Pinterest is finally getting the male users it desperately needs

There’s nothing wrong with having a service that’s geared towards a specific demographic, but the problem with Pinterest is that it’s NOT geared towards a specific demographic and yet still has a massive gender imbalance in favor of women. Consumer diversity is very important in business, especially one like Pinterest, which is why the company has been working hard to bring more men to its service, and that effort is starting to pay off. 

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.