Pinterest Passes Twitter In Popularity, Facebook Stays On Top | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest Passes Twitter In Popularity, Facebook Stays On Top

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82 pointsadidash38 comments

This sounded... difficult to believe, so I thought I'd read the actual report on the Pew website.[0]

They seem to use "social media website" interchangeably with the actual apps in question, and their methodology writeup doesn't mention the actual questions they asked in their telephone surveys.

I wouldn't be surprised at all if more people used the Pinterest website more than the Twitter website, as the latter seems more oriented to being a website. It would appear that Twitter has way more users overall as compared to Pinterest though.

  Pinterest: "50 million unique monthly users worldwide" [1]
  Twitter: 117 million monthly active tweeting users [2]

So headline should technically be "Pinterest website passed Twitter website in popularity ..."

[0] http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Social-Media-Update/Main...

[1] http://allthingsd.com/20131023/pinterest-does-another-massiv...

[2] http://blog.peerreach.com/2013/11/4-ways-how-twitter-can-kee...

I'd suspect a much larger proportion of Twitter users are things like RSS feed bots, though.

I would really love to see some numbers on that, but thanks to the IPO we will never have any insight into that. They have to make up numbers like that, or they lose money.

"It is an advertising-based business. Twitter also sells data. It will generate about $583 million this year. Twitter is expected to generate a little less than $1 billion in 2014, according to eMarketer.

Most of Twitter's revenue comes from three types of ads, although it plans to have a more robust advertising offering next year."

Aha!

Fake Twitter Followers Become Multimillion-Dollar Business

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/fake-twitter-follow...

Over 27% of the Top 10 Twitter Accounts’ Followers Are Fake

http://www.webpronews.com/over-27-of-the-top-10-twitter-acco...

5% of Twitter Users Are Fake [reports Twitter in S-1]

http://investorplace.com/2013/10/5-of-twitter-users-are-fake...

edit: 1 in 10 Twitter accounts is fake, say researchers

http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/1-10-twitter-accounts-fake...

Even if 60% of Twitter's users were fake they would still have more active users than Pinterest so the title is still pretty misleading.

I'd bet Pinterest has more non-member users, though. Very few people read tweets who aren't members of Twitter. With no evidence, I'd bet that Pinterest has more people looking at galleries of pictures who don't feel a need to register.

I doubt it.

Oh look, these are opinions, not facts. What a pointless diatribe.

Without direct access to their analytics and backends, educated guesses are the best thing available.

Thank you pessimizer. Interesting data.

>but thanks to the IPO we will never have any insight into that. They have to make up numbers like that, or they lose money.

Do you really believe that private companies are more forth-coming with information than public companies? Do you read 10-Qs?

Being public makes a company accountable to shareholders for just such information. Withholding it, or worse fabricating it, isn't the status quo with a public company. It results in shareholder lawsuits.

(Not that anyone cares, but:) I'm a 23 year-old without social media or smartphone. I consider myself a science experiment. The world is looking more alien to me every single day.

For example: last night I was watching the Vergecast [1]. The last episode is literally 90 minutes of four adult men bitching about social media smartphone apps! It's insane.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/12/5204758/the-vergecast-105...

If you're watching the Vergecast and posting about it on HN then you're not that much of an outsider as you think you are. No one of my friends or family your age are on Twitter or Pinterest and maybe half are on Facebook. It's easy to think the whole world is into social media when you're reading about it every day, but the majority of people have no idea what any of this means or are even remotely interested in it.

That would be good news. (Although I'm pretty sure almost every 23 year-old here has Facebook.)

23-year-old here. No Facebook.

Same with me lol. Only have an account for developer purposes since I have to put it in every app I work on haha.

I was really into MySpace and because of that I just sort of naturally transitioned into Facebook probably somewhere around 2007-2008 (I don't remember exactly). Though MySpace served as a typical teen social tool throughout junior high and high school, it became less interesting to me after graduation (strangely enough, right around the time you start seeing less of your friends in-person) as I spent more time with fewer people (family and my girlfriend, mainly).

Right around the time that my girlfriend and I went off to university together, I pretty much just stopped using it. All of the (little) social interaction I felt I needed was satisfied in-person, and so I didn't really need it anymore. I used Facebook a couple of times (quite literally), but at some point I got fed up with hearing everybody talk about it all the time (I think the foregone conclusion that "everybody has one!" really irked me), so I looked at it all, realized that I really didn't use it, and deleted everything.

