The Straits Times, one of Singapore’s main English newspaper owned by the Singapore Press Holdings, has announced that it has hopped onto the Pinterest bandwagon.
We're now on @Pinterest as well! Follow us at http://t.co/ie3XVJrggL pic.twitter.com/oOajghfC9n
— The Straits Times (@straits_times) February 6, 2014
The Pinterest account by Straits Times was also granted an official verified account by the Pinterest team
For those unfamiliar with Pinterest, Pinterest is an online pinboard that allows you to share and collect images with your network. Launched in 2010, Pinterest quickly exploded in popularity as users around the world uses it to organize their collection into beautiful online boards. At a point, it was one of the fastest growing website in the history of Internet, before popular news sharing site such as Buzzfeed and Upworthy came along.
Straits Times to focus on online traffic
The move to focus its resource to Pinterest shows that Straits Times is leveraging on various online channel to harness Internet traffic where there are huge distributions.
According to data from Shareaholic, Pinterest drove more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, and Reddit combined last year.
The decision to ramp up its online activities come shortly after Appetite Magazine, one of Singapore’s main food magazine, announced that it will be discontinuing its print magazine from February onwards.
The discontinuation of Appetite is hardly surprising, as it relies a lot on advertising to sustain itself. More and more users are going online, causing the decline in its circulation and advertising revenue.
Singapore Press Holdings, the city state’s largest print publisher, has also suffered a fall in advertising and circulation revenue in the third fiscal quarter of 2013 – despite posting an 81 per cent increase in net profit.
We definitely expect more digital news from SPH and Straits Times in the near future, and while Straits Times decide to focus on Pinterest, we can’t help but wonder, are there a lot of Singaporeans using Pinterest?
Do you use it?
Also read: Singapore’s food magazine Appetite shuts down, suffers from decline in print
