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Pinterest* wants you to know it doesn’t just provide inspiration for wedding dresses and do-it-yourself art projects — it can be used to decorate your man cave, too.
The bookmarking and photo-sharing company released new info about its user demographics Friday to drive home one important message: Men are using Pinterest!
Pinterest says the total number of men on the site doubled in 2014, and its male user base in the U.S. grew 73 percent last year. Stereotypical male categories like “Cars & Motorcycles,” “Men’s Fashion,” and “Geek” more than doubled since 2013 in terms of total pins saved from other sites or repinned within the platform.
Pinterest doesn’t share an active user count as other social sites like Facebook and Twitter do. Instead, the company points to comScore data, which lists Pinterest’s active users at 70 million, up from 48 million in 2013.
The company says a third of all new signups last year were men. That means there are roughly 15 million men actively using the service worldwide.
The new stats come on the heels of a Wall Street Journal article published Thursday that found Pinterest was having trouble finding male users. According to that report, Pinterest’s user base is still 71 percent female.
The social network is, however, trying to raise its appeal for men. It updated its search tool Friday so that people can now filter by gender (show me pins posted by men/women). It’s also beefing up its ad game, so men should soon see more targeted and relevant ads on the service moving forward.
So why does Pinterest care so much about male users? Growth, of course! If the site is viewed as “female only,” it has alienated roughly half of its potential user base. Pinterest is looking to increase its ad load, and that requires more users to advertise to.
“We have a vision to be a discovery engine,” a company spokesperson told Re/code. “While Pinterest got its start among lifestyle categories in the U.S., it’s grown to reach all types of demographics, especially as it grows outside of the U.S.”
The female demographic has certainly been good to the company. There are tens of billions of pins on the service, and the company has a $5 billion valuation — all before flipping the switch on its revenue plans.
You can hear from Pinterest’s head of partnerships Joanne Bradford at Re/code’s upcoming event, Code/Media, in Laguna Niguel, Calif.
* Pinterest executive Joanne Bradford is an independent board member of Re/code’s parent company Revere Digital, but has no involvement in our editorial process.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
