Pinterest referrals up two-thirds: Shareaholic

In the 12 months to September, traffic referrals from image-focussed social network Pinterest grew 66.52 per cent across the network of Shareaholic's 200,000 partner publishers.

Figures published by Shareaholic this month revealed that Pinterest was now responsible for an average of 3.24 per cent of referrals in the 13 months from the start of September 2012 to the end of September this year.

This means the site was the second greatest driver of social traffic, trailing only Facebook's average of 8.11 per cent of share of visits and eclipsing Twitter's average of 1.17 per cent.

Both Facebook and Twitter referrals also grew significantly at 58.81 per cent and 54.12 per cent, respectively.

GlobalWebIndex's Stream Social report for Q2 2013, released in September, registered strong growth for Pinterest. According to GlobalWebIndex, Pinterest grew 88 per cent year-on-year, overtaking Twitter's growth.

A blog entry posted by Pinterest CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann last month revealed that the social network was beginning to experiment with 'promoted' pins as a possible form of monetisation, initially involving a small group of businesses which wouldn't be charged to participate in the program.