TC: Multiple data sets show that Pinterest's growth rate is slowing down

Pinterest has been a hot topic in recent months, with so much news that people wonder if they are hyping it up. In February, comScore released a report showing that the website had 11.7 million monthly unique visitors, making it the fastest independent website to reach 10 million monthly unique visitors in the shortest time. However, the tracking data released by Facebook's third-party data statistics service AppData paints a slightly different picture of Pinterest.

Pinterest's average monthly Facebook active users, or users who logged into Pinterest using a Facebook account in the past 30 days, has dropped from 12.2 million before the redesign to 8.3 million after. Daily active users have also dropped from 1.1 million on March 22 to 930,000 on April 21.

According to AppData, the site's highest daily active user (DAU) was on March 18, when it had 4.4 million unique visitors. But two days later, the redesigned site seemed to have offended many users.

Meanwhile, data from Google Search Trends, Compete and mobile app tracker App Annie also show that Pinterest's growth is slowing. App Annie shows that Pinterest's mobile app download ranking is falling.

Compete data shows that although Pinterest had 18 million unique visitors in March, growth has begun to slow.

Google search trends also show that the search popularity of the keyword "pinterest" is declining.

Of course, all these data have their own partiality. AppData shows the users’ login and activity with Facebook accounts; Compete often provides inaccurate raw data; Google search trends only reflect the status of people searching for Pinterest, not its user numbers.

But when you put all the data together, it paints a picture of the site's popularity fading. There are several possible reasons for this:

▶ The redesigned website did make users unhappy;

▶ The new iPhone app requires a Facebook account to log in, which did cause trouble for some users, but another version released on April 18 fixed this problem;

▶ There has been a lot of media coverage in the past few months, which has led to many users just trying out the site. The current decline in the number of active users is just a rational return after the frenzy;

▶ Maybe the number of users logging in with Facebook is decreasing, because AppData cannot count users logging in with Email and Twitter accounts. Maybe the number of users logging in with other methods is increasing, but the number of users logging in with Facebook accounts is decreasing, although we don’t know why users no longer log in with Facebook accounts.

In addition, there are the old-fashioned spam and copyright issues. Pinterest has not yet commented on these data, and we are waiting for further updates.