Pinterest reached 100 million users, will add 'Buyable Pins'

Pinterest announced it had reached 100 million monthly users this week. The company will include 'Buyable Pins' on the site soon.

Tim Kendall, Pinterest Monetization GM, told Fortune that the startup had crossed 100 million monthly users. Kendall said the number of shared links and images have doubled over 18 months as well. Added to that, searches to Pinterest had risen to 81% over the previous year.

The company has a great potential for advertising as two-thirds of its contents are from businesses and websites. "We're the first digital medium where people are consuming content and promoted content of equal value," Kendall said.

The company started plugging advertisement in 2013. It's been less intrusive than other websites and social media to market products as promoted pins. With that, people could save items that they wanted to buy later, cited on Pinterest blog.

On the same context, Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann said in an interview with the New York Times that over 70% of the 100 million users are active. Either they pin items of those they found interesting, or they click the links to explore more about the image.

In 50 billion pins, 30 million of it could be purchased. Advertisers also found consumers from Pinterest spend 50% more than regular ones. On that note, many users access the website to buy the things they find.

They confirmed that we will be seeing buy button on Pinterest soon. It will be called 'Buyable Pins'. Although Kendall said in the interview that the company has no interest of monetizing with the buy button as it is planning to make money entirely from the ads.

Pinterest had gained valuation of $11B in five years from VC investors and partners. Like other startup companies, they were also put into question if the website is worth $11B, but they kept on improving their service and had gained user base.

In earlier years, Pinterest used to be compared to Facebook and Twitter, but they saw Google as its close rival because they both deal in the real world than in social media.

Anyhow, apart from being a digital corkboard, they have to enhance its features and maintain viability of business in order to keep up with the $11B valuation.