Despite Pinterest fatigue, it’s proving itself a powerful social shopping destination

Pinterest no longer has its early luster, but a report by eMarketer shows the platform is a social shopping destination with high conversion rates that translate into sales.

Since launching in March 2010, Pinterest has ridden the virtual collector hype and risen to the top of the Web faster than any platform before it. By July 2012, comScore estimated the total users in the United States totaled 23.4 million. It’s a far cry from the hundreds of millions of users that Twitter and Facebook have amassed to date, but according to eMarkerter, Pinterest has the purchasing power that competing social networks would kill for.

Women tend to make up the majority of users on Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter, and it turns out this demographic has quite a big or buying power. The latest figure from June estimates that as many as 79 percent of Pinterest users are female. For the record, competitor social networks Twitter and Facebook also slightly skew in favor of a more female-friendly user base. 62 percent of Twitter users are women and 58 percent of Facebook users are women.

And according to eMarketer’s report, based on a study by SteelHouse, as many as 59 percent of female Pinterest users in May 2012 (based on 303 respondents) had clicked through Pinterest to an external site and made a purchase. This figure is higher than media company BlogHer’s results, which showed that 47 percent of female users that had made a purchase on Pinterest after using the site. But it’s apparent that Pinterest holds considerable influence over its user’s purchasing habits.

In particular its users are more likely to follow retailers than on Twitter and Facebook, which indicates higher brand loyalty. There’s also a higher chance that a user will make purchases on Pinterest than on other social networks.

The BlogHer study also found that blogs held the top spot for “sites whose recommendations have helped influence U.S. female social network users to make a purchase” in February 2012 with 61 percent. Pinterest followed in second with 47 percent, while Facebook and Twitter round out the list with 33 percent and 31 percent of female users, respectively.

If you want to get more specific about Pinterest’s purchasing power, research firm Vision Critical and Emily Carr University found in March 2012 that in Australia, Canada, the U.K., and the U.S., one in five users purchased items that they pinned themselves. 12 percent made the purchases online while 16 percent purchased a pinned item offline.

Bizrates Insights went deeper to discover the product categories that were most purchased by Pinterest users in the same month. 39 percent of users purchased clothing and apparel, 23 percent purchased jewelry, handbags & accessories, while art, art supplies & hobbies accounted for 22 percent of the purchases.

Despite the rapid ascent to become the third largest social networking site, the hype has waned and Pinterest’s growth is stabilizing. There was one month between April and May, where the number of unique visitors dropped, and eMarketer points to a survey conducted by SheSpeaks and Women’s Marketing Inc. which indicated that more than half of the female respondents were not using the site daily (or at all) and only 30 percent of those surveyed used Pinterest for longer than one hour per day. While Pinterest may never grow to the size that Twitter, Facebook, or even Google+, user numbers aren’t everything — especially when you aren’t in the display ads business. What does matter for Pinterest is click-through purchasing rates, and all signs indicate the platform is facilitating the connection between shoppers and retailers.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Black Mesa: Source mod finally released

Gamers will have a chance to play the classic, original Half-Life with almost-modern technology, thanks to an all-volunteer total conversion

Steam Greenlight, the new initiative from Valve to make independent games available on the Steam Marketplace, could shut down tomorrow and it still would’ve been a worthy project.  Because whatever else it may release in the future, Greenlight has now brought a long-awaited title to gamers’ waiting hard drives.  Black Mesa: Source, the long-gestating total conversion of the original Half-Life, is now available.

The Black Mesa project was born from gamers’ dissatisfaction with Half Life: Source, Valve’s 2004 updating of their 1998 hit.  HL:S implemented better physics, effects, and lighting, but fans were disappointed when it didn’t update any textures, models, or level architecture.  Between the unhappiness players expressed with Valve’s port, the vast modding community built around Valve’s Source engine, and the company’s tolerant attitude towards fans playing with their intellectual property, even Valve CEO Gabe Newell admitted that a fan-made rebuild of Half-Life was “not only possible… but inevitable.”

However, getting the project to completion with an all-volunteer crew wasn’t going to be easy, or quick.  The Black Mesa: Source team announced their plans for a better conversion of the classic in September of 2004, and for years, they had nothing but a few screenshots to show for it.  Wired Magazine put Black Mesa: Source on their Vaporware of the Year list for two years running, joining such anti-luminaries as Duke Nukem Forever and L.A. Noire.

But now, all three of those games have arrived.  DNF was a critical and commercial disaster; L.A. Noire was a modest but ambitious hit.  As for BM:S…  Well, it won’t be uncontroversial.  While most updated ports are just recreations of an original game, the BM:S team decided to “improve” on the original with larger maps, re-balanced weapons, new music, and new voice acting.  They’ve also left out Half-Life‘s innovative Xen level — although they promise a massively-expanded version of Xen is on its way, but it remains to be seen if that will take another eight years.

It’s also hard to say if gamers will be quite so excited about this game as they would’ve been eight years ago.  Although the trailer looks good, and it’s certainly an improvement over the original graphics, the Source engine is showing its age, and making a game from 1998 look like a game from 2005 is rather less compelling in 2012. So far, though, the forums are full of delight, with gamers enjoying both the elegant pacing of the original Half-Life and the self-referential jokes of the mod. It helps that the developers have been extremely open about their recent builds, and willing to change the game in response to constructive criticism.

Gamers are also pleased by the open distribution of the title.  Getting through the Steam Greenlight process means the game can easily be purchased and installed through Steam, but for the more adventurous, the mod is freely available on a tremendous number of torrent trackers, as well as quite a few direct download links. 

It’s impressive to see this labor of love (almost) completed, and it’s equally impressive to see how supportive Valve has been. It’s hard to imagine another gaming company that would not only let fans’ recreation of their game go forward, but actually distribute it themselves.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com