Pinterest for Sale as Co-Founder joins Google

Well, it looks like the market for social media analytics has gotten a little less crowded, for now at least: the Pinterest analytics startup PinReach – which had originally been called PinClout until a cease & desist from Klout forced it to change its name – has just put itself up for sale on Flippa. You can buy it now for $10,000, or bid against others to see where you get.
Chris Fay, one of the co-founders, says that the reason for the sale is because he has accepted a position with Google, “and to avoid a conflict of interest my co-founder and I have decided to sell.” Included in the sale is the site’s technology “powering the aggregation and analysis of Pinterest data,” as well as the PinReach brand and domain.
We are reaching out to Fay to find out exactly what his role with Google will be — and whether it will have anything to do with building either a Pinterest-style service, or one that helps analyse and monitor activity on social media sites.
PinReach currently has 22,000 registered users, and claims it was the first of the Pinterest analytic services on the market, launching in early 2012. It got the cease & desist “within a few days” of our launch, Fay writes. That led the company to rebrand and also extend itself from just Pinterest influence measurement to the wider role of analytics. Up to now, the service has been free, “and as such we have virtually no revenue to show,” although Fay does point out that demand for the service is seeing usage numbers continue to rise.
As you can see from the site’s statistics, embedded below, its traffic was on the rise. The falloff in the last day, I believe, could have been down to the site itself going down for maintenance. (It’s back up at the time of writing, though.) Most of its users are in the U.S. and Facebook is the biggest provider of incoming traffic.
While social media sites like Pinterest continue to grow, the number of companies springing up to make sense of the data swirling around in them have been sprouting up, too. One of them, Pinpuff (which says it measures ‘Pinfluence’), recently got bought by the LA-based tech incubator Science. Another, Curalate, picked up a $750k seed round from NEA and others.
With Pinterest referral traffic now beating sites like Twitter, StumbleUpon, Bing and Google (but not Google Organic), you can see where big data might well smell an opportunity.
There are currently 39 sites tagged “pinterest” for sale on Flippa, ranging from straight-out Pinterest clones to those marketing themselves as SEO and Pinterest business services.