Last week, Pinterest hit an interesting albeit purely notional milestone – that of becoming a larger source of traffic for publishers than Yahoo – in its journey towards becoming a truly influential player in the world of social commerce. Shareaholics, a developer of tools for web content discovery and sharing, published its August traffic sources report, which showed Pinterest as being the fourth largest traffic source for publishers, behind Google Organic Search, Direct Search and Facebook, in that order.

The notional distinction of surpassing Yahoo aside, what is highly informative is Pinterest’s relevance to social eCommerce as indicated by the Shareaholics blog post; Pinterest’s user base of ~25 million seems to be contributing at least an order of magnitude in per capita referral traffic compared to Facebook’s roughly billion and Twitter’s roughly half a billion strong user bases. One part of this relevance might be related to demographics – the currently predominantly female and educated user base that is representative of Pinterest would be expected to more frequently share and click on visually pleasing retail item images. But the other, more telling part might just be structural about Pinterest the company. Since the late nineties, the monetization strategy for many a website has been to identify ways to display ads to its visitors, and well, Pinterest might just become an infinitely scrollable set of visually pleasing display ads! And even so, while a company such as Twitter believes its value is in its social graph, Pinterest hasn’t even built one of its own yet. Surely an excellent start for a company that raised its first financing round less than three years ago. Now will Pinterest scale up into the kind of effective and far-reaching social eCommerce platform that Facebook hasn’t been able to become yet, only time will tell.