GAYLE FALKENTHAL
SAN DIEGO, April 22, 2012 – Just when you thought you’d gotten a handle on social media by getting on Facebook and maybe giving Twitter a try, along comes Pinterest. It is the fastest growing social media website in Internet history. Yes, even faster than Facebook.
If you haven’t heard of Pinterest, it might be because you’re male, or over 40. Pinterest’s users are overwhelmingly women under 40, although men and older users are starting to catch up. It was launched quietly in March 2010, but really started taking off in the last year.
Pinterest is now the number three most-popular social network in the U.S., behind only Facebook and Twitter, according to Experian’s Digital Marketer Trend and Benchmark Report. Experian reports that Pinterest had 21.5 million visits the last week of January, which is 30 times the number of visitors over July 2011. It’s the fastest website ever to hit 10 million visitors. Pinterest beat its next-closest competitor, LinkedIn, in total visits for the first time in February:
- Facebook: 7 billion
- Twitter: 182 million
- Pinterest: 104 million
- LinkedIn: 86 million
- Google+: 61 million
And here’s the true test of Pinterest’s success: there are now a whole bunch of pornographic Pinterest imitations. You know you’re doing something right when people who put out smut think you’re worth copying.
