Pinterest: Crazy growth lands it as top 10 social site
The invite-only site received nearly 11 million visitors last week, helping it emerge as a top Web site.
Pinterest, an invitation-only site that describes itself as a pinboard to organize and share things you love, is growing at a phenomenal pace.
The site received nearly 11 million visits in the week that ended December 17, almost 40 times the number of visits it received during a single week six months earlier, according to Experian Hitwise, which measures and analyzes consumer behavior on the Web.
That's a 4,000 percent increase and lands Pinterest as the No. 10 social site among the 6,581 properties that Hitwise tracks. (See chart below.) It was beat out by the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
Pinterest features a range of content, but it is dominated by home decor, fashion, food, and crafts. Hitwise found that 58 percent of the visitors in the past three months were women, and most, 59 percent, were between 25 and 44.
And here's a surprising bit of information. Although most traffic to Pinterest comes from California and Texas, which is true for most sites, Pinterest receives unusually high interest in states like Utah, Alabama, and Tennessee.
Pinterest launched in March 2010 and in October of this year landed $26 million from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.
Here's a snapshot of the top 10 social properties in November as measured by Hitwise. (Note the absence of Google+.)
