Pinterest queues up autoplay video ads for new Explore tab

A few months after introducing click-to-play video ads, Pinterest is catching up with the times — and competitors like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat — and testing video ads that play automatically.

American Express, The Home Depot, Macy’s and Sony Pictures are among the first brands to test Pinterest’s autoplay video ads, which Pinterest announced on Tuesday.

During the test, brands will pay a fixed price for every thousand times their video ads appear on people’s screens, even if those people don’t actually watch the video. If people do watch the video ad and to completion, it will automatically loop into other videos from that brand.

For now, the autoplay video ads will only appear within Pinterest’s new Explore section, which appears to be Pinterest’s take on Instagram’s Explore section. Explore will featured pins and topics picked by Pinterest based on what’s trending across its platform. That content will also include stuff like non-ad autoplay videos from publishers like Tastemade, BuzzFeed, Brit+Co, National Geographic and Refinery29.

A Pinterest spokesperson declined to comment on any financial arrangements between Pinterest and the participating publishers but said the company will use Explore to develop some kind of business model for the publishers.

About The Author

Tim Peterson

Tim Peterson, Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, has been covering the digital marketing industry since 2011. He has reported for Advertising Age, Adweek and Direct Marketing News. A born-and-raised Angeleno who graduated from New York University, he currently lives in Los Angeles. He has broken stories on Snapchat’s ad plans, Hulu founding CEO Jason Kilar’s attempt to take on YouTube and the assemblage of Amazon’s ad-tech stack; analyzed YouTube’s programming strategy, Facebook’s ad-tech ambitions and ad blocking’s rise; and documented digital video’s biggest annual event VidCon, BuzzFeed’s branded video production process and Snapchat Discover’s ad load six months after launch. He has also developed tools to monitor brands’ early adoption of live-streaming apps, compare Yahoo’s and Google’s search designs and examine the NFL’s YouTube and Facebook video strategies.