Is Pinterest ‘a dud’ for news publishers?

Digiday | The Motley Fool
News publishers have been experimenting with the fast-growing, image-curation network Pinterest to see what value it might deliver. Referral data aggregated by Shareaholic from 200,000 websites shows Pinterest driving 1.19 percent of visits, growing steadily each month and exceeding Twitter and StumbleUpon referrals.

But Pinterest’s growth trend has been cooling, and Josh Sternberg writes that “for many news publishers, which often tend to judge social platforms by the hard metric of traffic referrals, Pinterest is a dud.” The highly social Atlantic and BuzzFeed websites say it’s not a big factor, Sternberg reports, and The New York Times says social referrals of all types account for less than 5 percent of its traffic.

“This comes back to how people use Pinterest,” Sternberg says. “It’s not a site for discovering or sharing textual content, which is the business that The Atlantic, the NYT and many other news publishers are in.” Niche magazines that focus on visual content and female audiences are seeing better results.

Earlier: Journalism professors find uses for Pinterest (Poynter) | Recipes, vertical photos shared most on Pinterest (Poynter).