The Most Pinteresting People in the World
The most popular people on Pinterest aren’t famous celebrities or pop-culture icons. In fact, they don’t even want you to know them.
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The second most popular account on Pinterest belongs to an interior decorator named Maryann Rizzo. She’s followed by 9.6 million people, has posted 99,000 pins and keeps up nearly 300 boards, which feature bright colors and sparkles in equal doses. She runs a bare-bones blog with pictures of pretty things she hopes will “inspire YOUR style!” And according to her Pinterest profile photo, she has bangs.
This is about all you can find out about Rizzo, despite the fact that she claims more Pinterest fans than Martha Stewart’s Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest followings combined. Rizzo is not famous, nor does she particularly care to be. She shares minimal personal details online and, like fellow top pinners contacted for this story, declined an interview, citing a desire to maintain her privacy.
On other social-networking sites, the most-followed members read like the guest list for Vanity Fair’s Oscar party. There’s Bieber, Miley and the rest of the red carpet crew. But Pinterest, the online scrapbook that showcases pictures of domestic bliss for an estimated 70 million members, is dominated by women who are mostly unknown, even to their followers.
According to one third-party ranking, which aligns with other sources, the twenty most popular pinners, who all have more than 4 million fans, include a hairdresser from Utah, a grandmother from Tennessee, a freelance photographer and the mother of Pinterest’s CEO. They’re joined by a woman who goes only by “Evelyn~” and uses, as her profile photo, a shot snapped in the front seat of her car. There’s the brunette in a black mask who runs the kids’ store HappyHippoz.com, as well as a twenty-something from San Antonio with a Led Zeppelin lyric as her bio. (These last three either denied my interview requests or ignored them.) Of course, Internet-famous lifestyle bloggers are also in the mix, but not in the numbers you might expect.
These social media “Pinomenons” differ from most Internet celebrities in a few key ways. First, they are not celebrities. And second, for the most part, they didn’t hound the spotlight with so many self-promotional posts and “#followforfollow” traffic schemes. Instead, in many cases, popularity was handed to them, without warning, by Pinterest itself.
“I woke up one morning and went from 35,000 followers to 3 million,” recalls one of the top pinners, who asked not to be identified, citing privacy concerns. “I have no answer as to how that happened.”
Ditto for Bekka Palmer (30,000 to 9 million followers in about 6 months), Stephanie Brinkerhoff (6,000 to 5 million in a matter of three months) and “Veanad” (who hit 6 million in a season).
The story of how these (mostly) women won a jackpot they never entered is one that reveals how conference room strategizing in a social media startup’s early years can have lasting and meaningful consequences for its members’ lives. What might have been for Pinterest a temporary experiment — a way of recommending accounts to solve an onboarding headache or high bounce rate — has, for some Pinterest users, persisted for years as a source of income, bewildering attention and uncertainty.
Veanad (pictured above) is the pseudonymous “pin-name” used by a 23-year-old whose millions of fans place her in Pinterest’s top 15. She’s thus far shielded her real identity from her followers, but she agreed to share more about life as a popular pinner over coffee near Columbia University, where she’s pursuing a master’s degree in architecture. Though I’d never even seen her picture, Danaë Vokolos, who gave permission to use her real name, was easy to spot: She perfectly matched her monochromatic pins. The slim brunette had on black boots, black pants, black sweater, black coat, black-and-white scarf and off-white nail polish in a color called “Funny Bunny.”
“Thanks for asking me!” she says when I inquired about her manicure’s hue. “I’m typically the one asking people.”
Vokolos’s account of her follower explosion tracks closely with the experience of other influential pinners. She joined Pinterest in 2011, as a freshman in college, to save clothes and furniture she coveted — all minimalist accessories in varying shades of black, white and gray that Mies van der Rohe would have admired. Then one day that fall, Pinterest plucked her boards from oblivion and suggested her account as one for new members to follow. Within a few months, her fans multiplied to the millions. And then just as abruptly, the growth stopped when Pinterest changed tack. A spokeswoman for the site confirmed that in its “early days,” since “the group of Pinner [sic] signing up was a smaller pool, there was a smaller, static list of recommended content curators based on certain interests.”
“Veanad” got attention. Pinterest, in turn, solved a basic problem faced by any site that relies on us to feed it content: highlighting design-savvy pinners like Vokolos ensured fresh members immediately saw appealing pictures and model pinning behavior that Pinterest hoped they would emulate.
The sudden spotlight baffled the people who were picked. “It was rather overwhelming because I’m a fairly private person,” says one individual with a top account, who asked not to be quoted by name.
“I’m a nobody,” says Vokolos. “I didn’t try to make it happen. I was just in the right place at the right time.”
Perhaps inadvertently, Pinterest gave these pinners a valuable asset — a captive audience—that they’ve been able to cash in on since. Vokolos, hardly the exception, says she can pay her Manhattan rent with the money she earns through Pinterest. She’s been hired by brands such as Nars, Mr. Porter and Sevenly to share products of her choosing on her boards. Often, using affiliate links tracked by the company RewardStyle, she’ll earn a commission off of accessories she posts that her followers later buy. There have been fashion week party invitations and offers for free clothing. Other pinners say their prominence has helped feed their main careers, be it hairdressing or portraiture. Bekka Palmer, a Brooklyn-based photographer, was paid to fly to Disneyland with her friends in exchange for posting pictures of her trip.
