Pinterest Hits 300 Million User Milestone

When Pinterest filed for an initial public offering in late March, it provided the public a glimpse on how it sees itself, how it’s doing financially and, perhaps most interestingly, how many people actually use it.

The first point is a bit of a tricky one, as Pinterest is widely seen as a social network despite but doesn’t consider itself one. Most consumer internet companies are either tools (search, ecommerce) or media (newsfeeds, video, social networks). Pinterest is not a pure media channel, nor is it a pure utility.

“It’s a media-rich utility that satisfies both emotional and functional needs“, the company wrote in its S1 filing, concluding that its platform is ultimately about discovery. Financially, Pinterest is doing better than many other internet companies are at the time of their IPO, with net losses dropping from $130 million in 2017 to $63 million last year, suggesting that profitability isn’t just a distant dream.

The ultimate question for most social media platforms, nay “media-rich utilities“, is how many people actually use it. In Pinterest’s case that is now 300 million people, putting it close behind Twitter when it last reported that metric in Q1 2019.

As opposed to the latter, Pinterest’s user base is still growing at a decent pace, however. Between Q2 2018 and Q2 2019, the company added 69 million monthly active users, mainly thanks to strong international growth.