Pinterest, like SoulCycle and book club, is filled almost exclusively with women even though there is no real reason for men not to join. There is nothing innately gendered about the platform, where users can “pin” any images they choose — even manly images! Ernest Hemingway drinking scotch while riding a bull! — to public or private pages.
Early this year, Pinterest told the Wall Street Journal that the site was hoping to lure in gentlemen. At the time, the network boasted over 70 million visitors a month, 71 percent of whom were women. ThinkProgress, unofficial advisor in all matters of the internet, implored Pinterest not to change its neutral, inoffensive display just to make dudebros feel more comfortable navigating the site.
But men have discovered Pinterest, it appears, even though the site hasn’t been altered in any way that would scan as male-focused. (The biggest shift is a new ad format.) A new survey commissioned by Ahalogy, a Pinterest marketing partner with every incentive to make these numbers look big and shiny, reports that men are signing up in significant numbers. Also part of Pinterest’s growth strategy: a concerted, transparent effort to improve diversity among its staff. (More on that in a bit.)
The stats don’t quite add up — or, at least, they are inconsistent with previously reported data. The WSJ numbers from January, which came from digital analytics company comScore, count men as 29 percent of Pinterest’s user base; the Ahalogy survey says men now make up 18 percent of Pinterest’s users, up from 13 percent last year. “Males are the fastest growing group on Pinterest,” the survey reads. “As almost two-thirds of Active Males have joined in the past year.” “Active” is Pinterest-speak for users users who access the site at least once a month.
Unsurprisingly, considering their bent, Ahalogy kicks off its survey by proclaiming “Pinterest is a marketing game-changer.” But there is reason to believe the declaration is accurate. Pinterest is free to join and use. And it is valued at $11 billion. Because, while people can arrive and play around on Pinterest free of charge, all those consumables demand to be consumed. Ahalogy claims that 73 percent of Active Pinners “have bought something new they discovered on Pinterest.”
People on Pinterest are already thinking about consumption: what clothing to buy, what to cook for dinner, what vacation is worth the splurge. Unlike on sites like Facebook and Twitter, where advertising feels like an intrusion into a social experience, ads on Pinterest feel like a natural extension of the site’s functionality. Why shouldn’t you be able to click on a picture of a leather motorcycle jacket and find yourself at the link where you can purchase it at once?
Pinterest added a “buy button” earlier this summer: click on a pinned product, choose your size or color or what have you, then buy with a credit card or Apple pay. It’s the ideal, integrated, browsing-to-shopping experience.
There are no added fees for Pinterest purchases — so who knows how Pinterest will ever make money off of this, or if they will just be valuable, with no cash flow, forever — but going forward, Pinterest could charge retailers who want promoted placement, or placement at all, on the site.
Pinners also skew young (67 percent of Active Pinners are under 40), white (75–80 percent of Pinners), and straight (88 percent of Pinners are straight, though the survey indicates that those who don’t identify as heterosexual “are slightly more likely to purchase products they’ve pinned”). They’re likely to have pets — dogs more than cats — and unlikely to have children.
Hispanic membership is “growing rapidly,” up to nine percent from last year’s three. In related news, Pinterest is amping up its focus on diversity behind the scenes. Residing as it does in the boys’ clubhouse that is San Francisco’s tech scene, Pinterest is reportedly the first major technology company to be aggressively transparent about its hiring goals regarding women and people of color.
In a blog post this Thursday, Evan Sharp, Pinterest co-founder and CCO, publicly shared the hiring goals for 2016. They’re not shooting for parity, and he acknowledges that the progress Pinterest has made since last year is “modest”: female employees increased from 40 to 42 percent of the company. (The numbers in engineering are about ten points lower, for both interns and full-time engineers.)
Not that it takes much to be a leader in diversity recruitment in the notoriously homogeneous tech scene, but Pinterest has been ahead of its peers since Tracy Chou, one of the company’s engineers, launched a data-gathering mission that challenged tech companies to publicize the number of female engineers at their organizations.
Sharp’s post lists the numbers Pinterest wants to reach in 2016, which includes increasing hiring rates for full-time engineering roles to 30 percent female and for full-time engineers to eight percent underrepresented ethnic backgrounds. He also writes that Pinterest will “implement a Rooney Rule-type requirement,” the regulation in the NFL that mandates teams interview minority and female candidates for head coaching and senior positions.
“By sharing these goals publicly, we’re holding ourselves accountable to make meaningful changes to how we approach diversity at Pinterest,” Sharp writes. “We’ll also be sharing what’s working and what isn’t as we go, so hopefully other companies can learn along with us.”