Still More Data Shows Pinterest Passing Twitter In Popularity

Pinterest is taking an ever bigger slice of the social networking pie. (Photo credit: ShardsOfBlue)

Its most recent valuation of $5 billion makes Pinterest a clear No. 4 among U.S. social networking companies, behind LinkedIn (current market cap: $20 billion), Twitter ($23 billion) and, of course, Facebook ($170 billion). On the basis of users, however, it's increasingly obvious that Pinterest deserves to be counted among the Big Three.

A recent study by the Pinterest marketing firm Ahalogy adds to the growing body of evidence showing that Pinterest has surpassed Twitter in popularity in the U.S. and looks set to widen the margin still further, while also catching up with LinkedIn.

Extrapolating from a sample of 1,300 males and females age 15 and up, the firm estimated that just over 22% of Americans are now using the service on at least a monthly basis. That's slightly more than the 21% of U.S. adults who were pinning when Pew Internet Project tallied the data in September It's equal to the proportion who were on LinkedIn, according to Pew, and somewhat ahead of Twitter, at 19%.

Ahalogy's data suggests that Pinterest has about 53 million monthly active users in the U.S. (or 22% of the 16-and-over population of 243.3 million recorded in the last census). In its last quarterly report, Twitter said it had 57 million MAUs - but that's including Canada.

Comparing the results of studies with different methodologies is tricky, of course. When eMarketer ran the numbers, it estimated that Twitter will reach 48.2 million MAUs in the U.S. this year, while Pinterest will hit 40.1 million.

One variable that could have an outsize effect here is Pinterest can become anywhere near as popular with men as it is with women. Currently its audience in the U.S. is around 80% male, and a study by RJMetrics suggested that the gender gap is widening, with the percentage of pins by men falling from 13% to 8% over the course of three years.

But Ahalogy's survey captured a different trend, with men 36% more likely than women to report having tried Pinterest for the first time in the last six months. (Of course, there are a lot fewer women who've never tried Pinterest to begin with.)