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Pinterest
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.
Image-based social networking service Pinterest has decided to relax its sign-up policy, opening the site to all.
Previously, people needed invites to become members and “pin” online images onto its virtual “boards”.
Launched in 2010, Pinterest became the fastest-growing site ever, passing 10 million users in nine months.
Although it has tried different money-raising techniques, the company has not yet disclosed a commercial plan.
Image-based social networking service Pinterest has decided to relax its sign-up policy, opening the site to all
“They’re one of the main sites that serve the so-called social collectors, people who like to curate information across the web,” said Forrester Research analyst Darika Ahrens.
“What remains to be seen is what happens if they start to commercialize – how they’re going to do that and if they do it in a way that’s not going to alienate their users.
“So far, they have tried a number of different methods such as using monetizing links that bring in a revenue share, but they stopped that.”
Social media analyst Rob McNair said that having invites had been part of Pinterest’s marketing strategy.
“This tactic of adding exclusivity upon launch of a social network is not a new thing,” said Rob McNair from mycleveragency.com.
“Google+ adopted [it]… creating a people-referral engine and as a result built pent-up demand from the everyday user that wanted to give it a try.”
Fashion and recipes have quickly become top topics on Pinterest, and women outnumber men on the site.
Its number of users grew hugely over the past year, according to a digital media analytics company Comscore.
It said that last June, there were 1.2 million unique visitors globally – but a year later there were 31.2 million.
In February, the company had to address concerns about users “pinning” copyrighted material.
It now allows websites to opt out of being featured on Pinterest. To do so, sites can block their content by adding a line of web code.
If a Pinterest user attempts to share images or other material from a site with the “nopin” instruction, a message is displayed: “This site doesn’t allow pinning to Pinterest. Please contact the owner with any questions. Thanks for visiting!”
Pinterest clones have flooded China’s web world – only months after the original social photo-sharing website reached massive popularity.
Pinterest has recently surpassed 10 million users, in record time.
Copying it seems to be the latest cloning trend in China – a country known for copying the designs of everything from shoes and cars to iPads and tech start-ups.
Tech blogs say there are about 20 Chinese clones of Pinterest already.
Some copycats modify the original site’s design only slightly, while others go a step further.
Several have taken the basic idea of “pinning” and sharing theme-based photos a bit further, for example changing the interface to allow online shopping.
Tech blogs say there are about 20 Chinese clones of Pinterest already
In China, locals joke that they have much more choice of products than in the Western world – and in a way, they do.
Local markets offer anything and everything that looks like the original version, but often with subtle differences.
And the online world is no stranger to cloning.
For instance, in 2011 copycats of a social network Tumblr were popping up here and there, with one of the most popular clones being Diandian.
Even a major Chinese Facebook clone, Renren, and China’s microblogging site Sina Weibo, dubbed a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, launched their own Tumblr-type blogs – Renren Stations and Qing.
But in the second half of 2011, Pinterest clones started to emerge.
One of the most recent ones is Alibaba Group’s social shopping platform Fa Xian.
It was launched only four weeks ago in a test mode, but already has some 60,000 viewers a day.
Just like Pinterest, it lets users “pin” images of items on virtual pinboards, where others can then post comments.
But with a different twist, Fa Xian lets people shop, too – anything pinned on the platform is available for purchase through two Alibaba-operated websites, Taobao Mall and Taobao Marketplace.
Besides Fa Xian, two other Pinterest clones have proved a huge success in China – Mogujie.com and Meilishuo.com.
But instead of letting users “pin” images from anywhere on the web, they only offer content from China’s biggest e-commerce site, Taobao.com.
On Mogujie, visitors can buy items as well.
And just like sharing “pinned” Pinterest images on Facebook and Twitter, Chinese clones allow you to share on Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo, another Twitter copycat.
There are other Pinterest clones that, just like the original website, do not allow users to shop and open the entire web space for “pinning” images.
They include Qihu 360’s, Woxihuan.com, Huaban.com and iCaitu.com.
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.
