Pinterest has reached 150 million monthly active users after previously announcing 100 million monthly users last September, the company said on Thursday.
The milestone is an important one for the digital search catalogue, which competes with a host of apps for users' -- and shoppers' -- mobile phone time. Pinterest has been pushing into more immersive content formats and expanding its ad offerings. This summer, Pinterest launched its first video ads, which will likely be key to the company's business. Marketers are expected to spend $12.82 billion on digital-video ads in 2018, up from $7.7 billion last year, according to the research firm L2.
Pinterest said on Thursday it has reached 150 million monthly active users. (Courtesy of Pinterest)
While Pinterest's monthly user base is much smaller than Facebook's (1.7 billion monthly users), and even Twitter's (313 million monthly users), Pinterest appears to have surpassed Twitter in the U.S. Pinterest said on Thursday it has 70 million monthly domestic users, while Twitter most recently reported 60 million U.S. users in June. More than half of Pinterest's users are overseas.
"With each new person who joins, comes more interests, tastes and trends into the system, which allows us to improve our personalized recommendations engine," the company said in a blog post. "We’re now serving 10 billion+ recommendations a day, which is double the amount from last year. By building with the latest in machine learning, we’re better than ever at understanding the content and people on the service and matching the two across languages and locations."
Pinterest reportedly generated about $100 million in revenue last year and is reportedly expected to generate about $300 million next year. (By comparison, forecasting firm eMarketer estimates that Snapchat, valued at about $18 billion, will generate $366.7 million in revenue this year and nearly $1 billion in 2017.) Pinterest was most recently valued by investors at $11 billion and has raised about $1.3 billion in funding to date.
Pinterest is betting on users' intent to buy products and services after browsing its service. Data shared by Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers general partner Mary Meeker earlier this year showed that 55% of people on Pinterest want to shop for products, compared to just 12% of people on social networks. Pinterest debuted a "buy button" last year, and 75% of content on Pinterest originated on a business' website, which has helped make advertising more organic on the service compared to other digital networks.
Pinterest, whose user base skews female, has also been working to attract more men through content such as articles. Now, 40% of global sign-ups are by men, the company said on Thursday, and the number of men actively searching on Pinterest has increased by 55% year-over-year. While Pinterest doesn't appear to have imminent plans to go public, it recently hired its first CFO, Todd Morgenfeld from Twitter, earlier this month, which suggests it's preparing for an initial public offering down the line.
