My girlfriend has called it "Reddit for girls" and that's exactly what it is.

Like Reddit, it's a place to waste endless amounts of time. My girlfriend has gotten a little addicted to Pintrest and has since apologized to me for being mad that I sometimes getting sucked into Reddit on my phone.

However, the beautiful design is tuned for the target audience. I've watched several girls surf Pintrest and they use it very differently than most anyone I know who uses Reddit. Just the way they scan visually and randomly for something that catches their eye, rather than reading down a row or column and scanning for blue links.

All that said, I believe that the female audience will prove much more monetizable than Reddit's. For one, all pins already have a photo, so sponsored pins will fit right in with the flow. Secondly, the types of things people are sharing and looking at on Pintrest are extremely gift and "spoil yourself" centric.

Best of luck to the Pintrest team. Seems like they've got a great run ahead of them!

Yup, spot on. You'll notice that the massive, visually appealing sites and apps (Flipboard, Instagram, for example) cater to a different audience and are arguably more suited for monetization: your "sponsored pins" idea - subtle additions to the natural eye flow down the page, BUT using the data that Pinterest has on your profile to show sponsored pins that you would actually WANT to see.

"People, mainly women at the moment, are creating mood/story boards which mostly contain pictures of products."

I keep hearing this, but I find it goes against my own experience on the site and that of other hardcore users that I know. Food, hair, nails, tattoos, quotes, amazing pictures, unique crafts/accessories (via Etsy), aspiration products, and amazing travel pictures yes. Anything being sold by a retailer seems few and far between.

If anyone knows of anything other than anectdotal evidence that users are actually actively pinning products, I'd be really interested to read more.

A client of mine sells classroom decorations and teacher resources. We recently added a Pinterest share button to each product page which has increased our traffic from Pinterest significantly. The conversion rate from Pinterest traffic averages between 6 and 10 percent. Conversion rate from Facebook traffic: .40%, Twitter: .08%.

WOW! Those numbers are crazy and precisely why I wrote the blog post.

How do pinterest users discover new content like yours?

Same way as people find new tweets. By following others and by having others follow you.

I have some products on Pinterest and I've been a little disappointed at how well they convert, considering how many boards they're on: http://pinterest.com/source/faucetface.com

Here's where* my paying customers have come from in the past 6 months:

Direct: 69%

Google: 17%

Blog/press mentions: 6%

Pinterest .52%

I recall a blogger recently who reasoned that women are using Pinterest as a substitute for making real purchases. And that the act of pinning things feels similar to hitting the buy now button.

That feels about right to me.

*I know it doesn't add up to 100 - paypal is taking credit as a source of traffic for some reason.

>the act of pinning things feels similar to hitting the buy now button.

Female perspective: that's not quite true. If you want to buy something for now, you'll buy it. It's more like a keeping a scrapbook of things you like to buy one day, when money and space is not an issue. Like for when you buy a house, or get an end-of-year bonus or gift ideas to remember for later.

I think his point was that there used to be no option for 'have it, but not have it.' You would either buy the pretty thing, or not. There was no good way to save it in a scrapbook or anything.

Pinterest allows that middle ground that wasn't there before. Those red pumps that you thought were amazing, but never really wear? You could have just pinned up a picture of them on pinterest and revisited them any time you want, without a purchase.

If you really want to -wear- the shoes, then a purchase is necessary. But if you want to look at them more than wear them, then the picture is fine.

Yes, there was a way to have it but not have it. When I was in high school 25 years ago, they tore it out of magazines and put it up on their locker door, the cover of their notebook, or on the wall of their bedroom. More recently, my wife had a folder of stuff. MySpace pages and photobucket albums used to have a lot of aspirational imagery, and even today, that is a big use of Tumblr.

Pinterest is a nicely targeted version of things that women have been doing online in other ways for the last decade, and offline for much longer.

What about conversion rate? That looks to be a limited number of pins, so you can't be getting much traffic from them.

Compete has some details here http://blog.compete.com/2012/01/05/affiliates-pining-for-pin...

Pinterest uses Skimlinks to turn all links to retail sites into affiliate links (and in turn they get affiliate money). From the article it looks like this is a good amount of traffic.

I agree with this, and perhaps that is why there are no affiliate links yet, from that list (and my brief, over-the-shoulder viewing of Pinterest) I only know of some "nails" postings that either contain in the picture or in the text/comments, the name of the product used in this case.

Users are not pinning the direct BestBuy link to their new headphones, but they are pinning "My new pair of Grado xxxxx are awesome!". Thats where Pinterest has the data, and could go to work to provide easy access to those products.

