Arrival of Pinterest promoted pins, signalling the death of traditional banner ads?

Jacky Yap

11 years ago

Pinterest, which was one of the fastest growing website in the Internet, has officially rolled out its “promoted pins”, which we wrote earlier.

In its company’s blogpost, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann mentioned that “Nobody’s paying for anything yet — we want to see how things go and, more than anything, hear what you think.”

Here’s how it looks like:

Here’s what we know about Pinterest’s Promoted Pins:

They will appear alongside regular user pins in Pinterest search results and category feeds.
Promoted pins are distinguished from organic pins by a subtle “Promoted Pin” tag and information icon.
When a user hovers over the promoted pins, an explanation appears.
Pinterest doesn’t permit retailers to upload their whole stores to the site, preferring that they pick and choose products to feature on inspiration boards.
Promoted Pins can be seen on both the web and Pinterest’s mobile apps in search results and category feeds.
Ads are served based on contextual relevancy.
Pinterest is soliciting user feedback and will also be monitoring advertiser success closely before proceeding with a broader roll-out.

Why is this such a big deal? Launched four years ago, the social image sharing site was one of the fastest growing website in the world: it had 11.7 million unique monthly visitors in January 2011. That’s up from only 7.5 million in December 2010, and 418,000 in May 2010.That’s the fastest growth ever for a standalone site.

However, the numbers have recently slowed down, with most of the growth shifting towards mobile. According to web traffic analytics company comScore, Pinterest had 46.9 million monthly unique visitors worldwide as of July 2013, down from a high of 54.2 million in April 2013.

Perhaps this is why the company is finally starting to look carefully into monetizing their desktop users, before it is too late.

What does this mean for advertisers? Advertising agencies and brands will now be testing the ROI for the advertising dollars for Pinterest. Pinterest is now a new paid user acquisition channel, posting a threat to other new media platform such as Facebook and Instagram, as well as Twitter, which just filed for its IPO.

More advertising dollars flowing to these new companies in the form of a more targetted content advertising (examples: promoted tweets and promoted pin). This will definitely deliver a huge blow to traditional banner ads, which have seen better glorious days.

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