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Facebook and Snapchat have helped video boom on mobile phones. Now Pinterest wants in on the action.
The search and discovery network launched a native video payer and autoplay videos on Tuesday. That means that instead of posting a link to a video that lives somewhere else on the web, like YouTube, some partners can now upload video directly to Pinterest. That video will then play automatically as users scroll past it.
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This isn't unexpected. Pinterest already announced that it was building a native video feature. Now it's here.
It's still a big update for Pinterest, though, primarily from an advertiser perspective. Pinterest just recently started selling video ads, but it's not known as a video destination. Adding more video content may help those ads perform better — or at least feel more appropriately placed.
These new autoplay videos probably won't appear in your main Pinterest feed, though. The company is rolling out a new search tab that will include videos you may want to watch based on popular stuff on the site. For now, that search section is the primary place you'll see autoplay video, and that will include autoplay video ads. (You could see autoplay in your main feed, too, but only if someone you follow pins one.)
Whatever the setup, it'll be important for Pinterest to get this right. And quickly. Most digital advertisers can already buy autoplay video ads on other platforms, like Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Pinterest is growing quickly all of a sudden — it grew 50 percent in the past year alone — and now it's time to play catch-up on the video ad front.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
