Earnings Labs

Pinterest, Inc. (PINS)

Q1 2025 Earnings Call· Thu, May 8, 2025

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Pinterest First Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I'll now hand the call over to Andrew Somberg, VP of Investor Relations and Treasury. You may proceed.

Andrew Somberg

Analyst

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. Welcome to Pinterest earnings call for the first quarter ended March 31, 2025. My name is Andrew Somberg and I'm Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasury for Pinterest. Joining me on today's call are Bill Ready, Pinterest CEO; and Julia Donnelly, our CFO. This conference call is being webcast and we're also providing a slide presentation to accompany our commentary. Please refer to our Investor Relations website at investor.pinterest.com to find today's presentation, webcast and earnings press release. Some of the statements that we make today regarding our performance, operations, and outlook may be considered forward-looking and such statements involve a number of assumptions, risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. In addition, our results, trends, and outlook for Q2 2025 and beyond are preliminary and are not an assurance of future performance. We are making these forward-looking statements based on information available to us as of today, and we expressly disclaim any duty or obligation to update them later unless required by law. For more information about assumptions, risks, uncertainties, and other factors that could affect our results, please refer to our most recent Form 10-Q and Form 10-K each filed with the SEC and available on our Investor Relations website. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release and presentation, which are distributed and available to the public through our Investor Relations website. Lastly, all growth rates discussed in today's prepared remarks should be considered year-over-year unless otherwise specified. And now I'll turn the call over to Bill.

Bill Ready

Analyst · Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs

Thanks, Andrew. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining our first quarter 2025 earnings call. In Q1, we demonstrated the strength and effectiveness of our long-term strategy and remain laser focused on delivering value for our users and advertisers. We finished the quarter with another record number of users reaching 570 million MAUs globally, reflecting 10% growth year-over-year. At the same time, we generated Q1 revenue of $855 million up 16% year-over-year due to the strong performance we are driving for advertisers across the full funnel. We also grew adjusted EBITDA to $172 million as we continue to focus on driving profitable growth while simultaneously investing in high ROI areas to enable us to reach our longer-term opportunity. Before getting into the details of Q1, I'd like to discuss the current macro environment we're operating in. Our business, including our top-line revenue growth remains healthy. This is an indication that our efforts to build a more engaging and actionable product for our users and a more performant product for our advertisers are working. The strong fundamentals in our business are the result of the strategic priorities we've executed against taking Pinterest from a platform with declining users and modest revenue growth a few years ago into a secular share taker with a more resilient business than ever before. Today, Pinterest is a shopping destination with roughly 85% of our monthly active users coming directly to our mobile app, which is up nearly 10 points from the middle of 2022. As we've made our platform more actionable and generated growing numbers of clicks and conversions, we've become a vital partner for advertisers across a range of categories seeking to reach our high intent users and drive sales. In turn, we are increasingly accessing always on performance budgets, which are larger and…

Julia Donnelly

Analyst · Ross Sandler with Barclays

Thanks, Bill. Good afternoon, everyone. Today, I'll be discussing our first quarter 2025 financial results and provide an update on our preliminary second quarter 2025 outlook. All financial metrics except for revenue will be discussed in non-GAAP terms unless otherwise specified, and all comparisons will be discussed on a year-over-year basis unless otherwise noted. Before I get into our first quarter results, I'll spend a few minutes discussing how we're thinking about our broader business strategy. Over the last few years, we've been executing on a durable long-term strategy focused on our key differentiators as a business, including the user commercial intent on our platform, the ability to create a relevant and actionable experience with ads as useful content, and leveraging our full funnel playbook to drive tangible performance gains for advertisers. We have multiple revenue drivers that have allowed us to take share in a competitive environment across a variety of advertiser verticals. The first is continuing to grow our user base and deepen engagement, bringing users back more frequently through our efforts and actionability and curation. As we've stated many times, relevant ads can be great content for our users and additive to the user experience. And as such, we see room to further grow our ad load as we increase monetizable supply through user commercial intent and more efficient ad delivery. Second, we're continuing to drive improved performance throughout the full funnel from spotlight ads on the awareness side to rapid product velocity, especially in the lower funnel with the launch of direct links, CAPI, and most recently, Performance+, which is in the early days of multi-quarter and multi-year advertiser adoption. Finally, we're finding ways to complement our strong and growing first-party business through new sources of demand, including efficient ways to scale our monetization through partnerships…

Bill Ready

Analyst · Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs

Thanks, Julia. I want to thank our teams at Pinterest, our advertising partners and all the people that come to Pinterest to find inspiration and take action. And with that, we can open the call up for questions.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The first question is from the line of Ross Sandler with Barclays.

