Snapchat lost 3 million daily users, Twitter lost a million monthly users in the U.S., and growth on Facebook is slowing — but Pinterest seems to be immune to the social media drop off. On Monday, September 10, Pinterest co-founder and CEO Evan Sharp shared that the network has now reached over 250 million monthly users, a growth of 50 million users compared to the numbers from last fall.
Among those new users, 80 percent are from outside the U.S., and about half of Pinterest’s user base so far is international. The growth is notable as Twitter’s user count in the U.S. fell while Facebook’s number of active users in the U.S. didn’t change at all. Meanwhile, Snapchat lost users after a design overhaul.
Pinterest is a bit different from the other social networks, as it is designed more for sharing and collecting ideas than catching up with friends. While Pinterest is susceptible to those “Pinterest fails,” the difference may leave the network less susceptible to factors that are drawing criticism to other networks such as fake news and abuse. In the words of Sharp, Pinterest “is your place to reconnect with yourself.”
Pinterest now has 75 percent more ideas saved on the network than the same time last year, which means around 175 billion Pins exist on the network. By category, product ideas have grown by 115 percent, art by 50 percent, style ideas by 38 percent, and DIY by 35 percent.
Pinterest has been busy adding new features to keep up with that growth, including expanded tools for the network’s visual search tool, Pinterest Lens. The network has also recently gained new group board tools, new ways to organize Pins, and a secondary Following Feed.
“At a time when the internet can feel increasingly negative and politicized, we think it’s remarkable that a quarter of a billion people are choosing to spend their time on Pinterest, a place that helps them feel positive and optimistic about the future,” Sharp wrote in a blog post.
To mark the 250 million user milestone, Sharp and co-founder Ben Silbermann are heading to Kansas City, Missouri and Des Moines, Iowa to speak with Pinterest users.
“When we first started building Pinterest eight years ago, we certainly hoped people would use it to get more creative with their daily lives,” Sharp wrote. “But we never imagined Pinterest would one day be one of the biggest internet platforms in history.”
