Why PayPal Should Acquire Pinterest — Or Something Like It
The lesson it could learn from rival Square
In today’s “attention economy,” eyeballs are everything. That’s why Big Tech has become focused, quietly or not, on acquiring those eyeballs.
It’s not as disgusting as it sounds — unless you’re the Department of Justice, maybe.
As Scott Galloway wrote here and here, most media platforms are great products with a terrible business model — they sell ads. These ads bombard the user and take attention away from what they came there to do.
Ads can get the job done financially. But are they good enough?
Galloway compares the user base of Pinterest to the user base of PayPal — two companies that recently flirted with each other. PayPal has had 416 million accounts make a purchase within the last 12 months while Pinterest has 444 million active users per month.
And yet, Pinterest’s market cap is just about 13% the size of PayPal’s.
Companies like PayPal and Pinterest can complement each other — financial technology companies need users while social platforms need to sell anything but ads.
PayPal could learn from one of its largest competitors, Square, that acquiring eyeballs is worth the cost. And Square…
