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Pininterest

Pinterest
Pinterest Logo.svg
Screenshot
Pinterest Homescreen (Apr. 2013).png
Type of business Private
Type of site
Visual discovery, collection, and storage tool
Available in Arabic, English, Norwegian Bokmål, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, Bemba, Ukrainian
Headquarters San Francisco, California, United States
Founder(s)
Employees 800+ employees
Subsidiaries Instapaper
Jelly (app)
Website www.pinterest.com
Alexa rank Decrease 67 (April 2017)
Advertising Some advertisements are displayed; however, companies have pinboards displaying their product(s)
Registration Required
Users 175 million active users
Launched March 2010; 8 years ago (2010-03)
Current status Active

Pinterest is a web and mobile application company that operates a software system designed to discover information on the World Wide Web, mainly using images and on a shorter scale, GIFs and videos. The site was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp. Pinterest has reached 200 million monthly active users as of September 2017.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann summarized the company as a "catalogue of ideas" that inspires users to "go out and do that thing", rather than as an image-based social network.

Development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched as a closed beta in March 2010. The site proceeded to operate in invitation-only open beta. Pinterest allows users to save images and categorize them on different boards. They can follow other users' boards if they have similar tastes. The evolution of Pinterest is based on the shared interest of its users and relies on its members to produce the content. The most popular categories, as of March 2012, were home, arts and crafts, style/fashion, and food. Silbermann said he personally wrote to the site's first 5,000 users offering his personal phone number and even meeting with some of its users.

Pinterest's early growth wasn't as Silbermann has expected. Four months after being launched, Pinterest only had a few thousand users, compared to Instagram which had about 1 million users after that same amount of time.

Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until the summer of 2011. Early in 2010, the company's investors and co-founder Ben Silbermann tried to encourage a New York-based magazine publishing company to buy Pinterest but the publisher declined to meet with the founders.

Nine months after the launch the website had 10,000 users. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011, brought in a more than expected number of downloads. The app would later be updated in March 2013. The Pinterest iPad app was launched August 2011. Pinterest Mobile, launched the following month, is a version of the website for non-iPhone users.

On August 10, 2011, Time magazine listed Pinterest in its "50 Best Websites of 2011" article. In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week. The next month, it drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+. The same month, the company was named the best new startup of 2011 by TechCrunch. Noted entrepreneurs and investors include: Jack Abraham, Michael Birch, Scott Belsky, Brian Cohen, Shana Fisher, Ron Conway, FirstMark Capital, Kevin Hartz, Jeremy Stoppelman, Hank Vigil, and Fritz Lanman.


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