Pinterest Marks 5th Birthday With New Stat: 50 Billion Pins Served

Five years ago this month, Pinterest launched as a place for people to collect their favorite things on the web. Today, the company released a new figure for how big that collection has become: 50 billion pins.

That’s up from the 30 billion Pins — a growth rate of 66% — that Pinterest put out last April. And those 50 billion pins are compiled on 1 billion boards, an increase of 250 million since last year.

The company has been ramping up its monetization efforts this year, officially launching its Promoted Pin advertising product in January. This month it signaled that it will improve ad targeting and introduce animated ad formats.  Today’s announcement included other metrics to remind businesses of the marketing power of the network.

Some of the stats have been reported before — for instance, two-thirds of all pinned content comes from business’ websites — but they are a useful barometer for activity on Pinterest. The privately held company isn’t required to release user figures in quarterly reports like its publicly held competitors, so this will have to do. (ComScore’s stats had Pinterest at 79 million unique U.S. users in February).

Here’s the rest of Pinterest’s self-reported stat rundown:

• 80% of traffic comes from mobile
• Each year we serve more than 1.5 trillion recommendations
• Recipes: More than 1.7 billion recipe Pins
• Shopping: Every day nearly 2M people Pin product rich Pins
• Articles: More than 14 million articles are Pinned each day
• We’ve doubled our male user base in the U.S. this year. Last year our male user base in the U.S. grew 73% year over year, and has been picking up in the past 6 months (54%) vs the prior 6 months (40%), which is outpacing overall Pinterest growth.
• In 2014 international users grew more than 135%. Today, monthly active users are up 150% year over year outside the U.S.