Pinterest launches an Explore section for trending topics and ideas; app now has native video player and auto-play videos in Explore section
Matthew Lynley / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
This launch lands three months after Pinterest said it would ship an in-app native video player built on its visual search technology — today's Explore section is where that player actually goes live, with auto-play as the default behavior. It also extends a video ad lineage that started with the scroll-animated Cinematic Pin in 2015.
What makes this worth tracking is how clearly the rest of the coverage reads as a straight line from here: Story Pins in 2020, Idea Pins in 2021, and finally a home-feed redesign centered on a Watch tab for short-form video. The 2016 Explore section is the first time Pinterest treats video as a discovery surface rather than an ad format.
First-order effects
- Pinterest users get a dedicated surface for trending topics where videos play automatically, shifting consumption from deliberate searching toward passive browsing.
- Advertisers gain a new placement: auto-play inventory inside Explore, on top of the Promoted Pin formats Pinterest had been building since Cinematic Pin.
Second-order effects
- Once video lives natively in the app, Pinterest can sell richer ad units against it — which is exactly what happens by 2018 when promoted videos are allowed to run full-screen width.
- Creators get a reason to produce video for Pinterest rather than treating it as an image bookmarking site, setting up demand for the creator tooling that arrives with Story Pins and Idea Pins.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Pinterest's core product identity migrates from curated static pins to algorithmic video feeds — the endpoint visible in the corpus's Watch tab redesign — putting it in direct competition for the same short-video attention pool as social rivals.
- A discovery platform whose feed is driven by trending topics and auto-play changes what gets pinned at all: content optimized for passive viewing displaces content saved for later reference, altering the utility that made the product distinct.
The trend: Pinterest is incrementally converting a save-for-later pinboard into a video-first discovery feed, one surface at a time — Explore being the first.