Originally posted on Gigaom:
Long viewed as a female dominated website, Pinterest has doubled its male user base in the last year and now men compose a third of new signups, it said this week at an engineering event. That's a significant increase for the company, whose user base has hovered at 70 to 80 percent women for years. It's an important demographic expansion for the product as it matures, one that shows it's a social network that can appeal to the public at large.
Until now, the application's female consumer base has been self-perpetuating. Because the content is user generated and it took off with women early on, a lot of the pins are focused on stereotypically female interests, like home and garden. That created a steeper barrier to entry for men joining the site. Even as the application's popularity exploded, the imbalance between the genders remained, far more so than with Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Tumblr...
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