Pinterest, the four year old social networking platform, which lets people make visual discoveries with the help of pictures, seems to have caught the curiosity of many Indians lately. The platform has recorded a 150 percent rise in Indian users in the last one year.
Pinterest is headquartered in San Francisco and has been successful in raising around $760 million till now through various rounds of funding. The online scrapbooking site is currently valued at $5 billion, all thanks to the recent $200 million capital raise that the platform received from Bessemer Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. The platform has plans of using some part of that money in expanding its services globally. The company has formed separate teams for France, UK, Germany and Japan. Seeing its popularity in India, the company is also investing in localizing contents for the market.
The United States forms the 70 percent part of the platform’s sixty million user base. What is interesting is that, in India the user base has a 50-50 gender split, which means equal number of men and women make use of the platform in the country. This trend is quite different from what the platform experiences in other countries. Most of the Pinterest users in India make use of the platform on their Smartphones.
In order to cash in on the local languages, the platform is available in over 32 different languages all around the world. Hindi was recently added to the list so as to impress the Indian market.
“We are very excited about the way India is growing for us and, with the rapid adoption in smartphone usage, we expect to build a great business there in a few years,” said Matt Crystal, head of International business at Pinterest in an interview to the Times of India.
According to Crystal, one thing which differentiates Pinterest from Google is that Google makes use of algorithms to index search, while Pinterest has human who do the cataloging work and algorithms are only used to push the result when someone searches something specifically.
Pinterest has recently introduced a new analytics tool which will help the business keep a track on the number of Pinners (Pinterest users) who interact with their pins along with other information.
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