Video ads have been on the agenda for Pinterest since the start of the year, and new reports have claimed that the popular social media site has recently started testing the feature internally and with a small subset of users.

Pinterest’s plans to embrace video advertising first surfaced back in January. According to agencies, the photo sharing website was aiming to build an ad experience that complements the platform so that brands would be able to promote video pins that dovetail with the experience. The latest report now says that users are testing this new product, which includes an autoplay function.

Pinterest is not a natural home for promoted video, as its core activity is centred on images and other digital content such as recipes and planned purchases. R/GA Strategy Director Dave Surgan believes the platform should encourage more video viewing to boost the potential popularity of promoted content. “We expect Pinterest to create better experiences with video, and the ad products will follow,” Surgan said.

Cinematic Pins

The new video ads are set to complement Pinterest’s Cinematic Pins, a mobile ad product that enables brands to post looping video ads. These ads are only set in motion when a user scrolls over them, something that the new video ad feature is likely to replicate. Cinematic Pins launched in May last year and was one of the platform’s first forays into video advertising solutions.

Video ads have become even bigger since then, as both Facebook and Twitter have focused their attentions on successful ad strategies while video consumption trends have continued to rise. For example, Facebook users now watch around 100 million hours of video each day.

Pinterest has been developing its own ad technology in order to attract more spending from advertisers. It launched a new software platform known as an API and introduced a buy button into ads last year, so it is no surprise that the site is now venturing into video ads. Sean O’Neal, President of social media buying platform Adaptly, added: “It seems like a great opportunity. Pinterest is one of the most visual platforms on the Web.”