The idea of a “Pinterest for men” is something that gets thrown around a lot — a few months ago, it seemed like I’d get a pitch for a new one every day. Tapiture is one of the newer contenders, but its traffic numbers suggest that it has a chance at claiming the title.
It helps that the site is associated with an established property, namely humor site theCHIVE. Leo Resig, co-founder of Resignation Media (which owns both properties) tells me Tapiture has its roots as a photo-tagging system on theCHIVE, before growing into a site of its own, where users can share (or, in Tapiture’s terminology, tap) photos of attractive women, cool products, funny jokes, and anything else.
Resig sounds almost gleeful when he describes the chaotic mix of content on Tapiture’s home page as “a shit show.” It turns out that mix is a product of human curation, without which the site would probably be nothing but scantily clad women. (One of the curation team’s other big tasks is eliminating content that’s outright pornographic.) Ultimately, Resig wants to turn Tapiture into “the most interesting homepage in the world” (at least for the site’s target audience): “It’ll rival Reddit.”
That approach is already attracting an audience. Tapiture launched about three months ago, and it’s currently bringing in 26 million monthly pageviews from 1.5 million unique visitors. The average visit time is seven minutes. And the company points to Alexa data suggesting (and it’s always risky to take these kinds of third-party numbers as fact) that it’s well ahead of competitors like Dudepins, Manteresting, and Gentlemint.
To turn Tapiture into a real business, Resig just hired John Ellis to serve as the site’s CEO. (Previously, Resig was running Tapiture himself.) Ellis previously led operations at marketing network Webxu and served as both COO and CMO at ad exchange NextMedium (which was acquired by Brand Affinity Technologies).
Right now, Resig says Tapiture is very much still in the beta stage, but eventually, he wants to build up a business around e-commerce. Resig says he has already seen “male buying power first hand” through Resignation Media’s e-commerce site theCHIVERY, and he thinks the model should be a good fit for Tapiture, too. As the company hires more curators, some of them will turn their attention away from zapping porn and instead “plow through the Internet to find the coolest shit online” — not the aspirational, expensive stuff featured in glossy magazines like GQ, but items in the $20 to $40 range.