Pinterest really wants to monetize — so much that it will now show you Promoted Pins (ads) in your home feed, the company announced today.
When Pinterest first launched Promoted Pins last year, they only appeared in search results and category feeds. Now, however, the social bulletin board and image search engine will start to slip those into the home feeds for U.S. pinners as well. You can, of course, hide any pin you don’t like, the company said.
[aditude-amp id="flyingcarpet" targeting='{"env":"staging","page_type":"article","post_id":1650300,"post_type":"story","post_chan":"none","tags":null,"ai":false,"category":"none","all_categories":"business,social,","session":"D"}']As product manager Annie Ta notes in the blog post, your home feed “is the first thing you see when you come to Pinterest,” so the company has an obvious interest in putting paid content there. It’s not clear exactly how much time pinners spend on their home feed as compared to other sections of Pinterest, but it’s likely enough that the company would want to take advantage of the eyeballs on it.
Pinterest has been doubling down on its advertising strategy, most recently with the acquisition of powerful product recommendation engine Kosei in an effort to bolster its ability to match paid content with users. Last week it also announced that it would be filtering content based on each user’s gender, a clear attempt to better serve its male users (still a minority). This is critical to Pinterest keeping the door open for as many advertisers as possible.
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