Hello everyone. Good morning, Bill.
Great to have you. You've had 10 straight quarters of double-digit user growth. Most recently, 631 million global active monthly users. It's pretty good. How is the consumer seeming right now between Iran, tariffs, gas prices? Like, what are you seeing?
There's just a little bit going on in the world, right? You know, it's interesting. Obviously, no comments on current quarter, all those sort of disclaimers as a public company. But, you know, we've talked about this on our last earnings call and pretty consistently that, you know, there's been real resilience amongst consumers. And I think not only has there been resilience, I think it's also there's so much changing in terms of the landscape with AI and all these kinds of things. Consumers, I think, interestingly, are craving authenticity and meaning and purpose and all these things that are not really answered by AI. And so, I think that's something that we're really paying close attention to is that, you know, I'm an entrepreneur by background, an engineer, a technologist. And there's so many great uses of AI, but there's also a bit of a sort of counter movement to that with consumers of as so much is changing, what do they reach for to sort of have ballast in the ship to sort of hold on to in terms of like where they find trust or meaning or purpose in these things.
But, from a shopping perspective, you know, of those 630 million users, more than half the platform's Gen Z. So, Gen Z's our largest, fastest-growing demographic. And more than half of our users are there to shop. And so, we've seen that shopping activity particularly in a visual-first, AI-driven world, there's tremendous engagement.
So, let's come back to AI, of course. But you have this incredibly intentful, purposeful, excited, passionate user base, but you've said yourself, we have more work to do to ensure monetization more fully reflects the strength of that user activity. So, what's holding the company back on monetization?
Well, I wouldn't say there's anything holding us back. I mean, we've made I came in as CEO 4 years ago, and the purpose was twofold. One, we wanted to prove there was a more positive business model for social media, that you didn't have to use engagement via enragement to sort of keep people glued to a screen, we could actually try to build a more positive space, one that would leave people feeling better, and one that would leave people feeling better about their time spent, that it wasn't about maximizing time spent, but about maximizing time well spent. And then the other side of that was building out as a shopping platform. And over the last 4 years, you know, we're now 80 billion plus searches per month. You know, which is just a massive amount of search volume. Those searches are primarily visual, so proving out a new way to search. More than half of those are commercial. And as is true with any platform, you want to get the users and the engagement first, and then the monetization follows behind that. But we've also 5x the number of clicks to advertisers over the last 3 years. So, the ad platform has been growing, you know, very nicely. We quadrupled the growth rate of the revenue. And so it is following, but of course you want to get the user engagement first, and the revenue follows in behind that.
Is part of it just the way advertisers measure success? I recently read in Media Stack one of your executives said, '95% of Pinterest impact is invisible to advertisers who look at last click data.' Is that a problem that advertisers are looking at the wrong thing?
Well, I think that's not just about us. I think that's been a big breakthrough in advertising generally. It's one of those things not all that matters is measured and not all that is measured is what matters. And, you know, great CMOs have always known this that even though the last click was the thing that was the most measurable, you know, any great CMO would know that well, okay, do you really believe the whole decision was made in the last 30 seconds before that last click? Or were there things before that around building your brand and your customer connection and how customers should think of you and how they were researching your product? So much of that happens before that. And just to be very fact-based about it, for most commercial journeys, they tend to be multi-day, multi-week, multi-month. And depending on how high consideration the purchase is, the longer that time period tends to be. But even something like apparel tends to be a multi-day consideration period. So, if you're only measuring the last click, you've probably just found the tollbooth, but you didn't find sort of actually the sort of map somebody used to navigate the journey. And that's not just about us. I think just generally that's been a major issue. But the good news is with, you know, things like clean rooms and other privacy-preserving technology, the ability to go understand the full journey of the user is getting better and better and better both with that and with AI-driven systems that can help you understand the multiple touchpoints that were on that journey. And when viewed through that lens, you know, yes, we 5x the number of clicks to advertisers over the last 3 years, so we're driving a tremendous amount of last click. But of those 80 billion searches a month that are happening, more than half are commercial. And you know, it's a great moment to engage when you can meet the user in a place where they have intent but haven't yet decided what to buy. So, 95% plus of our queries are unbranded. So, back to like are you a toll booth or are you actually helping drive a decision? That's a very fact-based way to measure that of like how many of the queries actually have the brand in it already? If the brand's in it already, then they sort of made up some part of their mind. Well, 95% of our queries are unbranded, which means the user has clear commercial intent, but hasn't yet decided what to buy. But, I think part of this that you're touching on around measurement, not just for us, but just in the industry generally, I think it's what the great CMOs have wanted for years and years. They just couldn't convince their CFO if it wasn't measurable. Well, now that more of that journey is measurable, that's letting great CMOs say, 'Yes, brand building matters. Customer connection matters. How our product is understood by the customer matters.' And those things matter way before those last 10 seconds before that last click.
So, I know we're getting in the nitty-gritty here, but here we are at Cannes. So, how are you helping advertisers make that case? Tell us is this Pinterest performance plus or like what are the tools you're giving to help make the case?
Yeah, so we have our own AI automation suite that makes it really easy to create campaigns, connect to that high commercial intent on our platform. Pinterest performance plus, our AI automation suite has cut campaign creation time in half. We're doing things like creative optimization where, you know, great marketers, great creatives are always going to want to know that they're showing up the way they want in front of their customers. But, the ability to personalize and say, 'Okay, well, you know, say you have like a great kitchen appliance that you want to show up.' Well, that person is if they're going to go spend $5,000 on a coffee maker or something, they're probably thinking about how that's going to look in their kitchen. And so, when you can personalize down to a level of like not just showing them a great coffee maker, but showing them a great coffee maker that is like sitting in a kitchen like their kitchen, you're going to have better conversion rates on that and it's going to be brand enhancing. These are the kinds of things you can do with AI-driven creative optimization that don't have to be about turning over control to a black box, but can be about how do you take, you know, your great brand architecture and then marry that with great personalization. So, there's things like that that we're doing. And then, we've integrated with 30 plus measurement partners to sort of meet advertisers where they are around these issues of measuring the full funnel.