Ross Sandler

Analyst · Ross Sandler with Barclays

Great. Bill, just starting with the guidance. 2Q looks pretty solid, all things considered, just a very modest decel. We know you have Easter in the second quarter this year, which may help a little bit. But just curious, what you're seeing in the pipeline? And are any of the kind of high tariff exposed categories in retail and CPG showing any softness thus far? How do you see this playing out throughout the year?

Julia Donnelly

Analyst · Ross Sandler with Barclays

Thanks, Ross. I'll take that one. So first and foremost, as we noted in our prepared remarks, we're seeing strength in our business, and trends remain healthy both in Q1 and the early signals on Q2. Our products are really working well as we leverage AI to drive gains in relevance, personalization and actionability for users, and drive increasing performance gains for our advertisers across a range of verticals. To your specific question on the Q2 guide, given the situation remains somewhat fluid, our guidance reflects a slightly expanded revenue range. As always, our Q2 revenue outlook factors in both what we are seeing in quarter-to-date trends as well as what we are hearing from our advertising partners directly about their spend expectations for the remainder of the quarter as of today. There have been small pockets of spend that have been impacted by tariffs in recent weeks. For example, like other platforms, we have observed a reduction in spend from Asia-based e-commerce retailers in the U.S. given the change in the de minimis exemption. However, we've also seen a geographic diversification from some of those Asia-based retailers to our European and Rest of World user regions. And that's a theme that has continued to play out over multiple quarters now and continues today. So stepping back, the fundamentals of our business remain strong. Our investments over the past 3 years have -- against our multiple revenue levers have helped us build a more resilient platform, and that's a vital partner to advertisers more so than ever before, and we'll continue to execute on the key strategic initiatives within our control.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from the line of Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs.

Eric Sheridan

Analyst · Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs

Bill, it felt like last quarter and then building a momentum this quarter, there was a shift in you framing where the platform and its products were going in terms of things that were inside of your control. So leaving the macro aside for a minute, I know we'll talk a lot about on this call, but are the things in your control in terms of where you want to take the platform and how you want to evolve products, where do you think you are in that journey? And what is the receptivity across the advertising landscape to what you built so far? And how do you think about what might build as we get deeper into the year?

Bill Ready

Analyst · Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs

Yes. Thanks, Eric. As we've talked about, going all the way back to our Investor Day, we see multiple ways to win and multiple strategic initiatives that have been playing out to support the direction we're taking the platform. At the core of that, we've made Pinterest a destination for our user, particularly shopping destination. Pinterest is where Gen Z goes to shop. And you see that reflected not only in the all-time highs in users, but also, as we shared in our 10-K, record levels of engagement per user, and that's really a combination of AI becoming a core competency for us, the unique signal on our platform and the fact that users are here with great commercial intent. So as we've been solving that for our users, we've also been, for our advertisers, opening up format ad platform also driven by AI-enabled tools. And we see it making it so that not only is there better commercial intent and actionability than ever before on Pinterest for our users, as advertisers have better and better tools, to easily take action on that, they're finding that not only can they come take action, Performance+ cutting campaign creation time and half, but also giving them great return on their ad spend and letting them meet users in a unique moment in their commercial journey where they clearly have intent but haven't yet decided what to buy, which is something really special about Pinterest that in the Western world, we're the only platform that has on the surface, in the same app, the user at every stage of the funnel. And we pair that with our unique curation that's giving us really, really unique signals, letting us do really great things with AI and the relevant to our recommendations, as I noted,…

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Brian Nowak with Morgan Stanley.

Brian Nowak

Analyst · Morgan Stanley

I have 2, please. The first one on Performance+. You've made a lot of progress driving adoption of that product with some of your larger advertisers. Is there any way you can talk with us about how to think about a rough percentage lift in same advertiser spend as you sort of rolled that tool out so far? And the second one, Bill, maybe a big-picture one. You continue to really rapid click growth to your advertisers. I remember last quarter, it was 90% plus growth and 100%, et cetera. What do you think is the biggest opportunity to sort of further close that gap between that rapid click growth you're selling to your advertisers versus your advertiser growth -- your advertising dollar growth?

