There comes a day when just about every successful social network eventually opens its doors to advertisers, and today marks that occasion for Pinterest. To ensure the continued success of the site, Pinterest has started experimenting with promoting posts from select groups of businesses. Their founder Ben Silverman, knows this concept is likely to be frowned upon, but he claims the promoted pins will be “tasteful, transparent, relevant and improved based on your feedback.” In this initial testing period, Pinterest won’t be accepting money for the placements yet, but rather looking to “see how things go.” So if you’re searching about the show Breaking Bad for example, you might find some memorabilia from the show on sale that you may really be interested in anyways. Also, the “promoted pins” will be clearly labeled from the others.
This is a major step by Pinterest towards monetizing their service, similar to promoted posts on Facebook or Twitter. What remains to be seen is how cool the site will still be for users once the ads creep in.
How awesome!