By Brian Brus
Courtesy of The Journal Record
OKLAHOMA CITY – Advertising is a matter of perspective in the development of the social media frontier, and PinLeague Chief Executive Daniel Maloney intends to help shape that data landscape.
The Oklahoma City-based analytics company has pinned a lot of its expansion energy on the rise of Pinterest, one of the largest interactive platforms on the Internet. A poll by the Pew Research Center in February found that about 15 percent of adults who are active online have Pinterest accounts, placing the network nearly even with Twitter, and in a relatively short time since its beta launch in 2010.
Industry watchers said Pinterest added tens of millions of new users last year. Building on that momentum, this week Pinterest acquired mobile recommendations application producer Livestar in a private transaction.
Maloney’s company is all over Pinterest, although PinLeague’s presence is largely invisible. PinLeague analyzes user data from Pinterest and tells client companies how consumers are behaving as well as identifying valuable nexuses, or people who influence many others. Pinterest boards are based on shared interests, so any particular page is a mosaic of what’s hot. That sort of market trending information helps companies shape and target their outreach efforts.
Maloney said that the now venerable Facebook platform, launched in 2004, has built so much mass, at an estimated 1 billion active accounts, that the company has been able to shift much of its attention to monetizing multiple avenues of consumer use. If a business wants to grab advertising space on Facebook, it’s going to cost from 50 cents to $2.50 per user, he said.
Pinterest hasn’t reached that point yet, so market exposure is much cheaper, he said, at as little as 1 cent per user. And that makes PinLeague’s data a bargain for its purpose.
The company, at just a year old, hasn’t limited itself to Pinterest, Maloney said. PinLeague also has a product that helps email companies target their content to consumer data pulled from Facebook and Twitter.
“Our plan is to get in early and build up expertise in the Pinterest environment, so that by the time they do have an advertising network we’ll be able to do it better than anyone else,” he said.
PinLeague is seeking expansion funds, although Maloney declined discussing details until after speaking with his primary investor. The company comprises about 10 people, several of whom are still at part-time status. Maloney said the staff will be about 15 full-time positions by the end of the year.
