AI Helped a Major Social Media Company Grow Its Revenue 16% in a Year, According to Its CEO Pinterest also reported that its monthly active users increased 10% year-over-year, to 570 million.
By Sherin Shibu Edited by Melissa Malamut
Key Takeaways
- Pinterest reported strong quarterly results on Thursday, with revenue up 16%.
- CEO Bill Ready said that the platform’s long-term use of AI helped differentiate it.
- Pinterest has been using AI for personalized recommendations and ads.
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready says AI deserves credit for the "healthy" results the social media company reported on Thursday.
For the first quarter of the year, ending March 31, Pinterest's global revenue was $855 million, a 16% year-over-year increase, while global monthly active users increased 10% year-over-year to 570 million users. In the U.S. and Canada, revenue grew by 12% to reach $663 million.
"Our business, including our top-line revenue growth, remains healthy," Ready stated on an earnings call.
Ready said that Pinterest's use of AI to tailor the user experience helped set it apart from competitors. He called Pinterest a "shopping destination" with 85% of its monthly users tapping into the app on mobile, a 10% increase from 2022.
Related: 4 Pinterest Hacks You Can Adopt to Drive Traffic to Your Blog
"Our ability to leverage AI to personalize our users' experience is a key differentiator and has enabled us to find our best product market fit in years," Ready explained.
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready. Photo by PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images
Ready stated that AI helped drive "deeper engagement" among users through personalized recommendations that factor in more user signals, like what they click on. AI has enabled Pinterest to generate more revenue and become "a vital partner" for advertisers, Ready said.
Pinterest makes money by selling promoted pins or posts to advertisers. It also has a "buy it" button that allows users to purchase products straight from Pinterest instead of a separate site. The company has been using AI in some capacity since 2016.
Ready also said on the earnings call that Pinterest is using its AI to better understand users and predict ads that are best suited to them. The company has seen a 4% increase in click-through rates with these AI-recommended ads.
Ready added that another one of Pinterest's "core differentiators" is its visual search feature, which resonates with the company's "largest and fastest growing" user base: Gen Z (born from 1997 to 2012). Pinterest is tasked with matching search queries with content from its library of billions of pins, and it is using its AI to help personalize search results.
Related: Is ChatGPT Search Better Than Google? I Tried the New Search Engine to Find Out.
Pinterest announced earlier this week that it is releasing new AI-powered visual search tools for women's fashion content in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., with plans to expand to more categories. The tools allow users to search for clothes without words, by selecting elements within a picture, like a pair of shoes or a particular color.
Pinterest was founded in 2010 and operates like a virtual pinboard that users can curate with images, videos, recipes, and other content. It is one of the largest social media sites in the world, with over 89 million U.S. users.
