Tonight at an event in the company’s San Francisco headquarters, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann announced that users had contributed more than 30 billion Pins since the service was founded, a number that has grown by nearly 50 percent in the past six months alone. Users have also created more than 750 million boards in that time. (Update: Our initial story said 30 million, not 30 billion. Big difference.)
That growth has stemmed, in part, from the introduction of Related Pins, something the company released about a year ago. Nowadays more than 90 percent of Pins have Related Pins connected to them, and the number of people who repin Related Pins has grown by 20 percent.
Silbermann compared Pinterest to curation that already exists elsewhere in the world. Specifically, how collections on Pinterest are like curated art in museums, articles and photos in magazines, and collections of clothing at a retail location.
As Pinterest has grown up, it’s sought to provide a lot more information about the things its users are Pinning. For food,it introduced the ability to add full recipes. And just a few months ago, Pinterest released Place Pins.
“Boards themselves aren’t just containing images, they’re containing objects,” Silbermann said. “When you see a movie on Pinterest, it’s likely to have the actor and the director.”
In March, Pinterest said that 75% of its traffic was coming from its native mobile apps. And previously it announced that mobile traffic grew 50% in 2013. eMarketer now pegs Pinterest at 40 million monthly users in the U.S., an audience big enough to drive serious ad revenue, and that doesn’t seem to include mobile.
With all those Pins begin carefully curated by its Pinners, Pinterest needed a way to surface them better. And so, the company introduced a new guided search capability in its mobile app, as well as the ability for its users to create custom categories.
