Pinterest has begun dabbling with ramping up ad revenue by letting marketers promote their own "pins" at the popular online bulletin board venue.
The website added do-it-yourself promoted pins, expanding a test of serving up ads in the form of Pinterest posts prominently displayed on search or category pages.
Pinterest also began providing businesses with improved analytics regarding how much interest pins generate and how profile pages are doing.
"Businesses are an important part of what makes Pinterest work," product manager Jason Costa said in a blog post.
Pinterest recently began letting ads be posted in the form of promoted pins.
Facebook and Twitter both bring in money from ads in the form of posts "promoted" to prominent positions in streams of updates at the social networks.
"Self-serve has proven very lucrative for Facebook, but less so for Twitter because they have taken it a lot more slowly," eMarketer social media analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a release.
"Pinterest has a lot of potential to grow this side of its business."
Pinterest last month confirmed that another $US200 million ($A216 million) has been pumped into its coffers to build up search capabilities at the booming, bulletin board-style social network.
The latest round brings to $US764 million the total amount of funding raised by the San Francisco-based start-up and gave Pinterest an overall value of $US5 billion.
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