Pinboard Is Growing Like Crazy, Adds 25 Million Bookmarks In A Year

Pinboard, the bookmarking site which emphasizes more on speed over socializing has had a remarkable growth story. Without being caught into the social trap, the site channeled its resources towards maintaining up-times and offering a serious paid alternative to Delicious.
Ever since its launch, the site has been queitly adding numbers to its service – many of whom came during the infamous Delicious exodus in Dec 2010. Last year at the same time, the site had 3.5 million bookmarks, 11.2 million tags, 2.5 million urls, 187 GB of archived content. Fast forward 365 days and we have a completely different picture. The site now boasts of 27 million bookmarks, 16 million URLs, 3 TB of archived content and about 12,500 active users.
Unlike Delicious which had absolutely no revenue model, Pinboard had a solid business model that helped the company gain trust and a sense of confidence from its users. Users were willing to pay for quality service, which Pinboard provided each and every day. Delicious loss was Pinboard’s gain – so much so that the company witnessed a sharp spike for few days when Delicious users marched into Pinboard’s fort.

As founder Maciej Ceglowski wrote on his blog, ” If Pinboard were not a paid service, we could not have stayed up on December 16, and I would have been forced to either seek outside funding or close signups. Instead, I was immediately able to hire contractors, add hardware, and put money in the bank against further development. I don’t claim the paid model is right for all projects that want to stay small and independent. But given the terrible track record of free bookmarking sites in particular, the fact that a Pinboard account costs money actually increases its perceived value. People don’t want their bookmarks to go away, and they hate switching services. A sustainable, credible business model is a big feature.”
Pinboard’s story can really be a case study for all the social media startups that still haven’t figured out a way to make money.
If you have a really good product in place then you can always bank upon your users to pay for the services you offer.

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