Pinterest – An In Depth Look at the Stats

There’s no big surprise to social media fans that Pinterest is blowing up.  It’s recently become a site that has traffic in the top 100 sites on the web, and rumors have it valued around $200m.  That’s a lot for a company that doesn’t have much revenue.  But just how engaged are the users that use the service?  The folks over at RJMetrics put together a rigorous report to find out.
RJMetrics simply did some scraping to analyze a series of users by looking at their “Pin” boards over time, and see how they’d engaged.  They found some pretty incredible statistics, including the following.

• Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3x as efficiently as Twitter was at a similar time in its history.
• Pins link to a tremendously large universe of sites.  Etsy is the most popular source of pin content, but it only represents about 3% of pins.
• Over 80% of pins are re-pins, demonstrating the tremendous virality at work in the Pinterest community.  To contrast, a study done at a similar time in Twitter’s history showed that only about 1.4% of tweets were retweets.
• The quality of the average new user (as defined by their level of engagement and likelihood to remain active) is high but declining.  Users who have joined in recent months are 2-3x less active during their first month than the users that came before them.

There’s a lot more in the report, including a breakdown of the various sources of pins and the breakdown of how many people actually use the pinmarklet versus just repin other’s content.  There’s also a detailed cohort analysis which looks at various groups of users that joined the site and their behavior over the first twelve months of use of the site.  They find that the earlier users are the power users, but that most cohorts have stayed engaged on the site.
Head over and take a look at the report and let us know what you think.
Image: pedrosek via Shutterstock

Twitter Investors, Including Employees, Can Only Sell 20% of Their Stock [REPORT]

In a move designed to forestall an IPO for as long as possible,Twitter has a rule barring any investor, including employees, from selling more than 20% of their stock, according to a report.

Twitter initiated the rule about a year ago, but it hadn’t been made public, according to CNNMoney. The guideline is somewhat controversial within the company and allegedly prompted Senior Technical Engineer Evan Weaver to resign last August.

According to the article, Weaver’s departure prompted an explanatory email to staffers from CEO Dick Costolo. The email outlined Twitter’s reason behind the policy: To keep to the SEC-dictated limit of under 500 investors. Beyond that number, Twitter would have to go public. “We don’t want to be public until we have very predictable quarterly earnings growth,” Costolo wrote in his August email, according to the article. “We’re not ready to be a public company for a couple years… There is one reasonable way to do this: Let everybody with vested common stock sell only some fraction of their shares,” Costolo added.

Twitter reps could not be reached for comment on the report.

Costolo’s stance on going public mirrors his other recent public statements. Like other social media firms, including, for a time, Facebook, Twitter appears to be holding off an IPO as a way of limiting outsider investors’ influence. That approach has hardly dimmed enthusiasm for the stock, though. Last March, Twitter’s valuationhit $7.7 billion on Sharespost, which trades shares on the secondary market.

Limiting shareholders means catering to deep-pocketed investors, including Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who sank $300 million into the company in December. Like Facebook, Twitter has also stopped giving out stock to employees instead offering them restricted stock units (RSUs), which can only be converted to actual shares after an IPO or a corporate buyout, according to the report.

Image courtesy of Flickr, eldh

What Piracy? The Entertainment Industry is BOOMING!

We’ve pointed it out numerous times in the past. Despite the rampant piracy, Hollywood and other entertainment industries continue to break revenue and sales records year after year.
In an excellent report commissioned by the CCIA, Techdirt’s Mike Masnick has has made an excellent overview of how well things go in the various entertainment industry sectors.
The report titled “The Sky is Rising” was presented at the MIDEM music business conference earlier today.
A summary of some of the key findings:
* According to MPAA, box office revenues grew 25 percent from 2006 to 2010 from $25.5 billion to $31.8 billion.
* Data from PricewaterhouseCoopers and iDATE show that from 1998-2010 the value of the worldwide entertainment industry grew from $449 billion to $745 billion.
* From 1999 to 2009 music concert sales in the US tripled from $1.5 billion to $4.6 billion
* Consumers’ choices growing as more movies are produced jumping from 5,635 films produced globally in 2005 to 7,193 in 2009.
* BLS data also show entertainment sector employment also grew 20 percent during that last decade and 43 percent for those identified as independent artists.
In addition to statistics, the report also lists many of the case studies that we’ve covered here at TorrentFreak, from Paulo Coelho to Louis CK.

n large part, the report is meant to counter the entertainment industry claims that their businesses have been ruined by piracy, and that the Internet has to be monitored and censored.
“Unfortunately, it feels like much of the debate about copyright law over the past few decades has been based on claims about the state of an industry that simply don’t match up to reality,” the report reads.
“Rather than decrying the state of the entertainment industry today and seeking new laws to protect certain aspects of the industry, we should be celebrating the growth and vitality of this vibrant part of our economy — while consumers enjoy an amazing period of creativity.”
“We hope that this report will help shift the debate away from a focus on a narrow set of interests who have yet to take advantage of the new opportunities, and towards a more positive recognition of the wide-open possibilities presented by new technologies to create, promote, distribute, connect and monetize. We’re living in a truly amazing time for the entertainment industry, and it’s time that our national debate reflects that reality.”
Let’s hope so.