Revenue Up But Pinners Down for Pinterest in Q1 2022

Pinterest reported an 18% year-over-year revenue gain in the first quarter of 2022 despite seeing a slump in monthly active users during the three-month period. The company’s revenue rose to $574.885 million from $485.23 million in the first quarter of 2021. Global MAUs fell to 433 million from 478 million at the same time last year and, despite the company saying in its letter to shareholders that the war in Ukraine was the primary factor, MAUs were down in all regions. Pinterest reported 94 million MAUs in the U.S. and Canada, down 13% from 109 million at the end of the first three months of last year. Its total of 120 million MAUs in Europe was down 12% from the year-ago tally of 136 million, and its rest of world total fell 6%, to 220 million from 234 million. Pinterest provided an update in its letter to shareholders, saying that as of April 25, it had 432.9 million global MAUs and 94 million in the U.S. and Canada. Insider Intelligence principal analyst Andrew Lipsman told Adweek, "Pinterest's accelerating user declines and contracting top-line and bottom-line growth rates aren't the most encouraging trends, but it did manage to outperform dampened expectations. Bright spots include improving monetization and a scaling international business, but Pinterest still needs to prove that it can reverse the troubling user declines if it hopes to inspire more confidence in the business going forward." The company also broke out revenue over the same geographic regions, saying that $470 million of its first-quarter total came from the U.S. and Canada, up 15% year-over-year, while Europe chipped in $87 million, up 27%, and revenue in the rest of the world soared, albeit with much lower numbers, jumping 152% to $17 million. Pinterest said in its letter to shareholders that the number of video Idea Pins on its platform skyrocketed by 15 times year-over-year during the quarter, and it has seen the save rate of Idea Pins grow by 25% during the same period. The company added that the number of Pinners creating Idea Pins grew by 17 times year-over-year in the first three months of 2022. Pinterest wrote in its letter to shareholders, “In the first quarter of 2022, we continued to experience year-over-year engagement declines primarily due to pandemic-influenced growth in the year-ago quarter, as well as lower search traffic (largely driven by Google’s algorithm change in November 2021). Time spent on competitive video-centric consumer platforms remains a headwind, particularly in our more mature markets. These declines were most pronounced for our desktop web and mobile web users, with mobile application users showing more resilience.” The company projected year-over-year revenue growth of roughly 11% in the second quarter. CEO Ben Silbermann said in a statement, “Pinterest made good progress in the first quarter executing on our long-term strategy. We continued to scale our native content and creators ecosystem, began beta-testing Your Shop, our personalized shopping surface, and released our new open Pinterest API (application-programming interface) so that any developer can build apps for Pinners, creators, merchants and advertisers. Despite a challenging macroeconomic and geopolitical environment, we grew revenue 18% year-over-year.”

Earnings Reports

Revenue Up But Pinners Down for Pinterest in Q1 2022

Global monthly active users fell 9% year-over-year

David Cohen

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