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Pinterest is ending the week on a high note, the company's second quarter revenue topping guidance, easing investor concerns about an advertising slowdown. Pinterest also saying that it's AI investments are beginning to pay off. The CEO of the company, Bill Ready, saying, our ability to leverage AI to personalize our users experience is a key differentiator. It also makes us a highly valuable partner to advertisers. He joins US
now along with Bloomberg Technologies. Caroline Hyde, Bill, thanks for coming on the program. Really appreciate it. I'm fascinated by really the sell through revenue that you can get, not as much the advertising, but because of the way I use the Internet, because of the way I want to use Pinterest. I search for things that I want or need, and I want to just click through and buy them. How much are you to making that, you know, a very profitable reality.
Yeah, I mean we've had a huge transformation in our business over the last three years where we've really made Pinterest a shopping destination for our users. And exactly to your question, you know, Pinterest historically was great for window shopping, but you really couldn't click or take action. Over the last three years, we've really opened up those stores, so it's not just window shopping. Now you can easily click
and purchase with some really seamless examples. You can link your Amazon account, you can have a one click buying experience right inside of our app. And there's a lot that we're doing to really drive clicks and conversions and sales for our advertisers. But for our users, it's just really great shopping and seamless buying right on our platform.
And let's just talk about the resilience of those consumers, the buying and indeed the advertisers bill because it's not exactly a feeling of economic nirvana out there right now, but still you're managing to give us a forecast unlike rivals in the social media space. What gives you that clarity, what gives you that resilience in the business.
Well, you know, back to what we've done for our users in turning interest into a shopping destination pinteresses where gen Z goes to shop. Gen Z is now our largest fastest growing demographic, over forty percent of our users, and you know they're coming here to shop. We're giving them a great shopping destination. But you know that has allowed us to deliver great performance for our advertisers. We've delivered a performance advertising platform where advertisers can get clicks
and conversions and great performance. We're giving them AI enabled tools, so it's easier than ever for them to go create campaigns on Pinterest and see really great returns on that. So that's the other side of the businesses that we've
made Pinterest a shopping destination. Eighty five percent of our users come to us directly, and then we connect them with advertisers and make it really easy for advertisers to connect with those users in this moment where they're in market looking for something to buy but haven't decided what to buy. That's a great moment for those two to meet,
and we see that continue to accelerate. We're all time highs on users and all time highs on depth of engagement per user, really driven by AI and the personalization there, and then how we're connecting shoppers and sellers.
So is that keeping the likes of Timu and Sin who a lot of those gen zs are going to buy on your platform? Is that sticking around because many had worried because of the towers, because of the difficulty accessing the US and consumer in terms of a price point, what we'd see retrenchment in terms of ads from those companies.
Yeah, Well, we're a global platform, you know, or over you know, five hundred and seventy million users. Eighty percent of those are outside the US, and so we noted as others that for Asian cross border sellers, you know, that has slowed down coming into the US, as others have noted as well. But we're seeing those sellers sell more globally and we're helping them to connect to other markets around the world. Here in the US. Consumers are resilient.
You know, there's lots of public spending information that says that consumers are still shopping. We went through a major supply chain disruption just a few years ago during the pandemic, and you know, we all saw, you know, things are out of stock and consumers found other ways to buy, other things to buy, and we see that happening on
our platform. That while you have things like budget conscious searches, like you know, budget friendly recipes or you know budget you know party decorations, budget party favors, and those kinds of things up to two hundred percent plus here on here. People find substitute products, they find other ways to go sort of bring delight into their life, and we're a great place to help them do that in a great place for advertisers to see these shifting consumer trends.
So I'm fascinated. Did you say eighty percent of your users are outside of the US or the US approximately years?
Okay, so approximate a percent users outside US?
What's the mix of sales? So for US consumers, you know, I'm looking at stuff all the time that's arrow leathers in Scotland or the real McCoy's in Tokyo. So all of the products that I'm looking for, for the most part, except for Westco Boots in California, are coming from overseas. What's the mix right now for US shoppers through Pinterest on overseas products versus made in the US say stuff?
Well, I would say we'd track the market generally on on that. But the opportunity for us with eighty percent of the users be outside the US is that you know, we have eighty percent of our users outside the US, but rough only twenty percent of our revenue outside the US. So the shopping playbook that we've created over the last few years, that's really working in North America for US.
We're now exporting that to other markets and we're seeing that shopping playbook really take hold in other markets as well. So that's a big part of our forward looking opportunity. And here in the US we continue to grow rapidly as well, particularly you know on our depth of engagement, really making Pinterest a shopping destination. And again, consumers are resilient. You know, if some things aren't available to them, they're going to be creative and find other ways to buy.
And you know, even if their pocket gets pinched. You know, we are a place for intentional purpose purchases, not just impulse purchases. So you know, we see highly considered purchases on our platform. Our users are planful and so if they go through a moment where they need to be a little bit more thoughtful about what they buy, are a little bit more creative about where to get it, that's exactly what people do on our platform, and we think that'll be a great moment for us to shine.
You talk about that depth of engagement and in many ways that's driven by the AI investment you've made and the fact that you're personalizing it. You call it a differentiator. How is it differentiating you when we see meta also plowing a lot of money into AI and offering that to advertisers too, what's the secret source that you've had.
So for us? You know, the really uniquely on our platform is that Pinterest is the only place in the Western world where users not only shop, but they also curate. So you know, you know, there's plenty of other places through third party cookies and things like that that could say they know everything you've bought and everything in your closet, but they have no idea how you style that into
an outfit. They don't know your taste. On Pinterest, hundreds millions of people every day are styling their outfits, deciding, you know, what handbag to go with, what pair of shoes with what dress, And so we learn people's taste. I talked about on our call. Our taste graph has grown by over seventy five percent over the last two years, and that really unique signal lets us train AI to be really really personal is the way that manifests for our users. If you go ask a gens the user
why they go to Pinterest. What they'll say is Pinterest just gets me. Well, that is the use of AI trained on that really unique signal where we understand not only their style and taste, but when somebody else bought that same handbag, how did they put an outfit together
around that. That is really really great personalization, that's really helpful to our user and again totally unique in that signal that we have that we're able to do differentiated things with AI because of that unique signal of the from the curation that users do on our platform.
I'm wondering about partnerships. You mentioned recipes earlier, and that's probably the main thing that I do on a daily basis with Pinterest. I save recipes that I like there and then I go to Pinterest when I'm ready to cook them. Can you partner up with, for example, on Instacart, to use your AI find all the ingredients I need and then say, like, you know, click this button to order all the stuff you need for this recipe.
You know, what we're seeing is that our visual search technology is working across many many categories. Shopping has been a first area of focus for us, but there are many adjacent categories that works for and the way we think about that is partnering closely with great retailers, great brands to connect them directly to a customer. So I
think those opportunities continue to abound. And you know, in terms of that visual search capability, one of the things that we talked about on our call yesterday is we just launched a new multimodal AI model for visual search that outperforms off the shelf models by over thirty percent. So just to make it really tangible how much better
those recommendations are because of that unique signal. Outperforming the you know, the best off the shelf models by over thirty percent gets to really just how unique our capabilities are there. And that makes us a great partner for many And you've seen us partner with Amazon, You've seen us partner you know, with large retailers, and we're now expanding that to more and more other great partners, and so there are many more forward opportunities for us on that.
All right, Bill, thanks so much for joining us on what must be a very busy day for you. Bill ready there the CEO having Pinterest