Bill Ready

Analyst · Morgan Stanley

Yes. Thanks, Brian. So in terms of how we think about the uplift from Performance+, I shared some stats on the call around the uplift and rollouts from different components. It's important to know, it's a suite of products, but we've also given the ability for advertisers to adopt a la carte. And so what we're seeing is that -- those that have adopted, they're seeing really strong performance that when paired with our measurement tools that we've rolled out is leading to share shift and budget gains for us with those advertisers. And while we've not broken that out what's the percentage of lift from that, again, given that sort of advertisers can either take the whole suite or sort of choose a la carte, we are seeing quite consistently, as I noted in the 80% of the campaigns on Performance+ outperformed traditional campaigns, we are feeling really good about that progress even as we still have a lot more functionality that we are building there. So again, we feel like the progress is quite strong, but a lot more ahead. As we've talked about with all these things, just think about these as sort of compounding effects that build on those, creating longer-term durable growth, no hockey sticks are sort of onetime federal results, but these are like steady builds that just make us a better and more performant add platform for advertising and getting extend more of those always on performance budgets that tend to be much more durable. So we feel really great about those things. More to go there. But when you see things like 80% of campaigns on Performance+ outperforming, that's quite strong. The beta test results that we mentioned, 20% CPA improvements on shopping campaigns, these are things that are leading to --…

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Shweta Khajuria with Wolfe Research.

Shweta Khajuria

Analyst · Wolfe Research

We've seen some press reports about you testing with multiple partners. Can you please give us an update on your strategy for third-party demand?

Bill Ready

Analyst · Wolfe Research

Yes. Thank you. I appreciate the question. So first thing I'd say is that nothing about our programmatic or third-party advertising strategy has changed. We've always said that our first-party demand that comes from our internal sales force would be the primary driver of our business. And that we would seek out demand from third parties as a complement to our first-party business really to round out gaps in our auction. As such, we've -- we're instantly and constantly testing and iterating within our business to find the right sources of demand around our gaps or auction and drive greater actionability for our users. And we've been consistent about having envisioned multiple partners. And you saw us start with some of the largest players, Amazon and Google. But there are also a number of smaller players that can bring incremental demand to the platform. In service of that, we've been testing with multiple providers to open up access, and we've decided to work with Magnite, a leading SSP, as our next partner to help us aggregate smaller sources of demand. While there's been some speculation out there, there are no additional SSPs that we plan to scale with in the immediate future, but we think this helps us to aggregate more of those sources of demand from other players through our Magnite partnership. And I view this as a steady progression and build of the business, which is consistent with what we've outlined. So just like prior efforts, these things take time to integrate and plan a thoughtful go-to-market launch and scale. So again, don't expect any big-hockey stick moment, but it's part of the ongoing build of the business. I wouldn't think of this as immediate change in revenue trajectory of the business, but as part of that compounding effect of just making it easier and easier for advertisers to reach really great commercial intent on our platform and us meeting advertisers more and more where they are.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo.

Ken Gawrelski

Analyst · Wells Fargo

Could we talk a little bit about the accelerating impression growth and the associated kind of price declines on a per impression basis? Could you talk -- I know that's a global number, and you referred to earlier some of the mix shift to international and adding, I think, you said 8 additional territories. Could you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in UCAN, kind of your most mature area and you're most well developed, could you talk about the trends there, what you're seeing from an impression basis? And also maybe potentially on the price per impression basis, are you seeing -- are you starting to see some pricing leverage in UCAN?

Julia Donnelly

Analyst · Wells Fargo

Ken, yes, thanks for the question. So we've said for many quarters in a row now the dynamics that we're seeing in terms of global ad impression growth and global pricing decline is primarily driven by international mix shift. As you'll recall, last year, we began to serve ads and monetize previously un-monetized or previously undermonetized international markets. And so naturally, these international markets have lower total addressable market and also have lower cost per impression or eCPMs on average. So this international mix shift puts downward pressure on global pricing, but it's clearly been a positive to net revenue overall. And importantly, you're seeing that show up in the accelerating revenue trends in our Rest of World market for the last several quarters. To your question on sort of UCAN specifically, it is worth noting, if you were to look at kind of UCAN impression growth and pricing alone, it would tell a very different story, and the trends are far less pronounced because the primary driver on a global level really is this mix shift impact due to international growth.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from John Blackledge with TD Securities.

John Blackledge

Analyst · TD Securities

Great. Just any further color on the broader macro volatility impacting ad spend, particularly with the more brand-oriented advertisers? And is the introduction of Performance+ helping drive and kind of tie together that full-funnel campaign dynamic that you referenced earlier in the call?

