OPINION: Pinterest–understanding the post-hype interest

In a relatively short space of time, Silbermann took Pinterest from a 5,000 member new-kid-on-the-social-network-block to a whopping 17 Million trail-blazer.

The fledgling network has been around for a couple of years but the media only began dissecting it late last year, after Time listed it as one of the top five social networks of 2011. Much has been written about it since, so suffice to say that its ease of use means the possibilities are endless when one considers how consumers and businesses can build on this simple idea.

The network retains the inherent fabric of what every social network is made up of–discovering and broadcasting within a community—but with a shot of visual adrenaline.

The Pinning interest:
First, a few interesting facts and figures that I picked up thanks to Google Adplanner (and other sources):

• Pinterest is driving as much referral traffic as Twitter and Google and in fact has surpassed YouTube, Reddit, Reddit and Google Plus in referral traffic (Shareaholic, Feb 2012)
• Pinterest emerged as the third-most popular social network in the US after Facebook and Twitter (a very recent Experian '2012 Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend' report)
• This month, two of the biggest online players, Amazon and eBay, added Pinterest buttons to their product pages (enabling Pinners to share product images, including links to product pages, on their virtual pin-boards direct from retailers' websites)
• What was Pinterest’s inflection point? In May 2010, a woman named Victoria helped organise a programme called 'Pin It Forward' – a 'chain letter' where bloggers would exchange pin boards about what home meant to them

On to the audience that makes this social network its frequent destination. A large proportion (81 per cent, according to Adplanner) of Pinterest users are women and most of them are between 25-44 years old with some college education. Their interests are very clearly skewed towards the right-brained, with interest in fashion, music, art, crafts, textiles, visual arts and design, homemaking and Interior decoration. This makes the average visit time of 1 hour and 17 minutes truly remarkable. A quick review of the other sites the audience frequent—etsy.com, food.com, marthastewart.com etc - clearly demonstrate the flavour of users the network will attract for some time to come.

The Waning Interest:
Excitement and novelty aside, there was something else on the radar that caught my attention. The stratospheric growth pattern of Pinterest seems to be facing some head wind of late as per the graph below (Source: Google Adplanner)

 

                                           
While I was mulling this over, another article came to mind which mentioned April statistics from Appdata, which tracks how often users of third-party apps and websites interact with Facebook. It may be noted over a fifth of Facebook-connected users are on Pinterest daily, which is in itself quite a gargantuan number of users.

Given that most Pinterest users sign into the service using their Facebook accounts, it would not be very challenging to look at the trajectory of active users and conclude on an overarching trend which, for April, has been anything but encouraging (see below):

 

                                   
Quite an interesting statistic I must say but is this really a harbinger to turbulent times for Pinterest?

The Post-Hype Interest:
Earlier, I dwelt momentarily on the reason for the brouhaha that surrounded Pinterest late last year. When it emerged into the limelight spurred by media attention, the direct result was the huge influx of the web to the site, triggered by curiosity and excitement. This was the time for 'digital immigrants' as well as the more recent 'digital natives' (who switch media platforms 27 times an hour according to a recent report), to rush into this new phenomenon called Pinterest and flirt with it. And once the initial hype subsided, the sudden stampede also started losing its steam and only the genuine ‘fits’ lingered.

This is not an entirely depressing development and is in fact an eventuality, because Pinterest continues to make the wider space gravitate towards it and this in turn will increasingly separate the wheat from the chaff such that over a period of time, the ‘real’ audience of Pinterest will remain and in turn attract more of their kind to join the family. I think this is just a natural slowdown for a niche network in the process of quality audience acquisition (although the trends look a tad worrisome).
A gold rush may happen. But after all, gold dust doesn’t come easy, does it?