Pinterest emerged from an earlier app created by Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra called Tote[10] which served as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs. Tote struggled as a business, significantly due to difficulties with mobile payments. At the time, mobile payment technology was not sophisticated enough to enable easy on-the-go transactions, inhibiting users from making many purchases via the app. Tote users however were amassing large collections of favorite items and sharing them with other users. The behavior struck a chord with Silbermann, and he shifted the company to building Pinterest, which allowed users to create collections of a variety of items and share them with each other.[11]
The development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype as a closed beta in March 2010.[12] Nine months after the launch, the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann said he wrote to the first 5,000 users, offering his phone number and even meeting with some of them.[13][12] The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in more downloads than expected.[14] This was followed by an iPad app[15] and Pinterest Mobile, a version of the website for non-iPhone users.[16] Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until mid-2011.[13] The creators behind Pinterest summarized the service as a "catalogue of ideas" that inspires users to "go out and do that thing", although that it is not an image-based "social network".[47] It also has a very large fashion profile. In later years, Pinterest has also been described as a "visual search engine".[29][48]
Pinterest consists mainly of "pins" and "boards", where a pin is an image that has been linked from a website or uploaded. Pins saved from one user's board can be saved to someone else's board, a process known as "repinning".[49] Boards are collections of pins dedicated to a theme. Boards with multiple ideas can have different sections that further contain multiple pins.[50] Users can follow and unfollow other users as well as boards, which would fill the "home feed".[51]
Content can also be found outside Pinterest and similarly uploaded to a board via the "Save" button, which can be downloaded to the bookmark bar on a web browser,[52] or be implemented by a webmaster directly on the website. It was originally called the "Pin it" button, but it was renamed in 2016 to "Save" to try to make the site more intuitive to new users.[53]
In August 2016, Pinterest launched a video player that lets users and brands upload and store clips of any length straight to the site.[54] Pinterest is a free website that requires registration to use.[78] The service is currently accessible through a web browser, and apps for iOS, Android, and Windows 10 PCs.
In February 2013, Reuters and ComScore stated that Pinterest had 48.7 million users globally,[79] and a study released in July 2013 by French social media agency Semiocast revealed the website had 70 million users worldwide.[80] In October 2016, the company had 150 million monthly active users (70 million in the U.S. and 80 million outside it), rising to 175 million monthly active users by April 2017 and 250 million in September 2018.[81][82][83] As of July 2020, there were over 400 million monthly active users.[84] In April 2023, Pinterest reported 463 million monthly active users, which suggests that 7.4% of the world's population over age 13 use Pinterest.[85]
Around 2020, Pinterest was thought to flood search results in Google Images. In 2022 Google claimed to have performed changes to increase "diversity" in the search results.[86] Pinterest claimed that, as a consequence of Google's changes of November 2021, "U.S. monthly active users coming to Pinterest from the web, desktop and mobile web declined around 30% year over year".