Dive Brief:
- In a first, the Wall Street Journal reports that Pinterest has announced it would begin selling advertising in the U.K. Up to now it has only sold ads to be served to users in the U.S.
- More than 45 million of Pinterest users are outside the U.S. and the social media platform has made no secret of looking to expand that audience, so the move to monetize international users is not surprising.
- A slide deck meant for ad buyers recently obtained by Digiday offered a glimpse into how Pinterest is selling itself, including attempting to position itself between most social media platforms and search in terms ad budget spending.
Dive Insight:
The move to begin selling ads overseas puts Pinterest more in line with competitors like Facebook and Twitter, which get around 50% and 35% of revenue internationally, respectively. The U.K. has been a hot market for Pinterest with that user base growing by 50% over the past year and its U.K users already pinning two billion images since it launched there three years ago.
The Journal reported that Pinterest’s new president, Tim Kendall, said it plans on increasing its current 10-person sales staff in London, and for U.K. ad sales will focus on consumer packaged-goods firms, retailers, financial services and travel.
One advertising challenge Pinterest faces is poor sales conversion performance. Research from last year by ChannelAdvisor found it lagged behind Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on the performance metric, and even performed worse in the U.K than the U.S. on driving sales conversions.
