Almost everyone ends up on Pinterest wondering how to maximize the space in their small living room, what to cook with leftovers in the fridge on the 29th, what trendy hairstyle they can wear to a wedding or some ideas for their next tattoo. Many of these people wouldn’t consider themselves Pinterest “users.”. He just got there from Google, saved a few photos and even forgot his name.
Nor is Pinterest talked about much in general internet gossip. It doesn’t have a whimsical owner or an algorithm that has been accused of radicalizing anyone Nor are managers subpoenaed to testify before Congress. It’s a social network that no one remembers choosing.
And yet there were not so many people inside it: it already has 640 million people a month, its record, and among these users more and more young people. It does just over $1.1 billion in shipments per quarter and is growing at around 20% annually. The only thing he doesn’t have is the stock market, which has stripped him of half his value in twelve months. Pinterest works better than ever but apparently almost no one noticed. Not even their investors. Or maybe the story is more complicated.
People who are still using Pinterest
- Short answer: More people than ever.
- long answer: Lots of people, but few from the market where Pinterest makes real money.
Only 106 of its 640 million users are in the US and Canada, where they are growing by 4%. Europe totals 157 million. Rest of the world, 377, and it is growing the most: 15%.
The problem is that income goes just the opposite. North America contributed 880 of the 1,180 million for the quarter, 75% of billings.
- Each user in North America generates $8.30 per quarter.
- Each European user, $1.35.
- And $0.23 from the rest of the world.
For Pinterest, one user in the US is equivalent to 36 users outside of North America and Europe. And it’s the 36 that are growing the most. That’s another problem.
Another change is generational. Recipe, craft and wedding board platform cuquis Generation Z now makes up more than half of users. The question was whether the audience would be valuable to advertisers. In September, the company said that a Generation Z user in the US already makes more or less the same Millennium.
And they keep coming up with the same reasons why Pinterest doesn’t create papers: It’s not exactly a social network. It does not require you to publish, follow or discuss anyone.. You go to see what to cook, how to decorate the living room, what to wear, what to buy.
It’s more of a visual search engine than the “public square” concept of traditional social networks, and no one goes there looking for problems. The company itself says that most of its users come to buy what advertisers want: people want to get cards, not party extremists.
Why you make money, and how
It depends on what accounting you look at.
- In adjusted terms, Pinterest generated EBITDA of 311 million in the last quarter with published data (which runs from April to June) and expects to end the year with margins close to 30%. It generated 582 million in free cash flow in the first half.
- In accounting results, however, Palm: 47 million in the second quarter and 74 in the first. The difference is almost entirely employee share compensation, which totaled 324.5 million in the quarter, more than 27% of revenue. It comfortably generates cash, but distributes a large portion of what it earns in shares. Bread for today…
This explains what he does with the box. It bought back more than $2 billion in shares this year, partly to offset the decline in those same employee shares. It did so with the support of Elliott, the activist fund, which invested 1 billion in convertible bonds in March.
What’s most interesting about its net results is that, through 2023, Pinterest only made money in the fourth quarter (thanks to the Christmas campaign) and lost money the rest of the year. Only in 2024 and 2025 can it be profitable almost every quarter. And that’s why 2026 is painful, because it puts the company back into its old patterns.
The IPO was not an operating loss in 2019, Pinterest simply increased the amount of stock compensation its employees earned. The extraordinary tax benefit for 2024 is an accounting note: it recognized deferred tax assets that it could not use earlier, not reflecting that the business took a leap.
Additionally, the advertising business showed two cracks this year:
- The first is reliance on large retailers. Trump’s tariffs have led big chains to cut back on ads to protect their margins, and Pinterest relies more on them than its rivals, especially in categories like furniture and decor. The next quarter was rather weak, and the stock fell 17% in one day, to its lowest level since 2020.
- The second came from Europe. In 2025, Asian cross-border sellers, driven out in part from the US, moved their advertising to Europe and Pinterest picked it up. This year, new European restrictions against the same sellers, starting with Shin, Temu and AliExpress, have removed it.
And so on in 2025 and 2026 Pinterest’s bottom line is largely decided by decisions on both sides of the Atlantic, in Brussels and Washington, but not in its offices.. Added to this is a long-standing problem: In three years, Pinterest has increased the number of clicks it sends to advertisers, but not its revenue: It sends traffic that doesn’t charge its price. By the end of 2025 ad impressions have increased by 41% while cost per ad has decreased by 19%.
Almost all measures and changes made this year are aimed at closing that gap:
AI, pit and crack
Bill Ready, CEO of Pinterest since 2022, presented AI as a “clear accelerator”. According to him, Learn from something no one else has: People have been saving and organizing what they love for years. Instagram has had similar functions for years, though not as focused as Pinterest.
It’s also fair to say that Pinterest has been able to optimize in some way before almost everyone else. Instead of paying for OpenAI or anthropomorphic models, it’s retraining open models like Alibaba’s Qwen3-VL with its own data. They save more than 90% compared to a closed option.
The problem is what the AI ​​is doing with the product. Both users and artists have been complaining for months that to feed Filled with AI-generated images, and images of automated restraint signs as “made with AI” hand-drawn more than ten years ago.
Pinterest has responded with new tags and a control to see less synthetic content, and maintains that it’s only a small portion of what’s shown to users. But in January it cut about 15% of its workforce to focus on AI. Of course, they were not the only ones to make such moves.
The gist is that PThe epitome of an AI that learns from human tastes while its catalog is full of images that no human created. And apparently almost no people like them.
There are worse threats on the horizon. Almost all of Pinterest’s business thrives on the pre-purchase moment, the moment when someone already knows they want something but doesn’t yet know exactly what they want.. This is an area that chatbots want to take over: If someone can recommend three specific chairs that fit your living room and your budget, boards will do. Scroll A father and a mother lose money out of hundreds of options. Pinterest actually launched its own shopping assistant to try to prevent someone else’s chatbot from winning. The question is whether it will come before someone with more users and more GPUs.
What is the discount in the market?
In the face of these doubts, the stock market has been putting pressure on Pinterest for some time. In August, for example, Pinterest beat forecasts and still couldn’t avoid another drop. The stock lost 8% after the results as the company expected a slowdown in growth this quarter. It fell another 9% in September, when the CEO admitted that international business “will hurt before it improves.”
With perspective, the picture is even stranger. It went public at $19 in 2019, reached 90 in 2021, and is around 23 today. It earns almost four times as much since then but costs more or less the same. A little less, actually. It is listed as a mature company when in reality it is doubling in size.
No one doubts that people continue to access Pinterest and even, one way or another, more and more people are doing so. The main doubts facing the market are three:
- That Pinterest really manages to monetize outside of the US, where it’s growing the most.
- Stop relying so much on tariff wars and other people’s regulations.
- And that AI doesn’t degrade is what sets it apart from other networks.
Pinterest has solved the problem that kills almost all social networks in the graveyard: that People come back without needing to urinate. But there’s one that’s both easier and harder to sell to investors: how much each visit is worth.
Featured Image | Xataka with the Magnificent
In Xataka | There is a generation who are working for free as documentaries of their own lives: they are not influential but they act as if they were.
