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Pinterest logos on an Apple iPad Air in Washington, D.C., in 2015. The online scrapbooking company says it has 150 million users world-wide.
Photo:
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News
Pinterest Inc. is showing it can compete with Facebook Inc.,
Twitter Inc.
and other internet giants in a battle to command the attention of distracted smartphone users.
The visual-search service on Thursday said it has 150 million users world-wide who log on at least monthly. That means the San Francisco startup has increased its users by half since September 2015, when it crossed the 100-million mark.
Pinterest’s ability to draw new users in a digital world littered with applications that quickly captivate users before flaming out is also helping it become popular with advertisers.
The six-year-old company, which last year was valued by investors at $11 billion, expects to triple last year’s revenue to $300 million in 2016, according to a person familiar with the matter.
People go to Pinterest to discover new ideas, browsing through billions of images on topics such as kitchen remodels and tattoos. Most ads on Pinterest are from retailers and consumer-product companies geared to women, its main audience. As it tracks toward a possible initial public offering of stock, Pinterest will need to prove it can appeal to a wider array of big-brand advertisers as well as to men.
It also inevitably will be compared with social network Facebook and messaging service Twitter, two companies that went in opposite directions since their IPOs.
Facebook dwarfs Pinterest with 1.7 billion users, after adding more than 167 million since September of last year. But Pinterest is growing at a faster clip than Twitter, which has 313 million users but added only six million users in the past year.
Pinterest likely is now bigger in the U.S. than Twitter, with 70 million monthly users versus Twitter’s 66 million as of June 30. Twitter’s $13 billion market value, which has dropped sharply of late, is now closer to that of Pinterest.
“A year or two ago there were these open questions such as, ‘Would we be able to globalize the service? Would we be able to build revenue?’ ” said Ben Silbermann, Pinterest’s 34-year-old chief executive. “Some of the questions we started to answer, and we obviously have more questions ahead of us, but I’m really excited about what the future holds.” Mr. Silbermann said reaching 150 million users reflects Pinterest’s efforts to get internet users in countries such as Brazil and Japan to understand the site’s utility. More than half of its users, about 80 million, are overseas.
Pinterest says 40% of global sign-ups are by men, though they don’t stick around as long as women, who account for about 70% of Pinterest’s U.S. users, according to digital analytics firm comScore.
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Still, Pinterest offers more promise than profit. The company earns money by selling targeted ads, based on factors such as browsing behavior, that look like regular images posted by users.
A user searching for “couches” might see an ad from Pottery Barn. Pinterest says its advantage is that its users are in a shopping mood.
Early results have encouraged some marketers such as Target Corp.
to spend more on Pinterest ads. “The consumer’s intent to buy is much more intense on Pinterest than other platforms,” said Kristi Argyilan, Target’s senior vice president of marketing.Other ad testers such as Pete Blackshaw, global head of digital and social media at Nestlé SA,
said he would need more metrics to decide whether to make bigger investments.
There is a risk that Pinterest could overestimate its own potential. Funding documents sent to investors in early 2015 projected Pinterest would make $169 million in revenue and cross 150 million users by the end of 2015, as reported earlier by TechCrunch. It missed both of those estimates.
Asked about the projections, Mr. Silbermann said, “There were some early projections when we were just a couple months into building the business, but we’ve learned more about it.”
Fueling speculation about an IPO, Mr. Silbermann has brought on several veteran executives including Jon Kaplan from Alphabet Inc.
’s Google to run advertising and Todd Morgenfeld from Twitter as financial chief. But the CEO said Pinterest has no immediate IPO plans.
Jeremy Levine, a partner at early Pinterest investor Bessemer Ventures, said it likely won’t need to raise any more venture capital, allowing it to take its time to go public. Pinterest has raised roughly $1.3 billion, including $533 million last year.
Such flexibility helps Pinterest try to avoid the missteps that engulfed Twitter and, temporarily, Facebook. Twitter’s plateauing user growth undermined its strong revenue growth. Facebook early on failed to anticipate the user shift from desktop to mobile.
“If you do it too early and you have no predictability, you’re going to get hammered,” Mr. Levine said. “If you do it too late and you have no growth left, then you get hammered. Pick your poison.”
Write to Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com
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