Pinterest passes 250 million monthly active users

Pinterest today announced it has surpassed the 250 million monthly active user mark, continuing a steady pace of adding 50 million monthly active users a year.

The milestone announced today is up from 200 million in September 2017 and 100 million in September 2015. Pinterest also announced today that the majority of its users are now outside the United States, and that more than 175 billion Pins have been created by users, up from around 100 million about a year ago.

DIY projects, home decor, and style continue to be Pinterest’s most popular Pin categories, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. Each has seen roughly 30 percent year-over-year growth in Pins by users.

As part of its growth initiative, Pinterest has recruited and acquired some of the top engineers and thinkers in computer vision from Google.

In late 2016, Pinterest hired former Google Images lead Li Fan to become head of engineering, followed months later by Vanja Josifovski, who would become Pinterest’s first CTO, and Google Images veteran Randy Keller.

Pinterest Labs was formed by chief scientist Jure Leskovec in early 2017 to provide research that can lead to efficiencies in Pinterest products, such as PinSage, a convolutional neural network that has led to a 25 percent increase in impressions for Shop the Look, a feature that lets Pinterest users buy clothes seen in Pins.

Earlier this year, Pinterest hired Google computer vision research lead Chuck Rosenberg to lead the company’s visual search team.

Since the barrage of AI talent began to arrive from Google, Pinterest started to roll out its Lens computer vision tool that can do things like Lens Your Look, which lets you take a picture of an item of clothing you like and then sends you recommendations. Scan codes for opening brand Pin boards were also introduced.

Pinterest’s Lens is seeing increasing pressure in the fashion arena from competitors like Google, whose computer vision tool (also named Lens) introduced this summer a feature for identifying similar fashion styles. Amazon put its visual search into some Samsung phones, and its Echo Look device lets users A/B test their outfits.