Image sharing service WeHeartIt receives over 600 million page views per month

Pinterest and WeHeartIt unique visitor growth

Pinterest and WeHeartIt page view growth

September 6, 2012 While investors were pouring millions of dollars into the social photo-sharing site Pinterest in the fall of 2011, another photo-sharing site, WeHeartIt, was quietly growing rapidly in Brazil.

In July 2011, WeHeartIt was five times larger than Pinterest, with 7.7 million unique visitors and 460 million page views, while Pinterest's numbers were 1.5 million and 91 million, respectively.

But Pinterest is growing much faster than WeHeartIt, which is why people haven't heard of WeHeartIt, which is now worth $1.5 billion. WeHeartIt's growth has been slow. Pinterest is currently about three times the size of WeHeartIt. In July, Pinterest had 34.5 million unique visitors and more than 2 billion page views, while WeHeartIt had 12.9 million unique visitors and 618 million page views.

These numbers suggest that WeHeartIt is still a big site, which is one reason venture capitalists are bullish on it. Pinterest is hot, has a lot of money, and has a beautiful design. For these reasons, its valuation is far beyond the reach of most investors.

An investor who tried to invest in WeHeartIt last year but ultimately failed to reach a deal said WeHeartIt founder Fabio Giolito was not very interested in outside investment. Giolito has a small team that sells ads at $3-$4 CPM (cost per thousand impressions). With 618 million page views per month, WeHeartIt can easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month by running ads on only a small portion of those page views.

But Giolito may eventually seek outside funding. A source told CoinDesk that WeHeartIt is "100 percent" raising money, with a number of investors interested. WeHeartIt's growth appears to have stalled in the past few months, but it has still easily added millions of new users and 200 million more page views per month over the past year.