Pinterest's Hype Bubble Has Burst, And Now It Is Actually Losing Users

After its growth slowed in March, it looks like photo-sharing/collecting site Pinterest is actually losing users in April.

Most Pinterest users sign-up to the site using their Facebook accounts, and AppData, which monitors how often users of third-party apps and Web sites interact with Facebook, says the number of Facebook-connected Pinterest users has declined precipitously the past 50 days.

Monthly active users are down from 11.3 million on March 1 to 11.15 million on April 1 to just 8.3 million today.

Here's a chart showing the 3/21 to 4/20 portion of this 25% decline:

That chart probably isn't as scary as it looks for Pinterest. The first three months of this year saw an explosion in coverage of Pinterest, according to Google Trends:

That coverage likely motivated a lot of try-out-the-latest-hot-thing types to try Pinterest during February and March. Many of those people seem to have decided the site is not for them.

The good news for Pinterest is that the reason the site started getting so much coverage at the beginning of this year was that it had become incredibly popular, very fast without much coverage from the media or buzz from early adopters.

The story of how I first heard of Pinterest is a common one. My wife, a nurse, started using it after her mother, from Florida, told her about it.

Our guess: Pinterest will continue shedding try-out-the-latest-hot-thing types and then start growing again, the way it used to: through word-of-mouth.