Pinterest just picked up a cool $100 million in funding led by Japanese online shopping giant Rakuten, placing its value in the region of $1.5 billion. That's huge--bigger than Instagram--but perhaps justified if the Pinteresting effect is reverberating through e-commerce sites. Here's some proof that it is: Shopify, which supplies the e-commerce back end to 25,000 online stores, asked its partners whether Pinterest users are buying anything. The results are impressive.
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A few highlights from the above Pinterest infographic:
- Pinterest is now the third biggest referral source to Shopify's partner sites after Facebook, and on par with Twitter.
- Pinterest users shop big--the average price tag is $80.00 or double that of a buy from a Facebook user.
- Pinterest user visit have jumped 145% since January 2012.
- Pinterest as a source of revenue for stores now contributes 17% of social media traffic--up from 1% in Q2 last year.
- Pinterest orders generated from pins have quadrupled and then some during the last six months.
COMMENTARY: That's what I call absolutely impressive numbers. That $100 billion they just raised from that Japanese ecommerce site Rakuten probably means that Pinterest users will be seeing a whole lot of Rakuten merchandise being pinned on the social ecommerce pinning site.
Here's another interesting infographic of Pinterest that describes the sites demographics and user interests.
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According to AppData.com, Pinterest has been on a hot streak this year. Or should we say hype streak?
In February, comScore reported that the site had passed 10 million monthly unique users faster than any standalone site ever. Then we started to hear from sources on Sand Hill that the company has attracted interest at a $1 billion valuation. But numbers from third-party sources like Facebook app tracking service, AppData, are pinning a slightly different picture on the image and link-sharing site.
Pinterest’s monthly active users on Facebook — or the number that has connected to Facebook over the past thirty days — have dropped to 8.3 million, from around 12.2 million a month ago when the site did a major redesign. Daily Active Users are also down but not by as much: on April 21 they were 930,000, from 1.1 million on March 22.
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AppData tracked Pinterest's traffic numbers Between April and May 2012, and the numbers have improved. Monthly active users on May 8, 2012 increased to 10 million from 8.3 million on April 22, 2012. Daily active users on May 8, 2012 increased to 2.5 million from 930 million on April 22, 2012. Incredible turnaround, in such a short period of time.
Whether Pinterest can maintain this traffic momentum going into June remains to be seen. I like the site. It's different, and its meteroic rise is unprecedented. Sort of reminds one of foursquare. The big negative that I see is that Pinterest, which is 80% female, cannot sustain its growth without signing up more males. foursquare has a similar problem, only in the reverse. 70% of foursquare members are male, and the sites total number of registers users reached 15 million, but growing a lot slower than in it was in 2011.
I do have a feeling that Pinterest could become an acquisition candidate for Facebook, which seriously needs to find ways to increase revenues. With the viability of F-commerice brought into serious question when The Gap, Nordstroms and Penneys abruptly closed their F-commerce sites only after a few months, Facebook needs a way to make money off of ecommerce. Pinterest definitely meets that requirement.
Courtesy of an article dated May 18, 2012 appearing in Fast Company
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