I based it simply on the data that was available (see the link in the blog post).

I see a TechCrunch post and a ReadWriteWeb post that rehashes Google AdPlanner data, but nothing that supports the idea that Pinterest has a large number of products from established merchants. I definitely agree with your other points about the ability to mine insights, create a demand platform, etc. but I think that it's predicated on users actively using the service as a virtual wishlist (a realistic one and not aspirational).

The real products that I've seen pinned are mostly clothing. People will pin a look or a series of pictures that build up a look.

There are two drivers for this that I've seen. Either bookmarking clothes to build up a look that they will then go and buy, or bookmarking clothes to buy once they go on sale.

One of the things I struggle with buying clothes online is being able to look at all the things I like on the same screen and then decide what I will buy. (H+M does this well). Some retailers limit the baskets to 10 items (Next used to) so even though I'll only buy a few in the end, the only other way to compare items is to open lots of tabs. This doesn't work at all when it's a flash based store. (Esprit.com suffers from this) So I use pinterest for this.

The other time I pin products is when I want comment from other people. I'd rather have these comments on Pinterest than on Facebook.

One thing that would make me pin products more would be if I could make a board private. Then I would pin ideas for Birthday presents and I would have used it to pin ideas for wedding dresses. But private boards are not what they're aiming for and doesn't fit into the context of the article either I guess.

Yes, private boards are key, IMO. I bought the ___domain wishistry.com a few years ago to provide just that: Private wishlists for birthdays, weddings, holidays, etc. I think Pinterest will roll this out soon.

You've described exactly why I started using pinterest. Things that I previously would have bookmarked in delicious I now pin on pinterest if they are sufficiently "visual".

I've been watching pintrest with some interest recently.

It's not a story of great relevance here, but I basically built pintrest in 2007 - 2008, and then never launched it. It was pretty much the exact same site; right down to the infinite scrolling, and concept of cards and images. I did not have the concept of 'repinning' they have though, I opted for 'loving' something, and copied the hackernews model of moving things around. My concept was 'what's cool right now'; it was to be a large visual endless board of interesting visual things and products in the real world.

When I researched how I should categorise, I arrived at almost exactly the same categories pintrest now has (90% overlap). I put those categories together by the same method I can only presume pintrest did; by highest advertising CPC rates and revenue driving metrics. I guess the slight deviation is because I was working on 2007 figures.

When I came up with the concept, it was when digg was king, and reddit was still highly techie. I used to browse this site every single day; http://www.notcot.org - and noticed there was huge gap in community driven linking based towards images and products. They didn't work well with text links.

Anyway, after initially planning simply to advertise for revenue (I made my image columns the same size as a standard advert banner) I arrived at the same conclusion; The only real way to make a solid stream of revenue from this is to create some kind of way to tap into the revenue created from the 'products' linked to.

I stumbled and stuttered on how to implement this. I couldn't figure out how to blend the concept of products in without trashing it. Then I got caught up in implementing new features when things like facebook connect were announced, and then, due to unfortunate personal events, never got around to finishing the last 5% and going live, it just sat on a staging server for years.

Something clicked for me recently when I saw was fab.com are doing. I realise with hindsight that had I simply launched when I had a basic product I could have come to these challenges later; which is exactly what pinterest will be in the process of doing now; but it's not an easy problem to crack.

Makes me happy to see pintrest doing well. I'm not in the valley, and I never really had any grand plans, obviously they had the vision I didn't! I doubt I'd have gotten much beyond a few hundred visitors haha :)

For anyone interested; http://i.imgur.com/eEJva.jpg It's not as pretty as pintreset, I was keeping comments on the permalink and cropping image but it was an early beta.

Fwiw, pinterest didn't start with categories. A few weeks ago, I did some blog archeology looking for early mentions of Pinterest and examined the screenshots, and announcements on the company blog. They started out with tags on each pin. I don't doubt that they looking at the advertising value of certain keywords, but I suspect they probably analyzed tags and board names to inform the choice of categories.

LINK IS NSFW!

Apologies - you were correct. I update the link so it is now SFW.

It was a small screenshot of a site, and on of the thumbnails visible had a picture from an artist which you can see a nipple in. I didn't spot that. I have removed it.

Thanks for updating, I just wanted to give a warning those of us at work and make it as visible as possible. I think the site looks great by the way! It definitely had potential.

That seems a bit vehement for the tiny amount of nipple that was present. I had to go back and look again after I saw this comment to actually notice it.

Maybe my brain is wired differently. I saw it pretty much immediately after loading, and I wouldn't feel comfortable opening it with my boss behind me.

