Pinterest has unseated Yahoo! as a leading source of online traffic, according to a new report that also shows a drop in traffic referrals across other social sources.

Heavy traffic

According to new data released by Shareaholic, Pinterest has beaten Yahoo! in organic traffic, making Pinterest the fourth largest traffic driver worldwide.

In addition, the company found that Google, Yahoo!, and Bing organic traffic decreased by 15.63 per cent on average since January, which the firm speculates may indicate more people are discovering content through social sites like Pinterest.

“While it is still far behind both Google organic, direct and Facebook referral traffic with an undetermined business model, Pinterest continues to send more traffic each month to our network of publishers,” the blog post explained.

Pinterest’s recent announcement that it removed the invite-only barrier to entry likely helped it gain momentum.

Social size

The growth of the network isn’t a sudden thing; as Shareaholic notes, Pinterest was already driving more referral traffic than Google Plus, LinkedIn and YouTube combined by January of this year, making it something to pay attention to for anyone looking to build a coherent and productive social media strategy.

Slice of data

It is important to note that Shareaholic’s data, which comes from a network of 200,000 publishers using its social sharing and content analysis tools, is more likely to reflect an engaged community where people are comfortable with using social networking sites to perform searches. In other words, it’s more a slice of data, rather than a big picture study.

Marketing heavyweight

As a marketing tool, Pinterest will likely see more visibility moving forward. The rise in traffic also puts pressure on the company to figure out its path to monetisation now that it has all these eyeballs.