Pinterest isn’t just about sharing wedding decoration ideas and food photos. It’s also a way for advertisers to push their “Promoted Pin” ads on users, and apparently it’s been successful at doing that, as Pinterest is promising to roll out this advertising option to everyone in the coming year.

Yesterday, the company revealed some details of the 8-month beta test of Promoted Pins, which — just like Sponsored Posts in Facebook or Promoted Tweets and hashtags in Twitter — allow paying businesses the chance to foist their content on targeted users.

“Promoted Pins perform just as good and sometimes better than organic Pins,” writes the company, which claims that the average advertising pin was repinned by users just as frequently, if not more frequently, than the average non-sponsored items posted by users.

Pinterest also claims that Promoted Pins continue to have an effect even after a paid campaign ends.

This makes some sense, as Pinterest users love pretty pictures and advertisers often know how to make the prettiest of pictures. And many people are already pinning images swiped from ads, so there isn’t as much of an anticommercial backlash; or at least nothing on the scale of what recently happened to McDonald’s Instagram posts.

The question is whether this level of success can continue when there are more advertisers promoting subpar Pins on Pinterest, or when some advertiser blankets a large, untargeted section of the user base with an irrelevant Pin.

“Pinterest provides a look at the interests of an evolving consumer,” writes AdAge’s Don Mathis. “These windows are limited and are ripe for one-to-one marketing messages, not blasts from brands seeking scale and exposure. Understanding and leveraging these windows may take some time. Still, with its active audience, solving this riddle makes Pinterest’s value to brands more a question of ‘when’ rather than ‘if.'”

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