Kendall, who's come to know both companies' products and their advertising appeal well, believes Pinterest is uniquely positioned to zoom past Twitter, Google and Facebook in terms of revenue. He tells Forbes that Pinterest has the "biggest business opportunity in the last 10 to 20 years for an online business" and that it will be "bigger than Facebook and bigger than Google."
His reasoning: Pinterest predicts intent to buy, much like $55 billion Google. The key difference: Google is only useful when you already know what you're looking for. On Pinterest, 70 million people are searching for inspiration. The don't actually know what they're searching for when they arrive, and they're open to ideas.
Catching people when they're most receptive to new products is an advertiser's dream, and it has Pinterest's first dozen advertisers paying $1-2 million each.
Facebook is appealing to advertisers because it knows so much about users and it actively reaches more than one billion people. But Facebook is about past memories and experiences, which aren't as beneficial to advertisers as new experiences, which is where Pinterest shines.
Pinterest is already a bigger traffic referrer than Twitter for many publishers. One social marketing executive, Dave Weinberg, tells Forbes that Pinterest is positioned to "bring in billions of dollars a year."
Pinterest currently has 70 million monthly users, 750 million pinboards, and users are pinning 54 million photos per day.