Bill Ready

Analyst · TD Securities

Yes. Thanks for the question, John. You're spot on with your question in the ability to tie together that full funnel. That's been -- Pinterest has talked about that for years, but I think now that our lower-funnel business has become very compelling, it's really helping us bring the promise of the full funnel to life. And I shared that stat in my prepared remarks about how advertisers that do both upper- and lower-funnel objectives with us see 2x the click-through rate. This is really what CMOs have always known is that great CMOs know that the whole decision doesn't get made just in those last 3 seconds before the last click. It was just the thing that was most measurable. And they knew they needed to be able to tell more of their story to differentiate their brand, to connect with customers, but that wasn't very measurable for them. With us having both the upper funnel and middle and lower funnel all in the same surface, same consumer experience, we are able to tie that together for our users and our advertisers. So the user is getting a seamless shopping experience from upper-funnel inspiration all the way through to the click and the conversion, but it is exactly as you alluded to in your question, we're helping us deliver on that full funnel. I actually think in this moment where, as we go through periods of uncertainty, if you talk to CMOs about past times of uncertainty, when they get that call from the CFO to ask them to focus their spend, of course, that would all rush to the low funnel, but then they'd feel like they had left something on the table by not being able to tell their brand story, which is how they really ultimately connect with the customers to eventually get to that last click with what we're doing in the full funnel, we're really giving them a twofer. They can do upper funnel and lower funnel, but then that CMO can turn to their CFO and say, see, when I did the upper funnel with the lower funnel on Pinterest, it was double a click-through rate. So my upper funnel does perform. And therefore, that CMO can still tell our brand story even while driving lower-funnel last click on our platform. So we think that is quite compelling and I think is, again, another example of how we've been building in a way that is long-term durable, but I think even in a moment of uncertainty where we have unique offerings that we can come forward with for both our users and our advertisers.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Ron Josey with Citigroup.

Ron Josey

Analyst · Citigroup

Great. Maybe another 1 on -- 2, please. And so the first one is just on advertising. Bill and Julia, we've been talking about strength in the emerging verticals for a few quarters now actually since Analyst Day, and before, we mentioned financial services. So I wanted to hear more about these additional verticals that Pinterest is seeing success in, maybe talk about some of the use cases and why Pinterest is a good fit for these advertisers just given the focus on retail and commerce. And then, Julia, you highlighted in your comments, 25% of code is generated by AI. That's up 10 points in the quarter, I think you said. But would love to hear your comments on the benefit tier. Is it product -- I mean, everything, right, but benefits around product velocity, time to market, but also cost savings as well?

Julia Donnelly

Analyst · Citigroup

Thanks, Ron. Maybe I'll take the first one just to start out here on emerging verticals. And you're right, we've called out financial services for many quarters now as one of several categories where we're seeing strong growth. Some of the others that we've mentioned over time have been technology, telecom, entertainment, which includes streaming services. So we're certainly underpenetrated in these categories with lots of room to grow. In terms of sort of use cases, Pinterest attracts users during key life moments like when starting a family, buying a car, remodeling a home. These are times when consumers are often seeking new financial services such as insurance or credit cards. This makes Pinterest an ideal platform for these advertisers who want to connect with their audience undergoing these significant life events. Advertisers are also value interest insights into consumer trends and spending habits, which inform their content and messaging strategies, particularly with Gen Z users who may be selecting insurance providers or credit card issuers for the very first time. In summary, I think we're seeing strength in these categories and believe there's an ongoing longer-term fit for these advertisers on our platform as we demonstrate it for some of these categories, and we're starting to see some of these advertisers really leaning in. On your second question about 25% of now being accepted -- generated by AI, but accepted by human review, that being up 10 points versus the prior quarter, we're really pleased with the progress we're seeing there. I think we've talked to you all many times about how AI is a core competency for our business and how we're leveraging it to power both user and engagement growth, including some of the newer visual search experiences that we talked about on the call earlier that Bill referenced and how we're doing on the ad serving stack. But I think we're also using it internally throughout our business to help accelerate engineering velocity, and I think you're starting to see just that pace of velocity really start to improve from us over the last year. I think that's a great example of that. It's both employee productivity, including engineering velocity, but also it allows us to be thoughtful about the places we're investing in our business and continue to be prudent as we think about those high ROI opportunities over time.

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Rich Greenfield with LightShed Partners.

Rich Greenfield

Analyst · LightShed Partners

I was listening to a D2C marketing exec at Kitch on the Chew on this podcast recently. And the woman was talking about ROAS across various digital platforms. And she gave some specific commentary around Pinterest from her experience and for relationships in the business. And one of the things he sort of said was that it's a long game because when you talk about ROAS on Pinterest, it's a long game because consumers pin things and then they come back, and they do buy them, but they buy them later. I was wondering how you react to that comment from a marketer and how some of the changes you've been making to the product to make it easier to shop and more visible from a shopping standpoint, how that narrative may be changing or whether you disagree with it entirely. But I just would be curious how you react to it.

