Pinterest’s problem: getting men to commit

25 January 2015 - 02:00 By Yoree Koh
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Social site adds ‘geek’ content, tweaks search results but 71% of visitors are still women

Pinterest Inc. hit the demographic jackpot after it launched four years ago, becoming the digital scrapbook du jour for blushing brides, arts and crafts enthusiasts and home decorators hunting for ideas and inspiration.

About 42% of online U.S. women use Pinterest, according to a Pew Research survey released this month, a coveted audience with enormous spending power. Among its social peers, only Facebook Inc. ’s site boasts a higher percentage of the online U.S. female audience.

But Pinterest’s success with women has also created a conundrum for the business. The company has outsize aspirations to become the go-to place for discovery on the Web. And yet the other half of the world’s population has largely stayed away from the site in part because of the stigma that Pinterest is a clubhouse for women.

“We’re really trying to unpack and understand that so we can communicate to [men] that Pinterest is absolutely for you,” said David Rubin, who joined as head of marketing in July from Unilever PLC, where he worked on women’s beauty and helped launch the Axe men’s deodorant brand.

The same Pew survey showed that just 13% of online men in the U.S. use Pinterest, up from 8% a year earlier. Digital analytics firm comScore estimates that about 71% of the site’s 72.5 million visitors in December were women, making it the most female-skewed social platform.

The male experience on Pinterest has been similar to visiting a women’s department store. Now Pinterest is trying to make it easier for them to find the men’s section.

The stakes are high. This month, Pinterest began selling ads to marketers for the first time. Venture capitalists valued Pinterest at $5 billion last year despite little to no revenue on the belief it can compete with the likes of Facebook, Google Inc. and Twitter Inc. for advertising dollars.

Marketers such as Target Corp. have generally been intrigued by Pinterest’s potential. Users post, or “pin,” images they find on the Internet to self-created photo galleries, or “boards.” So far they have pinned over 30 billion unique entries, revealing to marketers valuable information about what they might be interested in buying.

Pinterest’s new ad, called a “promoted pin,” targets specific users based on their interests, location or searches. The ads show up in search results or when users tap on a category of pins.

The San Francisco company’s executives like to say, “We want to do for discovery what Google did for search.” In other words, when someone wants to embark on a home improvement project or peruse easy-to-make dinner recipes, Pinterest wants them to search for ideas on its site.

But men aren’t exactly doing the searching, meaning that Pinterest is potentially missing out on a large chunk of advertising.

Pinterest executives say the gender imbalance stems from its origins. Initially pitched by founders Ben Silbermann, the CEO, and Evan Sharp, its head of design, as a tool to easily collect or “scrapbook” images from around the Web, Pinterest inadvertently became a woman’s world. Its original users in the arts and crafts community spread to mommy bloggers, home decorators and avid cooks. Soon, it was the hot place to be for magazine brands like “Elle” and “Real Simple.”

“I think the stereotype of it as a female space is probably not helpful when you’re trying to attract men,” said Robert Kozinets, a professor of marketing at York University’s business school in Toronto. “It’s more stigmatizing for a man to be on a woman’s site than the reverse. The perception is that it weakens a man’s social standing.”

Part of the solution is to make it easier for men to discover what they are interested in. Pinterest executives say they are focused on making the site more “gender neutral.”

Some of the most popular topics on Pinterest, such as cooking, gardening and travel, interest both men and women. So the company says it has made subtle changes, such as serving up more tacos and pizzas alongside its popular baked goods and family meals when users are searching for recipe ideas; or showing a range of costumes on Halloween, from single women in the cities to Dads in the suburbs.

“It will take some time, but it’s about trying to show this as a bigger tent—as a utility that works for a lot of people,” Mr. Rubin said.

Pinterest has also modified the sign-up process so that the list of suggested interests the site recommends users follow is generated based on gender. More recently, Pinterest rolled out personalized search results where gender is factored into the results.

For instance, depending on whether a male or female is browsing, a search for “workouts” generates fitness tips that are as different as the pages of “Men’s Fitness” and “Women’s Health.” In the past, the results for male users would have included a mix of men’s and women’s workout regimens. Pinterest says this feature, now available to all of its users, has led to increased engagement on the platform.

Indeed, male users spent 1.59 billion minutes on the site in December, more than four times as much as a year earlier, according to comScore. Meanwhile, women spent 4.94 billion minutes, up 42% from the prior year.

The number of pins added to Pinterest’s content library associated with male-oriented categories has also grown. Over the past year pins for “geek” content grew 175%, “cars and motorcycles” increased 134% and “men’s fashion” jumped 122%.

Pinterest declined to provide user numbers, but says male user ranks grew 54% in the six months through November, outpacing the rate of female sign-ups.

The company has also made sure its content is of interest to both genders when it launches in international markets. As a result, the user base is more of an even split in markets such as Korea, India and Japan, according to Pinterest, which is available in over 30 languages.

“It gives me a lot of confidence that over time even the U.S. may go to a much more balanced distribution,” said Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s head of product.

Regardless of the content, the gender divide may be rooted more deeply in the site’s grid-like design, says Joan Meyers-Levy, a marketing professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in gender differences in information processing.

Ms. Meyers-Levy’s studies have shown that women are able to process information more comprehensively and to do so at a lower threshold. Men are more selective and tend to focus on the essentials.

In other words, Pinterest’s busy design may create an information-overload for men. “If this was a magazine, they’d turn the page,” Ms. Meyers-Levy said. “It works for females because they like detail, they like more complexity.”

In response, a Pinterest spokeswoman pointed out that the product and site were designed by three men. Co-founder Paul Sciarra left the company in 2012.

No matter the reasons, Pinterest likely faces a lengthy struggle to reel in more men like Nicholas Hardesty, an avid user since 2012 with over 35 boards and thousands of pins on subjects such as breakfast foods and the movie “Star Wars.” The 34-year-old director of religious education in Owensboro, Ky., says he likes collecting things and organizing them in one place, but his male friends have largely stayed away.

“They don’t make fun of me per se,” Mr. Hardesty said, “but give me a sideways glance or a little bit of a ‘why are you on there?’”

 

This article was originally published on 22-01-2015 on The Wall Street Journal

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