Pinterest passes 150 million monthly active users, up from 100 million a year ago

Pinterest revealed today that more than 150 million people use its visual bookmarking and ideas service, with more than 75 billion “ideas” shared. This is a 50 percent increase from more than a year ago, when the company first revealed its usage numbers and declared it had 100 million monthly active users.

More than half of the people using Pinterest and 75 percent of new sign-ups are from outside of the U.S., according to company chief executive Ben Silbermann. And the service is no longer mainly attractive to women, as men make up 40 percent of the users, an increase of 70 percent from last year.

For some, 150 million MAU may not seem like a lot, especially when compared to Facebook and Twitter. But Silbermann views it differently: “Pinterest is more of a personal tool, not a social one. People don’t really come here to see what their friends are doing…Instead, they come to Pinterest to find ideas to try, figure out which ones they love, and learn a little bit about themselves in the process.”

Another statistic the company shared is that Pinterest now serves 10 billion recommendations daily, the equivalent of 3 trillion a year. More than 150 million visual searches are performed monthly, and there are more than 1 million businesses on the service (compared to the 60 million on Facebook) with “tens of thousands” actively advertising.

It does appear that Pinterest’s growth has been helped along by some of its efforts over the past year, such as improving its visual search using the camera on a mobile device, rolling out a shopping bag, building out its engineering team to improve how pins are surfaced at the right time, debuting its version of trending topics, and lifting its affiliate link ban.