Pinterest Launches 'Place Pins' To Help Users Discover Local Businesses

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Pinterest launched a new product called "Place Pins," to become more relevant to travelers and help people discover new places.

Users can pin certain businesses, such as a restaurant or coffee shop, that they want to check out, and it will be over-layed on a map with its specific location. Users can pin multiple places on one map. We can imagine people using this product to plan a night out with friends or to plan a vacation.

The company said in a blog post that people Pin roughly 1.5 million place every day, and that there are more than 750 million pins of destinations on Pinterest. Thus, there already seems to be strong demand for this type of content on Pinterest.

Pinterest tapped Foursquare to manage the location-based data and a slew of travel and media companies to populate the content.

This new product has huge implications for attracting small businesses to Pinterest. The new Place Pins serve as local business listings, so we could see how this type of a product would compete with Yelp. In terms of major brand marketers, the new product should attract more of the hospitality and transportation industries to the platform.

In Other News …

In October, Facebook referred roughly half of all traffic to the BuzzFeed Network, which includes more than 200 publishers (including The Huffington Post and TMZ). BuzzFeed released the findings in an article, saying that the unprecedented levels of traffic coming from Facebook is likely a result of changes the social network made to its News Feed algorithm that resurfaces content that a user might not have previously seen. (BuzzFeed)

Instagram released its app for the Windows Phone. Previously, it was only available on iOS and Android devices. (Instagram Blog)

Henry Blodget broke an exclusive news story about how Snapchat's management plans to monetize its wildly popular app. The two potential plans to generate revenue are:

• Advertising, in which case users might be shown an ad for every 20-30 snaps that they receive.
• Virtual goods, which is akin to how Japan-based messaging app LINE makes money.

Blodget also reported that the average Snapchat user receives an estimate 20-50 snaps daily. (Business Insider)

In related news, Snapchat's founder Evan Spiegel said 70% of the app's users are women. (Wall Street Journal)

Video has emerged of Evan Spiegel admitting that Snapchat's ousted third co-founder "may deserve something" for his role in launching the now-wildly popular photo- and video-messaging app. (Business Insider)

Tencent, which owns WeChat (a popular messaging app in China), reportedly invested in Snapchat. (TechCrunch)

According to a newly released study from Nanigans, Facebook ads placed one to three weeks prior to Thanksgiving achieve a higher return on investment than those placed at other time periods in October, November, and December. (Nanigans)