Pinterest has proven a strong competitor to other social services, showing astronomical growth around the world. Facebook and Twitter continue to lead, but the alternative social network is fast becoming more and more popular among users.  Apparently the social networking business revolves around images.  Pinterest is a social network geared more to trade and projection products and services.

According to recent data published on Shareaholic, the social photo sharing site sent more traffic than Yahoo organic traffic in the month of August, and now becomes the fourth largest traffic source in the world behind Google, Direct and Facebook.

Shareaholic study is based on social sharing and content analysis of more than 200 thousand sites, which reaches to an audience of more than 270 million visitors each month.

Success story

From May to June, Pinterest traffic service increased by 43.7 percent and in July it grew 15.97 percent. Starting from July to August, Pinterest matured by another 33.33 percent, an increase in organic traffic from 1.38 percent to 1.84 percent. Since May, Pinterest registered traffic more than doubled in size.

The social network brought more traffic than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined in January, StumbleUpon, Bing, and Google referral traffic in June and Twitter in February. Pinterest at the moment has already overtaken resources such as Bing and Twitter.

If the success of Pinterest today is a fact, it is still important to specify that women are mostly present (68 percent of visitors are women) on the social network and they are the ones that lead to that network traffic.

In a report being released by comScore, Pinterest is the fastest-growing social network as of Q1 2012. The network saw 4377 percent growth between May 2011 and May 2012. In addition, users are spending more time on the social site to buy more items and conduct more transactions online.

Google: a distant lead

The top company to attract traffic to a website is none other than Google, followed by Direct and Facebook. Google registered 41.28 percent of visits in the month of August, a decrease from the 46.8 percent of visits during the month of July.

The combined Google, Yahoo, and Bing organic traffic decreased by 15.63 percent since January–part of that traffic is diverting to social sites like Pinterest as people are discovering alternative content.

Yahoo, Bing, and Twitter all saw their share decrease as well, while Facebook saw a slide decrease in share going back to 5.9 percent after sliding above 6 percent mark in July.