This seems to be a pretty common trend with ad platforms. They start with the "dregs" (ie. diet stuff, teeth whitening, questionable beauty products, guru info products, etc.) and then leverage the revenue and benchmarks from that to ladder up and sell into larger more reputable brands. This is typically the case when there is strong direct response potential from the channel.

Once they gain major brand traction, there seems to be a big shift to catering more towards the big brands who care more about impressions and less about direct response, and who are fine paying very frothy CPMs for it. This typically coincides with a purging of the "lower quality" advertisers whom the big brands don't want to see their ads next to.

Happened with Google, Facebook, etc., so not really surprised to see it happening here with Pinterest.

This is exactly what happened with the platforms you mentioned. Affiliates and other direct response advertisers are willing to take a chance on a new ad platform because the costs are generally low, and the returns can be really good.

Then, once the big brands come to play, the platforms change what ads are deemed acceptable and start kicking off those that started out using the platform.

You nailed it.

Yeah, I mean, it isn't really a secret in the digital media or affiliate space. Since I do this for a living, I tend to keep my eye on where affiliates are gravitating towards with their media and marketing efforts. It can sometimes be an early signal of where to test.

But that totally depends on the brand tolerance for it. For example, if you are a big family brand, you're not going to be an early adopter of Outbrain and Taboola type stuff if your adjacent ads are acai berry drinks, colon cleanse kits, etc. that all link to flogs and fake news sites because the network might be turning a blind eye to quality at that stage of things.

And the way the purging happens is pretty interesting too. Typically it comes in the form of new policies. I forget what the wording was at the time, but I recall when FB started making the shift, some of their policy wording and examples was so obviously targeting recent things affiliates had been doing on the platform it made me laugh. Even reading through their current policy site's prohibited list is pretty much a checklist of every major affiliate category there is.

I've used Pinterest for a couple of years or more to save images of cars, motorcycles and houses and the ads are just as terrible for me. I almost never get on there anymore because of the garbage they are pushing on me. Just not interested and it ruins the entire experience to have to wade through these terrible ads that have nothing to do with how I use the product (or anything else related to my life).

-edit-

The suggested pins for me are just as irrelevant. I spent quite a bit of time marking each irrelevant pin and ad as such, but it didn't seem to help. I finally turned off suggested pins, but ads aren't optional.

I feel like ads on all of the big platforms started out as bad/irrelevant/spammy. They've typically gotten better over time as inventory improves but then again ads are in general spammy by definition.

> I finally turned off suggested pins, but ads aren't optional.

Well, technically you can always install an ad blocker.

I've got uBlock origin, but it doesn't block anything on Pinterest. That brings up a good point... on Pinterest it is hard to tell what is and isn't an ad because the only differentiator is the text below that reads "promoted by...". Everything else looks like a normal pin, except usually the content doesn't make any sense with my feed so I think look to see who is posting garbage so I can unfollow them and usually it turns out to be an ad.

I think if they focus on bringing in more content creators, especially people who produce and find niche stuff and keep working to improve their discovery capabilities, they can forge their space without fear competition from Instagram, which has launched an option To save things. I was recently looking for burnt cement floor and I had a better search experience than using google.

If not on Pinterest it's very annoying searching for things like you describe. A vast portion of the images you find can't be viewed in decent resolution without signing up to Pinterest.

It's so bizarre, seeing how pinterest screams for some sort of machine learning image matching ad system, combined with direct buy buttons for the stuff in the pictures.