends absolutely love it and get a lot of value and inspiration from the photos and links.

At first glance my thought was that it would be an amazing advertising platform. Mix in the user generated pinned photos with high quality targeted photos of products women are interested in buying and you've got some potential magic.

Again, using my wife as a reference, she's taken several ideas she's picked up on Pinterest and applied them to recipes, decorations, clothing, house design ideas (we're in the early stages of designing our new home), and travel ideas. She's not one to jump on the latest thing, so it surprised me how effectively Pinterest hooked her.

[rgrieselhuber]

Pinterest is so freaking monetizable it's not even funny.

[diolpah]

I'll take a wild guess, predicated on the fact that twitter is another social platform that's difficult to monetize: sponsored pinboards.

My company would pay to have "sponsored pinboards" all day long if the net ROI was positive. But that's a huge "if".

[ericsantos89]

I think that pinterest needs to be careful on how many of these "sponsored pinboards" they have. It is currently something cool and hip, but if the ratio of "sponsored pinboards" and user pinboards isn't correct, they can turn off a lot of users.