The 16-person Palo Alto , California operation, Pinterest, is taking the internet by storm. The idea behind Pinterest is quite simple: the site lets users create an online scrapbook that allows them to share the images of projects or products they like with their friends. Just last month around 11.7 million unique users from the US visited the site – almost a third of Twitter.com.

After comScore’s report of the huge numbers the site was attracting as well as the fact that users spend 98 minutes a month on Pinterest and drew in more referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn and Reddit combined – interest in the site increased. There are lots of reasons we can attribute this sudden increase of public interest with – to the tune of 11.7 million unique monthly US visitors.

When Pinterest launched its Action-packed Timeline tools a few weeks ago, the numbers of Facebook users navigating over to Pinterest increased by 60% - and it has only grown since then. For one, Pinterest lets us be ourselves –there is no pressure on Pinterest to be Facebook-like, no posts to share, no likes to get, no mundane status updates. In fact, Pinterest is more like the happy place you can run away to without any concerns.

That is exactly what Dr. Christopher Long, professor at the Ouachita Baptist University, said while talking to FastCompany. “It’s not a place where I have to worry about being bombarded by other people’s over-sharing of un-interesting or annoying daily experiences or about accidentally revealing intimate details of my day-to-day life,” he says, adding, “Pinterest is a place where we can demonstrate… ‘Here is my real self’.”

There is one problem though, and quite a major one from the looks of it – the guys running Pinterest? They don’t know how to make money off of it. Yep, you read that right – one of the best start-ups to come out of the Silicon Valley is unsure on how it’s going to make money from its success.

The dilemma is something which every company is plagued with. Both Facebook and Twitter have pretty much integrated themselves in users lives and are basically run by user-generated content and therein lies the problem. Where would they generate their revenues from?

Pinterest co-founder Ben Silbermann, a former Google Inc. employ is currently not bothered much by it. Hoping to build a service that’s of value is more valuable to him, "My hope is that if we build a service that a lot of people use to plan and discover things, that will be really valuable."

And in some ways it is exactly what Ben Silbermann is delivering since the launch of Pinterest. With more than $37.5 million from big names VC backers like Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer, Jeremy Stoppelman etc, the formula of ‘if you scale it, revenue will come’ seems like an unlikely one to make it profitable.  

Options suggested by analysts have so far been very unoriginal and range from user targeted advertising and data on users’ interests others have suggested that it apply for an IPO, ASAP. For CNN, Dan Primack writes, “When Pinterest begins to think the white lights have begun to burn a bit too brightly, it should begin drawing up its S-1 document. Not to actually go public (that would be absurd), but just to preemptively take itself down a notch. Consider it a long-term growth strategy.”

Despite not disclosing their financial figures, analysts estimate Pinterest’s value at $200 million. With more than 11.7 million unique visitors - what the Pinterest team does in future to monetize the startup remains to be seen.