Pinterest.com, the much-hyped social network that defines itself as “an online pinboard,” announced last week its first steps in translating its service into other languages, starting with French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish. Pinterest is also pondering other languages, including Russian – which is mentioned between Malay and Swedish on the site’s second priority list.
Whereas the US startup was starting its crowdsourcing experiment, Pinme.ru, a Russian copycat, has announced impressive results just five months after launch: a monthly audience of 4.5 million unique users and 250,000 registered users.
“Within the last two months the website audience has increased nearly 20-fold,” claims Fast Lane Ventures, the Moscow-based Internet accelerator that launched Pinme.ru. “The audience is highly active, with users uploading approximately 200,000 images per week and about 500,000 users exploring the site via mobile devices.”
Among the factors behind Pinme.ru’s success is its cooperation with major Russian sites, including the private shopping club Kupivip.ru, the women’s portal WomanJournal.ru, and Aif.ru, the online version of a popular Russian weekly.
Pinme.ru has set for itself the goal of “reaching brand awareness among 90% of Russia’s Internet users by 2013.”
Fast Lane cites data from Alexa.com showing that last month the audience of Pinme.ru exceeded that of Pinspire.com, a clone of Pinterest which offers localized versions in three dozen countries.
Much hyped – and much copied
Among other copycats of Pinterest.com, as recently noted by Techcrunch, are Pinspire.de – from the Samwer brothers, acknowledged master cloners – and Markpic. MySpace has also been accused of plagiarism.
Established in 2010 by Western entrepreneurs Pascal Clément and Oskar Hartmann, Fast Lane Ventures has developed a number of startups – most often adaptations of successful Western models – on the fast-growing Russian Internet market.
Russia’s Internet audience – the largest in Europe – is currently estimated at 58 million unique users over 18 years of age monthly, not counting Russian-speaking users outside Russia.
