Dude! The Battle to Become the 'Male Pinterest'

Matt Bruce, a 27-year-old education administrator from San Diego, likes beer, whiskey, and backpacking gear. He also likes the Internet. About a year ago, Bruce came across a website called MANteresting, a social network for men that resembles Pinterest, the hugely popular photo-sharing platform. Both sites feature interfaces with a grid of images and allow users to create collections of photos in preset categories. Pinterest focuses on fashion, fingernail art, and wedding decorations; users “pin” images to their “board,” which can then be viewed by others. MANteresting (tag line: Interesting. Man. Things.) leans toward muscle cars, women in bikinis, and bacon pancakes; members “nail” things to their “workbenches.” Since joining, Bruce has created 22 workbenches using 671 nails. “I have benches full of future travel destinations, clothing styles I like, and cool things I want to buy and add to a man cave,” he says. “MANteresting connects me with images that tell a story of who I am and who I want to be.”

Since its launch three years ago, Pinterest has become the third-most-popular social network in America, behind Facebook and Twitter, with more than 40 million users, 83 percent of them women, according to Engauge, a digital marketing agency. Essentially an enormous online girlie scrapbook, it has a highly dedicated membership: The average user is on the site for 89 minutes a month, compared with 21 minutes for the average Twitter user. Its popularity has inspired a number of imitators, including such sites as Pinspire and StylePin. Inevitably, testosterone-laden clones have popped up, hoping to capture the guys out there like Bruce, who really want to pin but aren’t interested in Pinterest’s feminine charms. In addition to MANteresting, there’s Dudepins (“Cool Stuff for Guys”), PunchPin (“The Site for Men and Manly Interests”), Gentlemint (“A Mint of Manly Things”), and Dartitup (“Man Up, Sign Up, Pin Up”).