Last month, Pinterest announced its plans to begin experimenting with its first paid advertising product, Promoted Pins. The first of those advertisements went live for some users on Wednesday.
Promoted Pins operate much like Twitter's Promoted Tweets and Facebook's Promoted Posts ad products. Essentially, businesses can pay to show certain pins at the top of search results and category feeds. Ads will be contextual: A search for "Halloween" might produce a pin of an outfit from an online costume shop, for example.
As you can see in the screenshot below, Promoted Pins blend in rather seamlessly with the rest of the (non-paid) pins on a page. Some users will no doubt appreciate their unobtrusiveness. At the same time, the lack of a colored box, prominent "sponsored" tag or any other marker typically used to differentiate paid content from organic content makes it difficult to distinguish Promoted Pins from normal ones.
Ben Silbermann, co-founder and CEO of Pinterest, said Pinterest is only exploring promoted pins with "select businesses" for now, but we can expect a broader rollout in the near future.