Pinterest will test advertisers' tolerance for sexy content when it changes its acceptable content user policy to allow artistic nudes.
The online pinboard service currently obliges members "not to post User Content that: is sexually explicit or contains nudity, partial nudity or pornography."
Although Pinterest doesn't take paid advertising, hundreds of brands have Pinterest pages and seed the site with marketing material. Pinterest is regarded as one of the more promising social media marketing sites for e-commerce retailers. Generally, advertisers don't want their promotional stuff to be next to anything overtly sexual or adult oriented.
But the site's users are posting that stuff anyway. (Just type in the words "nude," "sexy" or "naked," to see for yourself.) So now, the photo-sharing service is preparing to accommodate them, the Financial TImes reported.
According to the FT, the online pinboard service will permit more nudity on its site in order to placate artists and photographers who have complained about the current restrictions.
Pinterest is about expressing your passions and people are passionate about art and that may include nudes,” a spokesperson from the company told the Financial Times. “So we’re going to try to accommodate that.”
The time may be right for persuading advertisers that adult content doesn't necessarily have to be a brand-free zone:
- The move comes after the $1.1 billion sale of Tumblr to Yahoo. Tumblr is riddled with outright porn, yet it has already begun ramping up its advertising products.
- Similarly, video-sharing site YouTube has an abundance of risque content and its advertisers do not seem to mind.
- Although Facebook is currently in the process of reviewing its user-content regulations after misogynistic material caused several advertisers to boycotted the site, there is an overall permissiveness regarding sexually provocative imagery on social media.
Pinterest users can tailor their feeds so that they only see what they want to see, giving advertisers a figleaf of deniability: After all, if their brand appears next to nude photos on Pinterest it's only because you, the user, have chosen those feeds.
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