Though Vokolos negotiates all her own deals so she can keep full control over what appears under the Veanad name, a suite of companies, including HelloSociety and Storylark, now exist to help brands inject promotions into popular pinners’ feeds. HelloSociety, for example, sells access to what it claims is an “exclusive group” of over 350 Pinterest “influencers.”
For Vokolos, the extra money is welcome but also a source of internal conflict. She makes more on Pinterest than at her two $12-an-hour on-campus jobs, affording her a level of financial independence that she wouldn’t have otherwise. But the academically minded grad student, who studied ancient Greek and wrote her college thesis on ancient Thesmophoria festivals, also worries that it’s too easy and too commercial.
“To think about the money I’ll be making when I first graduate compared to what I make off a pin, it just devalues things. Why would you go for a Ph.D. or master’s now if you can be a blogger and make money by showing off these beauty products?” she says. “There’s something about it that feels like, ‘What’s going here?’”
Pinterest also has its misgivings. Even as the site has sought to make money off its popularity, it has laid down a patchwork of often inconsistent-seeming rules that limit its users from profiting off their followings. Referral links that pay a commission, such as RewardStyle or ShopStyle, are a-OK. But Pinterest prohibits getting paid for pins — even, presumably, if the pinner gets to choose what items to post and when to delete them. The site seems keen to reserve this particular privilege for itself. Earlier this year, it launched “Promoted Pins,” a way for Pinterest to charge companies for placing pins in users’ feeds. Members aren’t allowed to do so, explained a Pinterest spokeswoman, because the company “want[s] Pins to represent authentic interests — not just things sold by the highest bidder.”
Several pinners quietly admitted to making money off their enormous followings but declined to share more on the record. They’re confused about what Pinterest does or doesn’t allow. And since they rely on the site for extra income, they fear saying the wrong thing could get their accounts closed, banned or purged of their followers.
With no consistent way (or incentive) to disclose paid deals, the lack of transparency filters down to pinners’ followers. Sponsored posts on Pinterest often seem to fall short of what the Federal Trade Commission’s disclosure rules require, where even the pithiest paid posts are meant to have some form of “#ad” or “#sponsored” disclaimer. Earlier this year, the FTC chastised Cole Haan for running a Pinterest contest under the hashtag “#WanderingSole” that, the agency argued, failed to highlight the financial incentive. Cole Haan escaped with a warning, as the FTC admitted that it had not “explicitly addressed whether a pin on Pinterest may constitute an endorsement.”
For the time being, sussing out pinners’ financial arrangements is often guesswork at best. The board of images Palmer was hired to create for Disney is titled, “Find Your #DisneySide” and liberally drops the hashtag, but there’s no obvious reference to money changing hands. Want to know if you’re being pitched to on Pinterest? You can hope someone discloses their brand “collaboration.” Your best bet is often just to scan links for references to “rstyle.me” or “hardpin.com” — clues someone’s seeking a commission. Pinterest’s ban on pay-to-pin practices — which is more restrictive than, say, Twitter or Instagram’s—may contribute to the confusion by dissuading Pinners from coming clean about what they get paid to do, for fear of losing their accounts.
Even if they didn’t have to grow their followings the organic way, profit-making pinners know better than to inundate their fans with ads. They’re meticulous about populating and pruning their accounts. Vokolos says she can spend three to four hours a day searching the web for pin-worthy pictures, and prides herself on introducing new images rather than recycling what’s already on Pinterest. Others regularly reshuffle hundred of pins at a time to different boards, or alphabetize their boards, or do scheduled maintenance to eliminate broken links and sold-out items. (“I treat it as a job these days,” wrote pinner Kathy Myers in an email).
They expect their Pinterest pages, like the meals and flower arrangements pictured on them, to be in total harmony.
“If you go to my ‘Coveting’ board, I’m very strict about how I’m only going to pin things when models are not wearing them, so it’s free-floating clothing or accessories. They all have to have a generally lightly colored background, but it can’t just be stark white,” says Vokolos. “I may see thousands of images a day and I’ll pin two.”
Pinterest’s hierarchy of users has remained surprisingly unchanged in the three years since the company put people like Vokolos at the top of the heap. The only big-name brand in the top 20 is, of all things, L.L. Bean.
Though many top pinners’ success might be an artifact of Pinterest’s early interventions, there’s something fitting about the site’s reigning members: on the whole, they’re as average as the fantasies that play out on Pinterest.
The site captures our aspirations rather than our activities, and the dreams we share with it are modest on the whole. Meander through Pinterest’s boards, pins and feeds, and you’ll find wishful thinking that centers not on outsized achievement or unattainable heights of glamour, but a yearning for something far simpler. We fantasize about making our beds and arranging our bookshelves. Finding a winter hat and pairing belts. Writing with better penmanship. Baking. Knitting. Cleaning. Drawing. What makes Pinterest’s superstars special is precisely that they’re ordinary.
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All photos by Bryan Derballa/Backchannel
