Pinterest passes 100 mln monthly users

The company says has amassed a database of some 50 billion user pins, and users look to Pinterest when searching for particular items and ideas.

When you take all of that into consideration, there’s a correlation between Pinterest’s accelerated user growth, and the number of new features over the past 18 months.

Online scrapbooking platform Pinterest announced this week it had surpassed the 100 million monthly user mark, with 45 percent of users outside of the United States. That’s all good news for the site and its investors, who, as of March, were valuing it at $11 billion.

Based on the latest figures, Pinterest remains well behind Facebook-owned photo-sharing app Instagram, which claims about 300 million users. Earlier this year, eMarketer estimated that Pintereset had 47.1 million monthly users while comScore reported 75.8 million users.

It’s been a big year for Pinterest.

“Pinterest started five years ago as a place to save the best of the Web, and has evolved into a discovery engine that helps people discover, save and do things they love”, a representative said in a statement.

In the past year Pinterest has been building on this base to deepen its push into advertising, launching so-called “promoted pins”.

The bulletin board platform had amassed more than 50 billion user pins, according to company executives, making it more of a catalog than other networks.

He also noted that the site isn’t exclusively dependent on one type of ad budget and already pulls dollars from marketer’s display budgets. The company also rolled out Buyable Pins in June, which let users buy products directly within the Pinterest app.

Yet the firm has to cover up a lot of space to challenge social networking peers like Facebook Inc.