Yes, the company continues to grow by double digits, but the rate of growth is coming back to earth. ComScore's VP of Industry Analysis drew the comparison to Twitter, pointing out that after Twitter catapulted from 4 million to 20 million uniques over just a three month period, it was stuck at 20 million for quite some time, because those new users habits hadn't solidified yet.
And now the startup is scrambling to address legal issues. Up until last week Pinterest encouraged users to "avoid self promotion," which meant gathering photos from across the web to share, rather than sharing their own photos. But many of the photos people share from the web are copyrighted, which open users up to lawsuits. Pinterest itself is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which requires websites pull offending content when alerted. But if users start seeing lawsuits, they won't want to spend time on the site.
So on Friday Pinterest introduced new policies, telling users to only "pin" content they create or have permission to use. Limiting the scope of images users share could make the service less compelling. But lawsuits-- we haven't seen any yet-- would be a bigger problem.
Even if Pinterest is on track to plateau for a while - it's still a unique way to allow people to share images. Copyright issues haven't stopped President Obama from taking to the platform to reach a certain demographic: Pinterest users skew female, midwestern and suburban. On Tuesday the Obama campaign launched eight pinterest boards, including Obama-inspired recipes, merchandise, art, as well as the serious stuff-- information on his policies.
CNBC has also jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon-- http://pinterest.com/cnbcpins/ CNBC pins photos and quotes from interviews -- check it out!
Questions? Comments? MediaMoney@cnbc.com
