Microsoft’s secret Pinterest deal revealed as company hunts for social networks

The attempted deal is similar to Microsoft's attempts to buy TikTok

(Getty Images)

Microsoft made an attempt to buy Pinterest for $51million in recent months, as part of the company’s continued aims to purchase social networks.

According to a report from the Financial Times the talks are not currently ongoing, but the computing giant’s aim was to run Pinterest on top of its Azure cloud computing platform.

Pinterest, essentially a digital scrapbook, has approximately 175 million monthly active users. The majority of those are women, “exploring items tied to home redecoration, weddings or everyday needs like recipes and clothes before they have decided what to buy”.

The deal, had it gone through, would have been the largest ever in Microsoft’s history.

It would also have been expensive. Pinterest’s market value has increased six times over during the coronavirus pandemic, and thecompany has repeatedly emphasised its aim to remain independent, the Financial Times notes.

Pinterest’s demographic is not only of interest to Microsoft, but also Google. The search giant has attempted to cut into Pinterest’s niche with Keen, a curation platform for articles, YouTube videos, blog posts, and shopping links that came from the company’s workshop for experimental projects.

Nor is a potential Pinterest acquisition the only attempt Microsoft has made to enter into a social media market. During the tenure of President Trump, Microsoft tried but failed to purchase TiKTok in the face of the app’s ban in the United States.

“Microsoft would ensure that all private data of TikTok’s American users is transferred to and remains in the United States”, the company said in a statement at the time, as criticism of TikTok’s data-handling between it and its Chinese parent company ByteDance was apparently a national security concern - a claim that was also criticised at the time.

The purchase of TikTok would have given Microsoft access to a huge amount of data, which could have been used to improve its other products.

This is similar to how the company uses Xbox Live data to develop Microsoft Research projects for future hardware and software.

A Pinterest purchase, much like a TikTok one, would also give Microsoft access to a social network that was used by a younger generation than the one it has now – LinkedIn.

Microsoft purchased the business network in 2016 for $26.2 billion which was, at the time, its biggest-ever acquisition.