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Pinterest is putting its autoplay video ads in a lot more places

Pinterest wants to make $500 million in revenue this year. More video ads should help.

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Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann
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More video ads are coming to Pinterest.

The search and discovery startup, which started testing autoplay video ads back in November, will now run those ads in a number of new places inside the service, including the home feed and in user search results.

Why does this matter? Well, Pinterest users will probably start to see more autoplay video ads than they used to. These kinds of video ads were originally limited to a section of Pinterest called “explore,” but now they could appear in many of the most popular sections inside the app. Pinterest is still calling these autoplay ads a “test,” but that test is growing.

Pinterest’s video advertising business is still new. It just started selling video ads last August, and videos on Pinterest didn’t start to autoplay until November. Now it’s combining those two elements, and clearly wants to compete for video ad dollars alongside other digital players like Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter. Those companies already sell autoplay video ads, and have for years.

Pinterest has set internal revenue targets of more than $500 million this year, and those close to the company say that Pinterest is positioning itself for an IPO. Selling more video ads should help with both of those efforts.


This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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