Many people emphasize that Pinterest tends to skew female, despite the majority of UK Pinterest users being men (at least in the early years). It also is heavily weighted toward hobbies and interests that are predominately adopted by women – clothing fashions, homemaking, crafts, and manufactured pop culture chief among them. Pinterest also has been known to litter its interface with alienating search suggestions related to PC nonsense like “Women’s History Month” and the like, which may prohibit its growth and adoption as a serious platform, and Pinterest also remains quite an unintuitive labyrinth to navigate.
However, Pinterest’s “pin board” system represents a different way to group and think about content, both in that its focus is visual and increasingly multimedia – and also in that it is entirely organized around target audiences and interests. Pinterest’s “lifestyle” and visual orientation could be applied to organization of more serious topical content in the realm of news, business, sports, outdoors, and men’s interests, et cetera. Users of Pinterest scan the pin boards like a vertical content menu in a way that is somewhat similar to the single vertical column of ostensibly “related videos” on YouTube, so Pinterest or similar alternatives could be a way to re-map the presentation of such content. There are ways (such as Pinterest Widget Builder) to embed a Pinterest Board on a website, which leverages this experience off-platform!
