With Rich Pins, Pinterest Begins Working Better With Brands

Pinterest has received its first significant update with how pinned images appear on the website. Called “Rich Pins”, these images that are pinned contain a host of more information right from the originating image site, such as product purchase information or ingredient listings for recipes.

Pinterest has detailed several types of pins that have added information on them, including product pins, recipe pins, and movie pins. But this move is really seen as Pinterest working better with brands who get their products pinned frequently, and gives Pinterest users who see those pinned images better information about where the product can be found and purchased.

This should hopefully also help the issues of some product images being uploaded directly or from a site that later removes the image, making it difficult for people to track down more information about the product in the image.

Pinterest has a huge number of big name brands who were part of this launch, including eBay, Walmart, Sephora, and Target.

While the new Rich Pins don't seem to be directly monetized, it does raise the question of whether we will see these types of product pins somehow result in revenue being earned by Pinterest. They have had a few rough attempts at monetizing that caused pushback from pinners, but as a business model, Pinterest will need to look at how to earn revenue from their business.

If you're a website owner who gets many of their images pinned, you can include specific meta tags to those image pages to have that information included on the Pinterest pin pages. You can find the developer information page for Rich Pins here and test them with the validator.

If you have pins that have been previously pinned to Pinterest, those images can be converted to rich pins retroactively once you have included the meta tag information on the originating pages.

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