Unless you’ve been living under a rock over the past year, chances are you have probably heard of the popular photo-sharing website “Pinterest”. Pinterest has been particularly interesting to marketers not only because the number of users have been increasing substantially over the past year, but rather for the way that the site is being used. According to stats from theultralinx.com, Pinterest is only second to youtube when it comes to the average amount of time that people spend on the site at a time. This is an incredible advantage to have and one that will lead to big advertising dollars when Pinterest decides to go that route.
Another interesting feature of Pinterest is the demographics that it attracts. As you can see from the picture below, the users are predominately females, which in turn means that most of the content (or pins) on Pinterest will be geared toward the female taste.
Since it’s inception, there has been a number of websites that have tried to emulate Pinterest, with many trying to create the “Pinterest for men”. Some examples include Dudepins, Manteresting, PunchPin, Gentlemint, and Dartitup. While the thought behind these sites are great and make sense, they have had trouble retaining users, perhaps due to the experiences men have previously had with Pinterest and it’s predominantly feminine content. It is clear that the concept of being able to collect all of your favorite pictures on the internet into one centralized location is something that has become very popular, but there was always something missing from these new sites geared towards the male population.
Enter Tapiture.
Tapiture was formed by the founders of TheChive.com approximately three months ago, and had over 1.5 Million unique visitors to the website in it’s first 4 weeks of being live with essentially zero outside promotion. It is just like the others mentioned above, and the founders would be the first to tell you that. They have readily described it on multiple occasions as their version of Pinterest, for guys. There is, however, one thing that seperates Tapiture from all of the other websites mentioned above: community.
TheChive is well known for having one of the most dedicated communities on the Internet, and the founders Leo and John Resig identified an opportunity to take advantage of this in a big way. As mentioned several times in class, establishing a community goes a long way for a companies success, so it only made sense for TheChive to take advantage of their pre-existing community (who are predominately male) and fill a void such as this one. So far, the average stay of visitors on Tapiture is 7 minutes; a figure that is quite impressive and only has room to grow. I believe that this number has been dragged down by a visitors who checked out the site very briefly after its initial launch just to see what it was about.
On the outside, websites such as Pinterest seem like ways for users to simply share pictures with each other, however, these websites are also very important for E commerce. In fact, a recent report finds that Pinterest has motivated 47% of US female social users to make a purchase, as opposed to 33% on Facebook and 31% on twitter. The founders of Tapiture have stated that among the 50 pictures to show up on the home-screen, approximately 10 of them will be strategically chosen, clearly marked commerce items, available for sale directly from the website. The other 40 or so will simply be pictures ranging from good looking girls, to cars, to pictures of food, and everything in between. It remains to be seen whether this strategy of a Pinterest for men is one that will stick, but for now, TheChive has taken all of the right steps to reach this mark, as it continues to grow it’s loyal community within the website.