Pinterest

Critter Taylor

One new development in social media is photo sharing. One of the biggest players in this is Pinterest. Pinterest is a photo-sharing site in which users can create their own themed collections of images, similar to the way one would do with a regular corkboard. Users can share their collections of images with other users and explore other people’s collections or “pinboards”. They can add images from other users’ pinboards to their own by “re-pinning” them. Pinterest also gives you the option to subscribe to other people’s pinboards. Users can also link their images to their Facebook and Twitter accounts in order to share them with friends and followers. Pinterest forms links between people all over the world based on their interests.








Pinterest was launched in March of 2010, founded by Evan Sharp, Paul Sciarra, and Ben Silbermann. For the first year the website was operated out of one of the creators’ apartments. By December 2011 Hitwise data indicated that Pinterest was one of the 10 largest social networking sites and by the start of 2012 Pinterest already had over 11 million users, setting a record by reaching 10 million visitors in less time than any site previously.  Pinterest had no means of making money up until April 6, 2012 when it began to sell the content created by its users. Before this the site had been supported by a group of investors and venture capitalists. So far Pinterest has received over $70 million in outside investments. Pinterest also makes money through doing pay-per-purchase referrals to commercial sites, though revenue from these transactions is small. The future of Pinterest lies in data collection. Pinterest has the potential to be used as a platform for marketing and collecting information pertinent to marketing. The data collected could be sold to marketers for use in analyzing connections between consumers, products and the World Wide Web.





Pinterest has found its niche in a rather strange demographic for an online company. The majority of the users on Pinterest in the United States are women. Over 80% of Pinterest’s American users are women. It is especially popular with women in their late 30’s and early 40’s