Pinterest becomes latest company to cross 100M users

Taking over five years, Pinterest got there faster than LinkedIn, Yelp and Shazam

No matter how many people achieve them, certain statistics will always be impressive. Like hitting 500home runs, for example. I don't care how many people do it, there's something about that number thatmeans something.

For tech that would be crossing 100 million monthly active users. Once a company hits that number,there's the feeling that they've gone from start up to established player. Now the latest company to hit thatmetric is Pinterest, it was revealed in a blog post.

A Pinterest spokesperson also shared some more stats with me, including that the number of Pinners doubled in the past 18 months and that about 70% of have either saved on a Pin or have clicked on it to learn more.

International users have doubled in the last year and make up about 45% of the total, and the company is now "focused on growing internationally and making Pins more actionable."

Pinterest has five global offices in London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and São Paulo.

The 100 million number is significant for a few reasons. First, Pinterest has been cagey about user numbers in the past, and this is the first time it has revealed them. Back in February, eMarketer reported that Pinterest’s user base in the United States would be 47.1 million monthly active users this year, rising to 59.3 million by 2019. Not a great number, so perhaps this was Pinterest's way to debunking that statistic.

More likely it served two purposes. First, it helps to appease investors who may have been wary about the company's gigantic valuation if it was not delivering. Pinterest has raised $1.3 billion in funding, most recently a $186 million round in May that valued it at $11 billion. At those numbers, a company has to prove its worth.

The other purpose could be to drive more advertising dollars. Pinterest debuted its first ad product, Promoted Pins, in 2013, ramped them up last year, introduced its first partners in May, and, on the strength of those limited tests, announced it would be opening them up to all advertisers at the beginning of 2015.

Giving advertisers a sold number of potential users that they could be reaching might help the company ramp up that monetization.

Obviously Pinterest has a long way to go before it can really compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter, who have many more users, but this is a sign that Pinterest is still an up and coming competitor.

Getting to 100 million

Reaching that 100 million threshold is still a relatively rare thing. But is it getting easier now that more people have Internet access, and mobile devices?

Pinterest was founded in March of 2010, so it took over five years for the company to get to this metric, which was similar to two of its competitors. Facebook hit 100 million in August 2008, around four and half years after its launch in February of 2004. Twitter reached it in September 2011, more than five years after the first tweet was sent out on March 21, 2006.

Some of the fastest to get there were Tango, which launched in October 2010 and got to 100 million users in less than three years. Skype launchedin August 2003 and also took less than three years to get to 100 million users.

Snapchat was first launched in July 2011, and was said to have had 100 million users by August of 2014.

So three to five years seems to be roughly where most companies fall. Of course, some take a lot longer than that.

Evernote, for example, was 100 million user strong in May of 2014,  a little less than six years after launching in June 2008.

One of the longest to get there is LinkedIn, which has been around a lot longer than I realized, having launched in May of 2003. It didn't get to 100 million users until March of 2011, right before its IPO, nearly eight years after it was first introduced! After that it was easy, though, as it took the network less than two years to double it. 

Yelp launched in 2004, and it took the company nearly nine years to get to 100 million users, and Shazam took even longer, getting to 100 million in December 2010, more than 10 years after it first started in 1999.

(Image source: razoofoundation.org)