When is a pic­ture worth a $1,000 dol­lars?  When its on The Fancy.

The new social site The Fan­cy is also try­ing to prove they could be worth a lot of mon­ey. Accord­ing to Busi­ness Insid­er, Apple is in talks to acquire the fast-grow­ing social com­merce site backed by the co-founders of Twit­ter and Face­book. Already being called an archri­val to Pin­ter­est, but with a far small­er group of active mem­bers, The Fan­cy works in a sim­i­lar way. It is a pho­to-shar­ing web­site that, accord­ing to it’s about page is, “part store, blog, mag­a­zine and wish­list. It’s a place to dis­cov­er great stuff, to curate a col­lec­tion of things you love, to get updates on your favorite brands and stores and to share your dis­cov­er­ies.” While Pin­ter­est ranked 16^th on Alexa with 10 mil­lion active users so far in 2012, The Fan­cy dou­bled it’s users in two months to 500,000, mak­ing it the sec­ond largest social scrap­book­ing / pic­ture shar­ing sites online. While Pin­ter­est clear­ly dwarfs The Fan­cy at the moment, some believe a David and Goliath bat­tle is about to occur between the two startups.

How The Fan­cy can Chal­lenge Pinterest

Accord­ing to Forbes.com, there is one main fea­ture that The Fan­cy has going for it that may be a real chal­lenge for Pin­ter­est to over­come. While Pin­ter­est is sim­i­lar to thumb­ing through pages of your favorite mag­a­zine or win­dow shop­ping and see­ing items you real­ly like, you still can’t buy the items off the site itself. How­ev­er, The Fan­cy allows users to buy items direct­ly off the site. This allows there to be direct ecom­merce through The Fan­cy as they can take a cut of each item pur­chased through their site, giv­ing it extra rev­enue where Pin­ter­est has none.

The New Cool Kid

For a while, there was only Pin­ter­est and since it was the newest social media advance­ment out there, it was the coolest kid on the scrap­book­ing block. How­ev­er, now that The Fan­cy exists, it is new, dif­fer­ent and in many cas­es bet­ter. At least, that’s what some of the biggest celebri­ties in the busi­ness are say­ing. Kanye West tweet­ed to 7 mil­lion fol­low­ers that The Fan­cy was “pret­ty dope,” and Facebook’s Mark Zucker­berg even set up an account and showed it off to his 102,000 fol­low­ers. Anoth­er thing that The Fan­cy has going for it is the name of the site itself. It sounds as if users are being allowed to see, shop and buy items that appeal to the rich, tal­ent­ed and famous. With the sim­ple but sharp name and the celebri­ty buzz, The Fan­cy is sud­den­ly expe­ri­enc­ing the hip­ness and exclu­siv­i­ty that made Face­book and then Pin­ter­est so pop­u­lar. For now, at least.