Pinterest may not be growing at the rate the company had once anticipated, but the platform is expanding, with new data showing that the app is now closing in on 250 million monthly active users, up from the 200 million it reported back in September.
That growth rate means the platform’s gaining momentum – it took Pinterest 6 months to go from 150m to 175m users, and 5 months to reach their next milestone of 200m users. Adding another 50 million since September means the platform is now gaining 25m new users every four months, on average – so again, a marginally faster growth rate.
For comparison, over the last year, Twitter has added 9 million MAU, while Snapchat has added 25m (though important to note Snap’s are daily active users – they don’t publish MAU stats)
Of course, Pinterest’s 250m total is still well behind Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, but the growth rate is relevant to note, particularly given the platform’s evolving focus on eCommerce, shifting away from being a social network, as such.
Targeting shopping opportunities has lead to Pinterest becoming a better platform for driving purchase intent – according to Pinterest’s data, 90% of weekly Pinners use the app to make purchase decisions, while 78% of Pinners say content from brands on the platform is helpful.
Such findings are also backed up by comparative data – check out this slide from one of the recent Mary Meeker Internet Trends reports.
Instagram, through its slow roll-out of Shopping Tags and (potentially) in-stream payments, will likely become more of a challenger on this front. But still, there’s clearly a lot of opportunity in Pinterest, which many brands are likely overlooking.
Though even with these stats, the platform isn’t growing as fast as they had projected. Back in 2015, TechCrunch obtained documents which showed that Pinterest had been targeting 329 million MAU, and $2.8 billion in revenue by the end of 2018. The app’s not quite at that level – the user growth target is not wildly off, while Pinterest reportedly brought in $473 million in revenue in 2017. That still represents 58% revenue growth, year-over-year, but it does seem that Pinterest’s targets were more ambitious, as opposed to aggressive, a few years back.
But still, the opportunities are rising in the app, and there are now more ways than ever for advertisers to use the platform to reach an expanding, shopping-focused, audience, including search and video ads, quick promotion tools, ‘Shop the Look’ ads and more.
Pinterest will also continue to develop its innovative Lens tool, with more than 600 million visual searches now conducted in the app each month.
The next phase of Lens could include AR tools, which enable users to digitally place items within their homes, providing more context for potential purchases.
The platform’s not as big as Facebook, you’re not going to get as much reach on Pinterest. But you might just generate more sales by getting your products in front of a highly targeted, spend-ready audience.
If you’ve not considered it before, maybe these latest figures will have you re-thinking where Pinterest might fit into your digital marketing strategy.