Think back six months. You probably never had heard of a little website called Pinterest.
Now it's the third
most-visited social-networking site in the United States, according to a
report released Thursday by Experian Marketing Services, a digital
marketing firm.
Pinterest, which lets its
users "pin" photos and info from the Internet onto virtual boards,
ranks behind only Facebook and Twitter in terms of total visitors,
according to the analysis, titled "The 2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report."
The ranking is based on
the total number of U.S. visitors during March and does not include
mobile traffic, according to Experian spokeswoman Jennifer Marshall.
Last month, Facebook had
more than 7 billion total visitors; Twitter had 182 million; and
Pinterest had 104 million total visits from people in the United States,
according to data sent to CNN by Experian.
That ranking puts the newbie site ahead of heavyweights such as LinkedIn, Google+, MySpace and Tumblr.
"The site has really just
rocketed," said Matt Tatham, another spokesman from Experian. "It's
just been tremendous since (Pinterest) took off around October and then
in the last few months. With Pinterest, it's kind of a new take on an
old thing. Social networking is great. Pinterest is great. The way
people are sharing on Pinterest is new."
One caveat: Since the
data doesn't include mobile traffic, sites such as Twitter, which sees
much of its traffic from smartphones and tablets, may take a hit in this
ranking, Tatham said.
Pinterest's traffic
jumped 50% between January and February. The report calls the site "the
hottest social media start-up since Facebook and YouTube."
Those stats add momentum
to a site that already had become one of the hottest topics of
conversation on tech blogs and was known to be one of the
fastest-growing networks.
In February, Pinterest
was the third-fastest-growing site on the Internet in the United States,
with 17.8 million unique visitors that month, compared with 11.7
million in January, according to a report from another Internet tracking
company, comScore.
Plus, it can't hurt when the U.S. president joins your website.
Pinterest launched in
March 2010, but it has grown rapidly only in the past six months. Unlike
many social-media darlings, tech bloggers in Silicon Valley largely
ignored the site until they noticed that it was growing like mad.
The site's co-founder, Ben Silbermann, sounds somewhat surprised by the growth.
"It's a really humbling
feeling that all these people are using something that you helped make,"
Silbermann said in an on-stage Q&A at last month's South by
Southwest Interactive conference.
At that conference, he announced that an iPad app and new pinboards were coming soon.
Those boards -- where
people pin photos of products they'd like to buy and other interesting
bits of info they find while trolling the Internet -- are key to
Pinterest's success, he said.
"To me, boards are a
very human way of seeing the world," he said at SXSW. "The site is about
helping people to discover things they didn't know they wanted --
things that feel like they've been handpicked just for you."
Some other Pinterest-y stats for you to chew on:
The site skews female --
about 60% of users are women -- and to the middle of the country,
according to the report from Experian. Pinterest is most popular
relative to other social networks in Missouri, Utah, Alabama, Oklahoma
and Kansas, the report said.
Are you on Pinterest? Why or why not? Let us know what you think in the comments.
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