Pinterest Acquires Machine Learning Company Kosei to Boost Product Recommendations & Advertising

Pinterest is upping the game with the purchase of machine learning startup company Kosei in an effort to enhance many of their services such as product discovery, recommendations and monetization.

Kosei helps websites specifically with product recommendations on websites, in apps and with advertising. Using datasets, it is able to reasonably protect what’s a shopper might want to buy next and suggest it.

According to TechCrunch, the possible uses of the technology Kosei brings to Pinterest is pretty huge, and hits many of the problem areas of the social media company.

For an undisclosed figure, Pinterest gets Kosei’s tech that understands 400 million relationships between 30 million products, and the majority of its 10 person team including its co-founders. Lopp says the Kosei team will spend their first 90 days figuring out where to apply themselves across black ops spam deterrence, product discovery and recommendations, visual object recognition, ad click prediction for monetization, growth analytics, and building a machine learning system on spark for Pinterest’s data team.

Pinterest has a huge user base, and particularly active. But their downfall has been in their ability to effectively monetize it, which has been seen with a somewhat lackluster performance with their promoted pins and to their inability to monetize through their pinners, many who work with brands to post their product pins, all while cutting Pinterest out of the revenue loop.

With the Kosei purchase, Pinterest can now more effectively target their advertising, encouraging brands to increase their ad spend when the machine learning algorithms can better estimate what those users are interested in, based on previous pinning and viewing activity.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post

Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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