Pinterest is a very popular image-sharing social media platform for curating and aggregating collections of images. Users are able to discover images and information on a wide variety of topics that others have curated on Pinterest, without needing to do extensive searching.
Pinterest was created in 2009 as an online version of paper catalogues. This approach struggled as a business, however users amassed large collections of favorite items and sharing them with other users – the basis of social media.
Pinterest then started to grow and in August 2011, Time magazine listed Pinterest as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2011. By December 2011, the site had become one of the top-10 social network services, with 11 million total visits per week. Pinterest won the Best New Startup of 2011 at the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards. In January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. At the 2012 Webby Awards, Pinterest won Best Social Media App and People’s Voice Award for best functioning visual design.
Pinterest appears to mainly appeal to women. A 2020 report found that over 60% of the global users are women. Users users between the ages of 18 and 40 have been driving the growth of Pinterest, with those between the ages of 18-25 having grown twice as fast as those over the age of 25.
In May 2022, Pinterest released the “Pinterest TV studio” video streaming app, which allows users to live-stream using different devices for different angles on its platform.
Pinterest now has over 430m regular users.