Pinterest Announces First Ad Product: Promoted Pins

By Lauren Indvik2013-09-19 19:18:21 UTC

It's been a long time coming: Pinterest, the heavily funded, 3 year-old image and video-sharing network, announced Thursday that it is going to begin experimenting with paid advertising.

The product is called "promoted pins," and it borrows from Twitter's and Facebook's ad products of the same name. Essentially, businesses will be able to pay to show certain pins at the top of search results and category feeds.

SEE ALSO: J.Crew Debuts Fall Catalog on Pinterest

In a blog post announcing the product, Pinterest founder and CEO Ben Silbermann (pictured above) promised the ads would be "tasteful" and "transparent." There will be no "flashy banners" or pop-up ads, he wrote, and the site will clearly differentiate sponsored and organic pins. They'll also aim for relevancy: A search for "Halloween" might produce a pin of an outfit from an online costume shop.

Silbermann says Pinterest is only exploring promoted pins with "select businesses" for now, but we can expect this to be rolled out more broadly in the near future.

This isn't the first time Pinterest has explored monetization. The company partnered with affiliate links provider Skimlinks in early 2012, which allowed Pinterest to earn a bit of money every time someone purchased a product pinned on its site. Shortly after users learned that Pinterest was making money off their pins, however, the young startup severed its relationship with Skimlinks.

Now, Pinterest has investors — who have put in $338 million into the company — to pay back, and a $2.5 billion valuation to justify. With such a large audience base, advertising is an obvious place for Pinterest to seek out revenue. We expect that facilitating ecommerce, either through affiliate links or something more integrated, is also on the roadmap.

Note: An earlier version of this story said that businesses will be able to promote pins at the top of users' newsfeeds. Businesses will only be able to promote pins on search results and category feeds "for now," a spokesperson says.

Image: Kimihiro Hoshino/Getty Images

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