Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news chefs. Pinterest best day
Speaker 1: in a year. We're currently up eleven percent. The company
Speaker 1: reporting first quarter sales the top down assessments and forecast
Speaker 1: revenue exceeding all street expectations too. Already, pinterest CEO joins
Speaker 1: us now exclusively. It's great to speak with you, Bill.
Speaker 1: What's driving the growth?
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me on. So you know, we're really
Speaker 2: encouraged by the growth on the platform. It's eleven straight
Speaker 2: quarters of record high users, ten straight quarters of double
Speaker 2: disser growth in users, and at the core of that
Speaker 2: is that we've we've really turned Pinterest into an AI
Speaker 2: powered shopping assistant that is really really winning with users,
Speaker 2: especially gen Z that's now more than half our platform
Speaker 2: and our fastest growing demographic pictures is where gen Z
Speaker 2: goes to shop, and that's been really great for users,
Speaker 2: and increasingly advertisers're leaning into that and you see that
Speaker 2: reflecting our results.
Speaker 1: So ad targeting improves, we can see more efficiency, but
Speaker 1: look at getting eighty billion monthly searches, as you say,
Speaker 1: record hive users. What is the AI strategy here longer term?
Speaker 1: Because already you're seeing the efficiency in a flywheel.
Speaker 2: That's right. So we've shared that we have more than
Speaker 2: eighty billion searches per month on the platform, which would
Speaker 2: have been unbelievable to say, even a few years ago.
Speaker 2: And we've done that by really making it a visual
Speaker 2: first platform. So much of shopping is a visual journey,
Speaker 2: and so we are really focused on that. And I
Speaker 2: think in the world of AI, you've had a lot
Speaker 2: of discussion around general purpose winners, but you're also seeing
Speaker 2: specialization play out, and you're seeing that play out and
Speaker 2: sort of consumer versus enterprise. But even within consumer, there
Speaker 2: are a lot of different use cases and we've been
Speaker 2: really focused on shopping and visual search and discovery, and
Speaker 2: we're using AI to power that really based off the
Speaker 2: curation signal on our platform, and we're seeing that really
Speaker 2: really resonate with users. And o those eighty billion searches
Speaker 2: per month, more than half of them are commercial, which
Speaker 2: is a much more magnificant skew towards commerciality then most
Speaker 2: chatbots would have, and that you would see in sort
Speaker 2: of historical general purpose search. So it really has become
Speaker 2: a great shopping destination for our users.
Speaker 1: It's interesting those chatbots had been sort of some of
Speaker 1: the investor anxiety that this is where competition is coming from.
Speaker 1: In visual search, it is Google, it is opening on
Speaker 1: the others. But how dependent are you on are the frenemies?
Speaker 1: Shall we say, for the large language models, you're training
Speaker 1: your own, but how much you're using underlying models of others, that's.
Speaker 2: Right, So we primarily run our own compact fit for
Speaker 2: purpose models. I think this is one of the things
Speaker 2: that you will see over time is there's been so
Speaker 2: much discussion around AGI and general purpose models, but they
Speaker 2: can be really expensive to run, and we've demonstrated it
Speaker 2: through our own compact fit for purpose models as well
Speaker 2: as leveraging open source and retraining that off of our
Speaker 2: unique data set that we're able to see comparable or
Speaker 2: better results at oftentimes less than ten percent of the cost.
Speaker 2: And in terms of shopping, we've shared that we're able
Speaker 2: to get to thirty percent better relevancy of recommendations on
Speaker 2: shopping for our users than what we'd see from leading
Speaker 2: off the shelf proprietary models, which just really gets to
Speaker 2: the uniqueness of pinterest as a shopping destination. And it's
Speaker 2: important to note that what makes our models so powerful,
Speaker 2: it's not just the models themselves. The AI doesn't have
Speaker 2: taste or style. Humans have tastes in style, and so
Speaker 2: people come to Pinterest to figure out their taste, to
Speaker 2: figure out how they want to put outfits together, and
Speaker 2: we're able to learn from that and make better and
Speaker 2: better recommendations that are aligned to a user's taste. And
Speaker 2: the result of that, as usually say things like well,
Speaker 2: Pinterest just gets me. And that's something that we think
Speaker 2: we're doing really uniquely here at Pinterest and where we
Speaker 2: just have totally different signal based on what our users
Speaker 2: do on the platform, and that's what lets us take
Speaker 2: much smaller but really fit for purpose models and deliver
Speaker 2: better results for users.
Speaker 1: It's not just a signal on your platform. Though you've been
Speaker 1: doing M and A talk to us about TV scientific
Speaker 1: and while you're going into performance driven sort of TV ads.
Speaker 2: So we now objectively six hundred and thirty million plus users,
Speaker 2: you know, in eighty billion starches a month, more than
Speaker 2: half of them being commercial, have one of the highest
Speaker 2: commercial intent platforms anywhere in the world. And so far
Speaker 2: we've been making that a really great platform for advertisers
Speaker 2: to connect with users here on Pinterest, but we're also
Speaker 2: looking at how we can make it so that we
Speaker 2: can help those advertisers meet those users in other places.
Speaker 2: Connected TV being you know, one of the fastest growing
Speaker 2: areas of a of ad demand. It's projected to surpass
Speaker 2: linear TV in twenty twenty eight, and we're able to
Speaker 2: help advertisers show more relevant ads that deliver better returns
Speaker 2: for advertisers on TV and users get to see things
Speaker 2: that are actually helpful and useful to them. And we
Speaker 2: showed on this most recent call that when we add
Speaker 2: Pinterest audience data to TV scientifics capabilities, the company that
Speaker 2: we acquired in Q one, we see a sixty five
Speaker 2: percent improvement in the purchases that result from the ads
Speaker 2: that are shown, which is great for advertisers, but also
Speaker 2: just means as a user, when you're watching connective TV,
Speaker 2: you actually see more of thesa say, oh, that's actually
Speaker 2: a product that would be useful for me, and so
Speaker 2: it's a great thing for users too. Thanks.
Speaker 1: It's interesting, it's almost feels like diversification. Briefly, Bill, but
Speaker 1: there's also this moment of gen z and teen bands.
Speaker 1: How do you see that as your role in social
Speaker 1: media right now?
Speaker 2: Briefly, yes, So we've talked about this before, and I've
Speaker 2: been very out spoken on this publicly. When I came
Speaker 2: into Pinterest's CEO nearly four years ago, I wanted to
Speaker 2: prove that there was a more positive business model possible
Speaker 2: in social media, and so youth online safety has been
Speaker 2: very out in front for us. We made Pinterest private
Speaker 2: only for users under sixteen approximately three years ago. We're
Speaker 2: the first and still the only platform to do that,
Speaker 2: and so I've publicly advocated for the fact that social
Speaker 2: media as currently configured, it is not safe for users
Speaker 2: under sixteen. So we turned off social features three years ago,
Speaker 2: and we actually think it's quite an encouraging thing to
Speaker 2: see regulators around the world starting to really pay attention
Speaker 2: to that.
Speaker 1: Do you have to leave it there? Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for talking to us through your numbers and your focus.
Speaker 1: We already Pinterest CEO