Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Pinterest dabbles with promoted pins

Not unexpectedly, Pinterest announced plans to begin advertising on its platform in the form of promoted pins. The foray in to advertising is, for the moment, experimental, but it demonstrates that Pinterest has recognized not only the need for ad-generated revenue going forward, but also the huge opportunity for brands to advertise directly on Pinterest through promoted pins.The promoted pins would appear in search results and in category feeds.  Pinterest is promising that the advertising will be "tasteful", transparent and linked to what you are pinning or searching for.

From a marketing perspective, this is fantastic  news for brands, given the monumental popularity of Pinterest and the goal of pinning, ie creating wishlists. Being able to advertise directly to individuals based on what they are telling you they want through pins presents a huge advantage for advertisers.  From a user perspective, however, the introduction of promoted pins is likely to be less welcome as it will change the "purity" of pinterest. Pinterest clearly has a huge challenge ahead of them to find the right balance of capitalizing on ad revenue without alienating its users.

See Pinterest blog post for more details.

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