A Pin is Worth a Thousand Words: Characterization of Publications in Pinterest
Résumé
Online Social Networking (OSN) has become one of the main applications on the Internet. Pinterest is an emerging
social network that is gaining a lot of popularity and mostly focuses on images. In this work, we crawled during several
months the Pinterest website and collected all the relevant information to characterize this social network (e.g., users’ profiles,
publications and activities). More precisely, we investigate the interaction of users in Pinterest such as the type of activities, the
published images and the lexical analysis of their descriptions.We study as well the importance of this OSN to leverage traffic into
external websites. Throughout this paper, we emphasize on the specific characteristics of Pinterest with regards to other welladopted
OSN (Facebook and Twitter). In particular, Pinterest is a retransmission network, in which 84% of the publications
comes directly from other users. This fact and the Pinterest architecture have a direct impact on website ranking in search
engines. Finally, as Facebok or Twitter target social relationships or breaking news, Pinterest has a different nature and is mostly
devoted to leisure and entertainment.