Pinterest is the #3 social network in US and a recent study by BizRate Insights revealed that Pinterest is better at inspiring purchases than Facebook.
69% of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they’ve purchased or wanted to purchase as compared to only 40% of online consumers who visit Facebook. Additionally, significantly more online consumers agree that Pinterest is a place to “get inspiration on what to buy,” “help keep track of or collect things I like,” and “to keep up with the latest trends on things that I like.”
Having said that, an opportunity that is still waiting to be milked is enabling Pinterest publishers to start monetizing their pins.
NCR based startup, Viraliti is a pay per click (PPC) advertisement network for Pinterest and essentially the startup wants to be the adwords for Pinterest users.
The PPC platform connects advertisers with Pinterest users and provides a medium for Pinners to monetize their pins while giving opportunity to brands for getting more exposure on Pinterest and eventually acquire more customers and increase sales.
Viraliti runs on a CPC model that is advertisers will be charged for every legitimate clicks. The cost per click (CPC) for a publisher will be decided based on their influence on Pinterest. So a pinner who has more followers and generates more likes, comments and repins on their pins has more possibility of generating a sale and therefore will get higher CPC.
How does Viraliti work?
Brands/advertisers/internet marketers create display ad campaigns and set their campaign description (which actually goes as the description of the pin), targeting parameters(country and interests), CP, total budget and once they pay via paypal, their campaign becomes active on Viraliti and is available to publishers for pinning. Then publishers who are basically influential Pinterest users pin it onto their boards. Publishers monetize these pins whenever their followers click on them. Even when the sponsored pin is repinned by someone, the publisher earns for clicks that these repinned images get.
Viraliti Model
Right now publishers can only monetize on the sponsored pins however soon Viraliti will allow publishers to donate their earned money towards charity if they do not intent to monetize. Viraliti will award badges and have a credits page for those novel users who donate their earning to charity.
In terms of future plans, the startup plans to include interactive games/contest on Pinterest which will enable brands to better engage with users on Pinterest and drive more traffic to their websites, i.e. become a 1-stop shop for all things related to marketing on Pinterest.
The target geography of course is US and the company has raised a seed funding of INR 10,00,000 (~USD 19,000) from Indiatimes’ TLabs incubator. One of the co-founder of Viraliti is based out of New York and takes care of offline promotion of Viraliti in the USA and the team is targeting top Pinterest users to grab the initial traction.
Given that Pinterest has gained so much of momentum, there surely is a huge opportunity in cracking the advertising space (within Pinterest) – though I’d strongly recommend the team to revisit their homepage and seriously improve it (otherwise all marketing efforts will generate low sales RoI).
If you are a heavy Pinterest user, do give Viraliti a spin and share your comments.
» NCR based Viraliti wants to be the Adwords for Pinterest @Pluggd.in.
Link to full article
Your school gets 1 point for each person who registers for Space Race and installs Dropbox on their computer (if they haven’t already).
