Pinterest to start selling advertisements on Jan 1

New York

A QUICK glance at the digital scrapbook Pinterest makes it seem like the anti-Facebook. It has no stream filled with friends' faces and baby pictures, but rather a sprawling, colourful grid of recipes, photographs of clothes and a shopping list of presents to buy for loved ones.

Yet Pinterest wants to be like Facebook in one notable way: soon some of the slick-looking photos on its site may be advertisements from the world's biggest consumer brands - ads, Pinterest hopes, users actually want to see.

On New Year's Day, the company plans to sta…