Pinterest is adding a new ranking model to its home feed in order to display specific types of content more often. Generally, Pinterest ranks the content by using a click-through prediction model in the home feed. The pins a user is most likely to tap on considering the past activity are more prioritize in the home feed.

This model was more for increasing user engagement and not the best for displaying various content types. Pinterest to boost more content types and at the same time keep content recommendations relevant has introduced a real-time ranking system for the home feed known as “controllable distribution.”

Controllable Distribution

The description of the controllable distribution by Pinterest is that its a “flexible real-time system.” Pinterest will make use of its click-through prediction model to search relevant content and then will apply controllable distribution to display various types of content. The controllable distribution may be used to mention that 4% of users’ home feeds must contain video content.

The so-called process is done via a system that tracks what percentage of the feed was video in the past. Then accordingly the system will downgrade or boost content according to how near the percentage is to the mentioned target.

What’s For Marketers?

The controllable distribution model will be adjusted automatically that means, on one hand, the home feed will not get old for users, and on the other hand, it is not really feasible to optimize an algorithm that changes in real-time. Pinterest is on the move to diversifying content in the home feed. It is recommended to diversify the types of content you post to show up in users’ feed.

 Yaron Greif Of Pinterest’s Home Feed Ranking Team Statement

“In practice, these hand-tuned boosts quickly became unmanageable and interfered with each other. And worse, they often stop working over time — especially when ranking models are updated. We regularly had to delay very promising new ranking models because they broke business constraints.

In theory, controlling content on a per-request basis is undesirable because it prevents personalization. If we show each user the same number of video Pins we can’t show more videos to people who really like to watch videos or vice versa.”

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Pinterest will continue investing in post ranking state of displaying content. So this is possible that we may get to see the model applied somewhere else in the future.