Shareaholic: Pinterest surpassed Yahoo to become the fourth largest source of organic traffic in August 2012

Pinterest has surpassed Yahoo to become the fourth largest source of organic traffic

September 7, 2012 morning news, Internet content sharing service provider Shareaholic released data on Thursday showing that in terms of natural traffic, Pinterest has surpassed Yahoo to become the world's fourth largest traffic driver.

Organic traffic is traffic that comes from search engines, directory sites, or unpaid links in the web yellow pages.

Shareaholic's data also shows that organic traffic from Google, Yahoo and Bing has dropped an average of 15.63% since January, suggesting that more users are discovering content through social networks like Pinterest.

Shareaholic's data comes from 200,000 publishers that use the company's content sharing and analysis tools, so the company's data may only reflect the use of social networks by users within its publisher network, rather than the entire Internet.

In August, Shareaholic predicted that Pinterest's organic traffic would surpass Yahoo's. From May to June, Pinterest's referral traffic increased by 43.7%, and from July to August it increased again by 15.97%. In addition, from July to August, Pinterest's traffic share increased from 1.38% to 1.84%.

Pinterest's referral traffic also exceeded that of Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined in January, Twitter in February, and StumbleUpon, Bing and Google in June. However, Pinterest still lags far behind Google in terms of organic traffic.

Pinterest's rapid development is noteworthy, but the company needs to find a way to commercialize it. An e-commerce startup recently said: "Pinterest is an important source of traffic, but users may not necessarily become weekly or daily active users." On the other hand, Walmart plans to use Pinterest's popular trends as a reference factor in its new e-commerce search engine. Walmart believes that Pinterest's popular trends can reflect consumers' shopping intentions.