Pinterest enters the world of digital media marketing

Pinterest is the favorite online pin board for everyone and now it is ready to get monetized. Following the track of Zuckerberg’s Facebook’s ‘sponsored posts’ and ‘promoted tweet’ of Costolo, Pinterest which is a visual search tool is now introducing paid advertisements in its website. 

Pinterest was launched in the year 2010 and it allowed all its users (the number crossed the 70 million mark last year) to upload and share their favorite images (also called pins) to their profiles.

This is the first time that Pinterest is introducing something that can generate revenue. 

The initial program where Pinterest started off with the promoted pins was launched on May 12th.  Many major corporations like Kraft, General Mills, Lululemon and Gap piloted these paid ads. They agreed to a 3-6 months agreement with Pinterest to run these promoted pins or new promoted images. 

If you are thinking whether these ‘promoted pins’ is good for your business as well, that completely depends on you.

If we compare the cost per 1,000 impressions, as expected Facebook still remains in the top. Pinterest at this moment is best suited for the top brands.

But being an advertiser, it is important to have a reporting tool so that you can track as well as measure the results. On May 20th, the Business Insights API (application programming interface) was launched by Pinterest that makes it measurable to advertisers and brands. It reports on what is most popular and which images are doing the best and which pins are bringing the maximum sales.

Former Apple Online Store Executives Hired by Pinterest for Key Roles

Pinterest is trusting its future on the hands of two former Apple employees who are from ecommerce background and worked in Apple Online Stores. It was announced on the 10th of June that it has hired Michael Lopp as the company’s engineering head and hired Bob Baxley as product design head. Bob Baxley worked in Apple for many years as design director while Michael Lopp worked in Apple for 9 years before shifting to Palantir Technologies in the year of 2010.

Baxley used to work in Yahoo before joining Apple in 2006 and he spearheaded Apple efforts to bring its online store at par with the modern web standards and after that even helped in the designing of Apple store app. Michael Lopp on the other hand, was part of the Mac OS X Server’s engineering team and later lead the engineering team in the online store of Apple.

Pinterest announced that as they are building a visual search engine, they are happy to have two of the industry’s leaders in their team. While the work of Lopp will be scaling the infrastructure of Pinterest, Baxley’s work involved creating the interface that helps millions of users discover things that they love.

Lopp writes his own blog using the pen name Rand and has written books on software development and engineer management. Baxley has published a book named ‘Making Web Work’.

Earlier this year, a fund of $200 million was raised by Pinterest and its current worth or value is $5 billion.