Apple Watch: Pinterest pique

Matt Crystal, Pinterest's head of their international team, talks about the spread of Pinterest across the world.

You're either a Pinterest user or you're not. I suspect if you use Pinterest, you really use it - or you really don't. I'm not a fan, mostly because I can't be troubled with yet another socialmedia-ish platform - but I know people who feel they can't live without it.

What is Pinterest? It's sort of an image-based online search/categorisation system. Where some people live online with their words (mostly) in Facebook, Pinterest is your life and interests visually. You can 'pin' visual bookmarks for anything you find anywhere around the web, to share your ideas on refurbishing (or cooking or clothing or travelling or anything) or look at other people's pins for inspiration.

Or as Wikipedia puts it, "Pinterest is a visual discovery tool that people use to collect ideas for their different projects and interests. People create and share collections (called 'boards') of visual bookmarks (called 'Pins') that they use to do things like plan trips and projects, organise events, look for things to buy or to save articles and recipes. There is also a 'like' feature to save certain pins that may not fit with a board ... Pinterest acts as a personalised media platform, whereby users' content and the content of others can be browsed on the main page."

Does that leave you mystified? If so, but also interested, the only way to get how it works is to ... get it. You sign up with an email and pass or via Facebook.

Pinterest is another of the developers I got to visit in San Francisco. If you do understand what it's all about, you're not alone: the service (free to use) is spreading all over the world and has millions of users.

Sites are mostly happy to have their sites pointed at from Pinterest, but a 'take-down' request can be made if that's not the case. As you can imagine, it's rarely used.

A screenshot of search results on Pinterest. Photo / Pinterest.com

Head of Pinterest's international team, Matt Crystal, told reporters from Korea, Singapore and Australasia (and me) that two thirds of Pinterest's mobile traffic is from iOS. "Our mission is to help people discover what they love, and help them to do those things in real life. If you look around you you'll see that discovery happens in the real world in different ways, but the problem of discovery is largely unsolved, online, and that's the opportunity that we see."

He calls Pinterest a 'visual discovery and planning tool', as you can search on terms like 'where should I go on holiday' and see what people have 'pinned'. There are over 60 million monthly users currently on Pinterest, 30 billion items have been 'pinned', and 50 per cent of those were added in the last six months. Of those, 75 per cent of all users are on mobile devices, and two thirds are not using Android or Windows mobile devices but iOS.

"We know that mobile users pin twice as often as those who use the product on computers." A 'pin' is an interactive visual bookmark. That means 98 per cent of the content is 'pinned' from other people's sites, with the other 2 per cent user-generated. That means that Pinterest is driving a colossal amount of traffic to blogs, products sites, news sources etcetera. People collect the pins into collections called 'boards', which allow you to categorise into groups according to your interests. It's a vast online collage system that's searchable and interactive. Pinterest itself hosts feeds on various topics - animals, fashion and so on. Users discover, searching on sites, and you use the 'pin it' button that more and more sites are making available on their pages. You add that pinned site to your board, organise it into the board according to your organisation, not someone else's. Click on the pinned site on your board, and you're taken to the originating site.

An example of a post that allows Pinterest users to 'pin' photos from their blog on to their Pinterest boards. Photo / Refinery29.com

Pinterest is focused on growth, so language support has escalated dramatically over the last few months to cover 31 languages (support was at eight languages last year), with feedback from users (or 'pinners') being analysed constantly as to what they follow and how they use the surface. Finally, the international team is making partnerships with more and more sites so they'll add the 'pin-it' buttons. They want every website to have this facility.

Pinterest now has offices in Japan, the UK and France, and Germany's coming, then Brazil.

Pinterest boards can be followed, too, so individuals emerge with groups of people following what they pin - some of these are in the tens of thousands.

Currently, more users are women than men in the US, whereas Japan has a 50-50 gender split.

One of the Korean journalists asked if Pinterest had a specific strategy for news sites. While Pinterest is not focussed in this area specifically, there's a product called Article Pins that lets news sites add metadata to pins - the New York Times, Gawker, the Guardian and other sites already use this. Articles can live on in this way, as 'pinned content', long after the originating sites have buried them in their archives. Home décor, DIY and fashion are real favourites, but the breadth of content goes far beyond these topics to cover, for example, sports, motorcycles, travel.

So now let's pin the elephant in the room: money. Pinterest has all these people working in a large and beautifully decorated two-building office, millions of users and the very real weight of massive global reach - and no direct way to bring in money. No matter how much traffic Pinterest might direct to a site, Pinterest doesn't get to clip the ticket.

This entire hive of activity has been supported so far with investment funding. The words 'only in California' went through my mind at this point.

So now, Pinterest is sitting on a massive audience of pinning devotees and that's a saleable item if ever there was one. But how?

Matt Crystal said a new product is in early beta: Promotor Pins looks like a regular pin but is denoted as a Promotor Pin, a method Pinterest could use in future to gain a revenue stream (other methods are being considered).

Pinterest has just started these monetisation tests, and in the US only so far. It's still in an experimental phase to test promoted pins with certain ad sponsors.