Pinterest will start displaying select ads to users, will take a mobile-first approach
Pinterest will begin to promote certain pins (or display ads) while also focusing more on mobile growth going forward.
This effort to monetize their service comes after almost four years of being around, and according to its CEO, Ben Silbermann, is because “it’s important that Pinterest will be a service that is here to stay”.
So how will it work?
The initial ads will appear in search results and category feeds and won’t be very different from the successful approaches taken by Twitter and Facebook recently. The company has selected on a few brands to work with so as to display ads tastefully and which will not disturb users but instead deliver value in the process.
No, this won’t be an exercise where users will have to deal with a number of banner ads, says Silbermann.
Prior to this, Pinterest partnered with SkimLinks, an analytics company, in order to track traffic driven to a number of e-commerce sites and thus earn referral fees in the process. Even though rumors suggested that the amount was significant, dropping their partnership indicated otherwise.
It’s also the reason why Pinterest had to raise capital amounting to almost $338 million in all so as to hire new staff and scale its product and technology for the user base that it has developed over the last 2-3 years.
Speaking of its user base, almost 46.9 million users were on Pinterest in July with an average of 3.8 million daily visitors, mostly women in the 15-34 category. However, this service seems to be relatively balanced across all ages too.
As for its mobile base, almost 10 to 50 million downloads from Google Play ensures the company will have to take a mobile-first approach.