Pinterest, the image curation Web site will soon open its doors for advertisers online. If the plans pursue, Pinterest will be battling head on with Instagram, another photo sharing social network that also share the same plan.

Pinterest was launched in March 2010 and is 6 months older than Instagram that is also launched in the same year. However, though both allowing users to post images online, the social networks target different niche.

Pinterest is more inclined for people who want to share their recipes, fitness regimes, and DIY projects. It allows users to create and share collections of their interest as categorized in "boards." Every visual bookmark is called "pin" that other users can "repin" to share. Currently, Pinterest have 50 million following and this huge number is the target of marketers who will soon be able to promote their products or services in the category feeds.

Pinterest ads to look like artworks.

According to an article by Time, the social media network want the advertisements to appear like magazine ads, unlike the typical online advertisements flooding the Internet nowadays. Joanne Bradford, Pinterest's ad chief in an interview with the Wall Street Journal shared that the Web site's goal is to build advertisements fashioned as "works of art."

With a different approach for the digital advertising scene, the plan is very promising for Pinterest with optimistic investors who calculated the company's value at $3.8 billion though the Web site is running free and generates no revenue to date. On the other hand, the company may be pitted with online photo-sharing and video-sharing service Instagram, which also plans to offer advertising services for online marketers.

Instagram to offer a good fight with 150M active users.

Since Instagram's Facebook acquisition the app increased around 170 million users, with 150 million who are active, it is definitely a larger platform that can offer a good fight with Pinterest especially that all of the users are using mobile.

Instagram is not as consumer-centric as the pinning network, but the advertiser's interest for Instagram ads relatively increases. The company already tested promoting paid posts for popular brands such as Levi's, Lexus, and Michael Kors.

The digital advertising battle for Pinterest and Instagram is yet to start. The question of which among them will get the bigger slice of the market share remains to be answered.

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