Bill Ready

Analyst · LightShed Partners

Yes. Thanks for the question, Rich. What I would say is I think that commentary is half right. And half right in the sense that like, yes, we do see consumers coming to Pinterest when they have sort of a kernel of an idea, a beginning of an intent, but haven't yet decided what to buy, which, again, is a magic moment for the advertiser to meet that consumer. Historically, Pinterest had that, but didn't have that last click, didn't have the conversion. We absolutely are delivering the clicks and conversions now, and I've shared that. Some folks that may not have looked at them more recently or may not have adopted all of our tools or maybe were not yet integrated into their measure solution, which is why we had so much focus on those things, that sort of illustrates a little bit of -- there's an earlier question around how do we bridge the delta between the extremely strong growth in clicks and conversions relative to the revenue growth, that gets to a little bit of that, that from a user perspective, the users absolutely are clicking and buying on the platform in addition to what they used to do, which was curate sort of planning ahead. Now it is all of those things, it truly is the full funnel. But as we've noted before, we're working through an adoption cycle with our advertisers. And the largest, most sophisticated advertisers have -- this way I've talked about them coming on the most quickly because they integrate through APIs, they're the most sophisticated, they see the arbitrage very quickly. And that's where we saw our strength first. Then we talked about that next group down in the sort of $1 billion to $30 billion in sales range is the…

Operator

Operator

The next question is from Doug Anmuth with JPMorgan.

Doug Anmuth

Analyst · JPMorgan

I just want to ask about capital allocation. You repurchased about $175 million of stock in 1Q and I think have $1.7 billion authorized. Can you just talk about how you're thinking about capital allocation strategy currently in light of valuation, but then also the current macro backdrop as well?

Julia Donnelly

Analyst · JPMorgan

Thanks, Doug. Yes. So we noted in Q1, we did buy back $175 million of shares, as you called out. In addition, we also utilized $94 million in net share settlement of equity awards. So these 2 actions together combined led to a 2.2% decline in year-over-year fully diluted share count. So we're clearly more than offsetting dilution in a meaningful way here. We do have $1.7 billion remaining under our share repurchase authorization. And we have the discretion to determine the timing and amounts of any buybacks under that program, and we will use that discretion thoughtfully over a multiyear period, particularly when the stock is trading at an attractive valuation level. Our overall capital allocation framework hasn't changed from what we laid out at our Investor Day in late 2023. We have lots of potential uses for our cash, stock buybacks, certainly being one of them that you've seen us use here multiple times to mitigate dilution. We're always looking at ways to optimize our balance sheet, preserving flexibility for opportunistic and disciplined M&A, and obviously, first and foremost, investing in our product and technology innovation, as you've seen us do for many quarters now. So that overall capital allocation philosophy remains consistent with what we laid out at Investor Day.

Operator

Operator

Our final question on today's call will be from Justin Patterson with KeyCorp.

Justin Patterson

Analyst · KeyCorp

Great. Bill, you've had great engagement gains over the past 2 years, but we're also now in a world where there's more uncertainty on how AI is impacting search. As a business that's had the intersection of search and social, could you expand a little bit more on how visual search and other product initiatives can keep that engagement going?

Bill Ready

Analyst · KeyCorp

Yes. Thanks for the question. We think we have a really unique space in this because, yes, we're at this intersection between not only social and search, but also commerce as well. And I shared on the call, I've talked about this extensively since I joined the company that the curation signal at Pinterest just gives us really, really unique signal to do something very different with the AI. I've long had the view that AI, just like cloud compute, would become basically building blocks available to everyone, but then it thrives on feedback loops, and so who has unique feedback loops in their business to do something special with it. The really, really unique feedback loop that Pinterest has that, again, I don't believe exist any place else in the Western world, is users curating their purchases before they make the purchase. And doing that in a purely visual format gives us really, really rich signal. So when I shared on the call that our multimodal model that powers our visual search is 30% more likely to identify and recommend relevant content from our corpus than leading off-the-shelf models, that is both a great credit to the fact that AI is a core competency, and we've got some amazing AI engineers at Pinterest, but it's also about that curation signal that we get. So there's also, I think, a broader discussion of a group of sort of very large general purpose models. But then also, you're seeing now more fit-for-purpose models that can be smaller, focused, solve individual use cases better than the general purpose model. And I think this, again, is an example of that. But at the core of your question of how do we compete, if you look at search generally, search has been fragmenting for…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. That concludes our Q&A session. I'll hand the call back over to Bill Ready, CEO, for closing remarks.

Bill Ready

Analyst · Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs

Thanks again to all of you for joining the call and for your questions. We look forward to keeping this dialogue going, and we hope you enjoy the rest of your day.

Operator

Operator

That concludes today's call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.