Though I still get the occasional friend trying to convince me to come back, I haven't, and I've been OK. I really don't need another Internet distraction, and I don't feel like I've missed out on anything substantial because of it.

Wait till you have kids. Facebook works really well as a "sharing photos of the grand-kids" for all of those grandparents and great-aunts around the country/world

Yeah, that's still more of an "if" than a "when". It's often more energy than it's worth dealing with other people now, let alone children.

could you tell us something about your friends/family situation (geographic location, socioeconomic situation, education, etc). i know three (!) people who are not on facebook.

Define "not on Facebook." I have a Facebook account, but I haven't actually logged into it in over a year and the last post made to it was probably 3 years ago.

Don't people bug you about having no way to contact you without a phone? I'm in no social networks currently either, but had to keep my phone..

He did say no smartphone, which presumably implies a non-smartphone with a phone number.

Good for you AlexanderDhoore. You don't need that stuff to have a great life.

I don't understand this at all. You read hn and yet you think the world looks alien because most people small hand held computers around with them??? To be honest this sounds like some attention seeking gesture, so people ask you about your "radical" smartphone-free lifestyle, especially since you prefixed your comment with "not that anyone cares".

there's nothing alien about using a smartphone. it's a natural progression and people are avid consumers of entertainment, so when it goes hand held it's a no brainer that it will be popular. Not to mention all the useful things they do.

you're not without social media, you're commenting on hn?

>you think the world looks alien because most people small hand held computers around with them???

Alien means different, not magic. This world is alien to the world of 2005, and most of that quality is a result of ubiquitous smartphones. The issues that we are grappling with now around smartphones were only the concern of science-fiction authors 10 years ago. I'm not sure how that could be controversial.

>prefixed your comment with "not that anyone cares".

That's called humility.

>you're not without social media, you're commenting on hn?

Does sending a letter count then?

Sorry for commenting, it's just that they only give me one downvote.

Pinterest is actually a fantastic resource for finding visual inspiration e.g. illustrations, graphic design, typography, product design, app design etc.

A lot of people think it's filled with mostly cupcakes and kitten pics (I used to think that too), but it's actually one of the best places to visit online if you're doing visual research.

If you're interested in the above design topics, here are some example boards to help you start browsing:

http://www.creativebloq.com/inspiration/pinterest-boards-812...

Same with reddit. People tend to forget about well curated pinboards or subreddits.

That's probably 1% of their user base if that. I'm guessing because I've only ever visited pinterest by accident and don't actually know what it's for or how it works.

"For these sites ... critical mass is crucial: you won’t visit a site if no one else is using it."

This is not as true for Pinterest, which has a standalone use as a nice visual bookmarking tool - my wife uses Pinterest heavily (mostly for cooking and fashion) and isn't engaged in the social aspects at all.

If you look at the 'Frequency of social media site use' graph though Twitter is far more popular on a daily basis than Pinterest. This seems a more significant statistic.

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/screen-s...

Significant in what way? Pinterest users are (often, not always) looking to buy things.

Significant in that the title is "Pinterest Passes Twitter In Popularity..." so if you decide to judge popularity by page requests then I suspect twitter may be more 'popular' than Pinterest.

This theory is backed up by http://www.alexa.com/topsites/global;0 where Twitter is 12th and Pinterest is 30th.

Of course, popularity doesn't pay the bills!

Other than looking for jobs, does anyone here actually use LinkedIn in a social capacity? I feel like I end up going to their site more from link bait than from actual interest in finding content there.

I do also wonder how much Pinterest use is more passive even than Twitter. Sure, there are lots of Twitter bots and lurkers, but everyone I know on Pinterest complains that they get into an unusable state where they just keep "pinning" things from badges all over the web, but have too much junk pinned to manage/reference/use.

I use Pinterest (http://www.pinterest.com/anthonycreek/), but I'm quite selective of what I pin so I can easily see and appreciate everything on my boards. I also only have a handful of boards.

I see people with dozens of boards and thousands (even tens of thousands) of pins. I don't know what the point of that is unless you are trying to simply grow your following by being everywhere.

Google+ does not make it into the top-five mix — not because of its lack of popularity; but because Pew says it did not include it in its survey questions.

BAM! :-)

It's a Phone survey. I'll leave it at that.

Media manipulations for a next big IPO?)

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