Pinning Some Money On Pinterest
Up til now Pinterest, the popular online scrapbook site, did not display revenue generating ads on its site but many businesses have still used it to promote their products. According to Reuters, Pinterest now aims to capitalize on this by releasing tools that will allow businesses to view the number of users that are directed to their products through Pinterest. Called Pinterest Web Analytics, it will give site owners insights into how people are interacting with "pins" that originate from their websites, such as the frequency with which people are clicking on a company's online photos."The goal is really to help websites understand what content is resonating with people on Pinterest.” said a product manager at Pintrest said about Web Analytics.
The new tools are part of the fast-growing start-up's efforts to forge closer ties to companies and build a base for the introduction of money-making features. Only last month, Ben Silbermann told Wall Street Journal that Pinterest is "building foundations to monetize' its service this year."
Pinterest was the 38th most visited website by U.S. Internet users in January, with roughly 30 million unique visitors according to online measurement firm comScore. In Feburary a funding deal valued the three-year-old company at $2.5 billion.
“Providing companies with data about usage is a "pretty clear step in the direction" of monetizing Pinterest,” said Greg Sterling, senior analyst with Opus Research, a San Francisco-based market research firm. “They couldn't really start charging people without some way of measuring the efficacy of the spend," he said.
More information about the Web Analytics tool available on the company's announcement of the feature on the Pinterest blog.
