Pinterest Is Experimenting With GIFs
You may soon be pinning GIFs alongside your favorite meals and workout photos — A new Pinterest feature available to select pinners allows them to play GIFs within the platform, a feature that was previously unavailable — See also: 15 Stylish Ladies to Follow on Pinterest
Context & Ripple Effects
The GIF test lands in the middle of an unusually busy stretch for Pinterest: after rolling out its new look and discovery features to all users in March 2013 and taking a "first step" toward working with big brands that May, the company spent late 2013 adding Place Pins, passing Twitter in popularity among U.S. adults, and acquiring machine-vision startup VisualGraph.
January 2014 alone has produced two product moves announced the same week — the Punchfork-powered recipe search engine and this limited GIF playback trial — suggesting Pinterest is pairing acquired technology with format experiments rather than one-off launches.
First-order effects
- A selected group of pinners can now play animated GIFs directly inside pins for the first time, removing the click-out to the source site that static pins previously required.
- Brands, whose partnership potential Pinterest flagged back in 2013, gain a path to motion-rich content on boards built around food, fitness, and style categories where looping imagery fits naturally.
Second-order effects
- Hosting and rendering GIFs shifts more of the viewing experience onto Pinterest's own servers, deepening the platform's infrastructure burden as it simultaneously absorbs traffic from the recipe search launch.
- With Pinterest ahead of Twitter in U.S. adult popularity as of December 2013, richer in-feed media raises the bar for rival networks competing for the same casual browsing time.
Third-order effects
- If the experiment generalizes, Pinterest's core unit — the pin — evolves from a static bookmark toward a natively rendered media object, which would reshape what advertisers can buy against and how third-party sites lose or keep referral traffic.
- The cadence of acquisition-plus-feature (Punchfork to search, VisualGraph to visual understanding) points to a platform strategy where small technical teams are bought to power successive format expansions.
The trend: Pinterest is converting a static pinboard into a richer native media surface through a steady drumbeat of format experiments and small technology acquisitions.