Nicholas Carlson over at Business Insider is reporting on an interesting phenomenon involving Pinterest‘s popularity. It seems the number of Pinterest users has been falling since mid-March. Using information from AppData, a site that measures metrics for apps on different platforms, Business Insider is estimating the app has lost around 3 million monthly active users since March 1st.

Carlson speculates that media coverage spurred a lot of users to try out the app who didn’t stick with it. He points out that Google trends shows searches for Pinterest growing at a pretty crazy rate since late last year. It’s hard to sustain that kind of explosive growth, and I suppose, as does Carlson, that a correction of sorts was inevitable. Take a look at the graph and interpret it for yourself:

Pinterest Google trends over the last 12 months” />

Interestingly, if you look closely at that graph, you can see that the numbers of searches for Pinterest began to fall at nearly the exact same time as mentions of Pinterest in news articles began to spike heavily. Could this be a case of Pinterest suddenly becoming too “mainstream?” Are Pinterest hipsters fleeing the app the way some Instagram users are? Will these two groups find each other and create a sharing-app paradise on some platform that none of us have heard of yet? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.