Pinterest has gotten the same rap for years: it's a great looking service used far more by women than men.
Evan Sharp, Pinterest's cofounder and Chief Creative Officer, doesn't contest the fact (nor does he say anything is particularly wrong with it), but Sharp maintains the ratio of women to men is gradually shifting.
Earlier this year, the five-year-old San Francisco startup announced that men are actually its fastest-growing user demographic, with the number of men pinning and re-pinning doubling in 2014 to an unspecified number.
Data from comScore, the web analytics firm, bears that out. From March 2014 to March 2015, Pinterest's user base climbed 25% year-over-year to 72.8 million monthly active users. And during the same period, male users grew 2.2% to make up 21.9 million of its overall user base. That's a small, but significant uptick.
"For better or for worse, more women use Pinterest today than men," Sharp told Mashable on Tuesday prior to appearing onstage at Bloomberg Businessweek's annual design conference. "It’s not inaccurate to say that. And while we were very lucky that our early community was very female-oriented early early on, I think, my point is that we’re evening out the gap.
Part of why Pinterest attracted more female users earlier on? User content.
"The way the product has always worked, or worked until a year ago, was kind of self-sustaining," Sharp explained. "When you clicked on hair and beauty, the people who were using Pinterest powered what you discovered. So for a long time, if you used Pinterest and if you were like the people that used Pinterest, it worked well for you. If it didn’t, it didn’t work well for you."
Like begets like, in other words.
But according to Sharp, more men began logging onto Pinterest regularly around the time its recommendations began getting smarter. Last week, for example, Pinterest rolled out a "smart board picker" for iOS and Android users that predicts which boards users will re-pin something to.
According to the company, the "scoring algorithm" which powers the feature is generally more effective than previous tries at suggesting relevant boards to folks. Accurately doing so, as it does when a user clicks "Pin It" on mobile, cuts down on users shuffling Pins around later because a recommended board wasn't really what they wanted. In that regard, Pinterest says the smart board picker reduces the number of people who edit Pins by 4% and delete pins by 3%.
The other reason more men are pinning and re-pinning? More users than ever are international -- nearly 40% of the social network's total user base -- across countries such as China, Indonesia, Romania and the Philippines. In India, Korea and Japan, the breakdown of female to male users is roughly 50-50.
Given all that heady growth abroad, it's no wonder Pinterest raised $367 million in funding this March at an $11 billion valuation (with plans to eventually raise another $211 million) to fuel global expansion.
"That’s not at all because women aren’t interesting or useful or important -- it’s more like we think Pinterest is for everyone," Sharp added. "But for that, we have to make a product that works for everyone, no matter what you’re doing."