Pinterest is internet scrapbooking, and sharing it.

Strangely I'm mostly hearing about Pinterest so far from the women in my life, and not the guys so much.

My wife just recently started a food blog and along with that found Pinterest. With a site redesign we did, we added a Pinterest button directly next to the Facebook like button. The Pinterest button gets upwards of 10 times the actions as the facebook like.

We were just talking about how it is not considered as acceptable to share as much mundane stuff on Facebook and how that is what Pinterest is all about. Facebook has no way to easily categorize or review what you have shared in the past, so it gets lost. Women especially seem to enjoy this.

One odd thing is Pinterest doesn't seem to combine all pins of a single image together. For a single image, you may have 20 different pins, each of those with their own set of repins and comments. See: http://pinterest.com/source/thinlyslicedcucumber.com/

My wife started pinning DIY posts from her pet blog on Pinterest and discovered a lot of them had allready been pinned. Also, in just over a month, it has become the leading non-search referrer to her blog.

Tumblr does the same thing. I've assumed it's a way to give users "ownership" of their pins, they can look at their pin as theirs and not just a +1 (like Facebook like button is)

I was thinking about this same thing last week in the shower. The reality is that I find most people pinning items that are not necessarily to be purchased i.e 20 different wedding dresses, ferraris, crazy tattoos. That sparked my apiphany, like yours, that this isn't to create a store front, this is to curate enough data to proverbaly shoot fish in the barrel with targeted advertising.

I know Google made an offer to Pinterest and clearly it wasn't enough. They should have put all of their eggs in this basket because this is the true alternative to FB's power house advertising that is soon to be bolstered by the inevitable search capabilities.

With FB's IPO imminent, they should take some of that cash and buy Pinterest (Andreeson is invested in both anyway).

Does anyone know what the breakdown between men/women users are on pinterest? Do you think it will always be women dominated or will they roll out something to attract men users?

It's about 80/20. (http://www.ignitesocialmedia.com/social-networks/pinterest-d...)

Personally, I think men will "catch on" in the future. Many of the Pinterest users I know use it as a catalog of things they like around the web. Sometimes it's clothing/craft/recipe related, and sometimes it's a workout program, news story, or other interesting (and gender neutral) read, that they want to come back to.

I think it's about time a startup is used by women in majority.

The fairer half are a grossly underserved audience, there are lots of opportunities and I hope Pinterest is the first of many to build on it.

doesnt Pinterest smell too much women (no disrespect whatsoever!) by now? I mean, its been built upon profiles of shoes, wedding dresses, carpets, flowers, knitting stuff, etc. I wonder if they will be trying to shift it more towards men, or perhaps there is a good niche right now here: built pinterest that has a strong lean towards men interests: cars, women, alcohol, bikes, boats, luxury watches, houses, cool places, etc, etc.

EDIT: although second thought. Pinterest strong side is that women (more than men) like to collect stuff. Nice thing about Pinterest is that you can pinboard your collections, join others, etc. I am not sure if the same effect would work on "mens pinterest".

I think you'd definitely want a separate space for men, although I don't think you will ever get as much traffic. Sharing the website (even though it is technically done that way right now) would be weird - most women aren't going to be interested in a handgun on the page or a swimsuit model or a muscle car.

I don't think a men-only version would work anyways. Men just don't tend to 'window shop' like women do. Men also don't like sharing as much as women do.

The real interesting thing is will they survive when it becomes open to the public? I can see the application appealing to the SA, reddit, and 4chan crowds, but I don't imagine the current userbase would be too stoked about that.

I prefer Svpply and I only use it for things I want to buy. Just like in real life, I don't have time to dilly-dally at the mall : P

I've never heard of Pinterest before - my first impression was that this was somehow related to Path. The color scheme , logo, and favicon are eerily similar.

Great piece, I wrote something similar on Google+ recently but you've summed it up better than I did.

Pinterest could create real social shopping and users want it. They'd love to to be able to purchase the items they repin. That would be easy to monetize and eventually could even allow for payments to go through pinterest to make it a slicker solution and without the need for lots of accounts.

I can tell you they aren't doing anything funny. I have been pinning items from my site (I feel a bit of shame when I do this). Now that they have millions of users, your pin gets lost within millions of pins unless someone who has lots of followers repins you.

I have figured I could get around 1000 visits to my site daily from Pinterest by pinning around 200-300 items, assuming 10 of them become hits. But the traffic is not really sticky.

really? pinterest has a substantial potential for data warehousing! maybe that's why they're hiring to find ppl with data mining experience for their hadoop stack . . .