How Pinterest is wooing more male users

It’s no secret that Pinterest has a problem attracting male users. With a user base more than 70 percent female, according to comScore data from June, it remains the most gender imbalanced of the major platform players.

While over-indexing on women has been a selling point for Pinterest’s ad sales team, the company also recognizes it needs to become more bro-friendly if it’s to ever reach the scale it hopes to achieve. Some have said that the gender imbalance is self-perpetuating; a predominantly female user base results in mostly female-oriented pins, leaving men to feel that the experience does not speak to their interests.

“If you pull up Pinterest and go into any content section, you will see purses, dresses and women’s shoes because women are the user base,” DigitasLBi’s vp of social and content strategy, Jill Sherman, said in a previous interview. “When 70 percent of the users are female, then 70 percent of the content is going to be female-oriented.”

To that end, Pinterest is planning on making the sign-up process more welcoming for first-time male users, Pinterest’s head of partnerships, Joanne Bradford, said Thursday at the Digiday Platform Summit. Instead of being inundated with, say, women’s fashion items when they first sign on, male users would see items more stereotypically catered to their gender.

Watch Bradford address Pinterest’s “dude problem” and how Pinterest users are reacting to the platform’s ad rollout in the following video, filmed at the summit.

The View from Pinterest from Digiday on Vimeo.

https://digiday.com/?p=84222

More in Media

Media Briefing: Publishers who bet on events and franchises this year are reaping the rewards

Tentpole events and franchises are helping publishers lock in advertising revenue.

With Firefly Image 3, Adobe aims to integrate more AI tools for various apps

New tools let people make images in seconds, create image backgrounds, replacing parts of an image and use reference images to create with AI.

Publishers revamp their newsletter offerings to engage audiences amid threat of AI and declining referral traffic

Publishers like Axios, Eater, the Guardian, theSkimm and Snopes are either growing or revamping their newsletter offerings to engage audiences as a wave of generative AI advancements increases the need for original content and referral traffic declines push publishers to find alternative ways to reach readers.