Pinterest’s users are still overwhelmingly female, but the number of male users on the site has increased 73% in the last year, according to recently released data from the site's researchers.
And while Pinterest will not share a figure for the exact number of men using the site, the company offered a glimpse this week into what content men are pinning the most: fashion, hiking, and DIY.
These three images above, specifically, have been repinned the most in the past month, Larkin Brown said, a researcher at Pinterest: a close-up shot of a dapper-looking suit, a stuffed military daypack for hiking, and a beautiful infographic on how to build a platform bed.
The popularity of specific images and categories on Pinterest are hard to quantify because images can be pinned and repinned multiple times throughout the system, Mithya Srinivasan, a representative from Pinterest, told BuzzFeed Life. "Nothing is numerically ranked," Srinivasan said. But the company's data scientists said that repins are the most effective way to measure an item's influence.
In addition to these top three categories, Pinterest said its male users are also pinning travel:
Pattern-mixing inspiration:
Home-related building projects:
Survival kits and shelter-building ideas:
To an obsessive observer of Pinterest trends (which I am), one thing that seems to differ between the popular pins of women and men — or at least what the company said are the popular male pins — is the overall quality of the photos and the buy-ability. That is, the photos Pinterest said men pin were more likely to be products linked to a merchandiser's site than just a photo of a person wearing that item. And while some of the most repinned photos on Pinterest at large might be a gritty shot of a beige casserole or someone's random gray hallway, the top male pins the company sent BuzzFeed Life all looked professionally produced.
This could be related to Pinterest's new partnership with brands, which can promote pins targeted to certain interests or demographics, or because of Pinterest's own work to increase their number of male users by saturating the men's fashion and other traditionally masculine categories. Or, maybe men just like looking at pretty pictures.
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