Pinterest website has seen its value jump by more than 50% to $3.8 billion following its latest round of fundraising.
The three-year old social networking site, which is a virtual scrapbook, said it had raised $225 million from a group of investors led by Fidelity Investments.
Earlier this year it had raised $200 million, valuing the company at $2.5 billion.
Pinterest said it plans to use the new funds to further expand internationally and develop its mobile services.
Pinterest value jumped by more than 50 percent to $3.8 billion following its latest round of fundraising
It is also looking at ways of monetizing its service, which has yet to generate any revenue.
“We hope to be a service that everyone uses to inspire their future, whether that’s dinner tomorrow night, a vacation next summer, or a dream house someday,” Pinterest co-founder and chief executive Ben Silbermann said in a statement.
“This new investment enables us to pursue that goal even more aggressively.”
Earlier this month the company started testing the use of “promoted pins” as a possible form of advertising.
The San Francisco-based company recently set up offices in Britain, France and Italy.
Pinterest aims to be operating in 10 more countries by the end of the year.
Instagram announced it will start placing ads in US users photo streams in a posting on its website.
“We have big ideas for the future, and part of making them happen is building Instagram into a sustainable business,” the photo sharing service said.
Ads will appear in a few months and involve just a handful of firms.
Instagram was bought by Facebook for $1 billion, but has never made a profit.
Instagram announced it will start placing ads in US users photo streams
The company, which now has 150 million users, has been a favorite among consumers but has long left analysts wondering how it could turn enthusiasm among photographers into a business model.
Early efforts by Instagram to generate revenue were met with user backlash, such as when the company changed the terms of service to seemingly indicate that it would own user images and could sell those images to advertisers.
The failure of this move was acknowledged in the company’s posting.
“As always, you own your own photos and videos. The introduction of advertising won’t change this,” it said.
Social media advertising is a booming business in the US.
According to research firm eMarketer, advertisers will spend $9.5 billion on social network ads worldwide this year.
Facebook has boosted its efforts to gain a larger share of this ad spending.
This year, the company’s share of global mobile ad revenues will rise to 15.8% from 5.35% last year.
It seems that the Pinterest bubble has already burst after a meteoric rise in popularity in January and February as the new figures show that the photo-sharing site is unexpectedly losing users this month.
The majority of Pinterest users sign up through Facebook and the number of people doing this has significantly dropped in the past few months, according to data collected by the Business Insider.
Pinterest works as a “timeline app” within Facebook, allowing Facebook users to use one log-in across both and share “pins” – Pinterest’s term for posts – via a Facebook page.
AppData, which monitors how often users of third-party apps and other web sites interact with Facebook, has shown the site’s decline.
Pinterest’s growth slowed last month and it is now revealed that users are turning away from the network, which was launched in March 2010.
New figures show that Pinterest is unexpectedly losing users this month
Monthly active users are down from 11.15 million on April 1 to 8.3 million today.
With endorsements from President Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerburg the picture-sharing program that allows users to essentially create “vision boards” of their favorite things, was quickly labeled the social media craze of 2012.
It is speculated that the people who signed up to the site simply to try out the latest fad have now decided that it is not for them.
However, Pinterest may not need to worry just yet – after a media frenzy and celebrity support the site’s traffic soared up by 50% from January to February.
And by the beginning of April it was declared the third most popular social network based on visits from American users coming after only Facebook and Twitter.
This surge in popularity meant Pinterest has more visitors than established social media giants like LinkedIn, Tumblr, and the continually-flailing Google+.
Unlike many other sites, Pinterest has a much clearer demographic make-up, with female users accounting for 60% of users. The site’s focus is largely on sharing interior design sites and recipes.
Pinterest has an exclusivity model which calls for users to request invitations, or be invited by friends, and while it does still extend those invitations to whomever wants one, the company does make the desperate wait to log on for two or three days before they can start highlighting their interests.
