On August 16, 2023 Amazon announced that sponsored product ads will now start showing in premium apps and websites, including Pinterest, BuzzFeed, Hearst Newspapers, Raptive, and Ziff Davis brands like Lifehacker and Mashable to name a few.
Pinterest explained how this will work on their last investor day:
When a Pinterest user expresses commercial intent, say, searching for something as specific as green dresses or broader like hiking guides. We send a request to Amazon for relevant ads. Amazon gets that request and sends ad candidates back to us. We then decide which ads to show based on relevance and price blended with our first-party auction. And when an ad is engaged, Pinterest and Amazon share the revenue. So that’s how it works. But what makes this partnership especially exciting is that because these sponsored product ads are designed for search on Amazon, they’re well suited to perform on Pinterest, where we see similar behavior. So now brands and retailers who buy sponsored product ads on Amazon can expand their reach to capture similar commercial intent on Pinterest.
Amazon is pushing it’s Prime delivery hard. In the partnership announcement Amazon said that:
Sponsored Products only appear when advertised items are in-stock, and include trusted Amazon shopping attributes such as Prime delivery promise, ratings, and accurate pricing information
Amazon ads did $12 billion in revenue in as of 2023 Q3. Ads are becoming a huge business.