With 100M users, Pinterest’s ‘promoted pins’ just became a lot more attractive to advertisers

Everybody and their dog is talking about Facebook and Instagram ads, but with Pinterest finally sharing its monthly active user numbers Wednesday — the service claims 100 million — I expect that advertising eyeballs will suddenly be looking a lot closer at “promoted pins.”

Pinterest is the hugely popular social curation platform that allows users to share and categorize images, or “pins,” online, and it actually lends itself incredibly well to advertising.

Why? Because, as the company itself argues, users are oftentimes saving and collecting pins of items that they eventually want to buy.

And while Pinterest has only started to get serious about its advertising push in the past 12 months, there is clearly a huge opportunity for brands to be a part of that as it matures.

Now that advertisers have the transparent 100 million user number to work with, it’s likely that they’ll be taking a second look at promoted pins — assuming they’re not allocating marketing dollars there already.

Pinterest this week teamed up with fashion retailer Topshop to create a color palette tool based on saved pins, and in May it announced a new platform for developers to help them build apps that would “bring pins to life.”

As we reported at that time, “Pinterest could further enhance its advertising efforts with promoted pins and its ads API by using user data derived from these third-party sites.”

The idea behind ads on Pinterest is that they blend in seamlessly with the rest of the content in the same way that native ads do on services like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In other words, promoted pins are designed to be non-intrusive, and that’s very attractive to marketers that want to be active across all streams of social media.

With a fresh round of funding in March pushing Pinterest’s valuation north of $11 billion, and some describing its loyal user base as “addicts” — not to mention speculation as to a possible IPO — it seems that the platform’s best days are ahead of it.

That’s sadly something that can’t be said about all so-called tech unicorns today.