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, colorful grid of recipes, photographs of clothes and a shopping list of presents to buy for loved ones.

Yet 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 start selling ads on the site to any marketer, sounding the call that Pinterest is open for business and that it wants to compete for ad dollars with the likes of Google, Twitter and Facebook.

It is the first major step for Pinterest toward building a scalable business. And although its major competitors have been pursuing advertising for years, Pinterest says its strength stems from the very nature of its service, in which users create collections of items they want or gather information about places they want to go — so-called aspirational content.

“On Facebook, you think about friends, and on Twitter you think about news,” said Joanne Bradford, Pinterest’s head of partnerships, who is responsible for building the company’s business. “On Pinterest, you think about what you want to do, where you want to go, what you want to buy.”

Introduced to a handful of advertising partners in a limited test in June, the new ads look much like the other content on Pinterest. Marketers pay to create a Promoted Pin ad, and target it to certain groups of people based on their location, sex and the type of topic they have shown interest in.

Pinterest says early results are promising. Brand advertisers see Promoted Pins “re-pinned,” or shared by users, an average of 11 times per advertisement.