Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news chefs. Pinterest best day in a year. We're currently up eleven percent. The company reporting first quarter sales the top down assessments and forecast revenue exceeding all street expectations too. Already, pinterest CEO joins us now exclusively. It's great to speak with you, Bill. What's driving the growth?
Thanks for having me on. So you know, we're really
encouraged by the growth on the platform. It's eleven straight quarters of record high users, ten straight quarters of double disser growth in users, and at the core of that is that we've we've really turned Pinterest into an AI powered shopping assistant that is really really winning with users, especially gen Z that's now more than half our platform and our fastest growing demographic pictures is where gen Z goes to shop, and that's been really great for users,
and increasingly advertisers're leaning into that and you see that reflecting our results.
So ad targeting improves, we can see more efficiency, but look at getting eighty billion monthly searches, as you say, record hive users. What is the AI strategy here longer term? Because already you're seeing the efficiency in a flywheel.
That's right. So we've shared that we have more than eighty billion searches per month on the platform, which would have been unbelievable to say, even a few years ago. And we've done that by really making it a visual first platform. So much of shopping is a visual journey, and so we are really focused on that. And I think in the world of AI, you've had a lot of discussion around general purpose winners, but you're also seeing specialization play out, and you're seeing that play out and
sort of consumer versus enterprise. But even within consumer, there are a lot of different use cases and we've been really focused on shopping and visual search and discovery, and we're using AI to power that really based off the curation signal on our platform, and we're seeing that really
really resonate with users. And o those eighty billion searches per month, more than half of them are commercial, which is a much more magnificant skew towards commerciality then most chatbots would have, and that you would see in sort of historical general purpose search. So it really has become a great shopping destination for our users.
It's interesting those chatbots had been sort of some of the investor anxiety that this is where competition is coming from. In visual search, it is Google, it is opening on the others. But how dependent are you on are the frenemies? Shall we say, for the large language models, you're training your own, but how much you're using underlying models of others, that's.
Right, So we primarily run our own compact fit for purpose models. I think this is one of the things that you will see over time is there's been so much discussion around AGI and general purpose models, but they can be really expensive to run, and we've demonstrated it through our own compact fit for purpose models as well as leveraging open source and retraining that off of our unique data set that we're able to see comparable or better results at oftentimes less than ten percent of the cost.
And in terms of shopping, we've shared that we're able to get to thirty percent better relevancy of recommendations on shopping for our users than what we'd see from leading off the shelf proprietary models, which just really gets to the uniqueness of pinterest as a shopping destination. And it's important to note that what makes our models so powerful, it's not just the models themselves. The AI doesn't have
taste or style. Humans have tastes in style, and so people come to Pinterest to figure out their taste, to figure out how they want to put outfits together, and we're able to learn from that and make better and better recommendations that are aligned to a user's taste. And the result of that, as usually say things like well,
Pinterest just gets me. And that's something that we think we're doing really uniquely here at Pinterest and where we just have totally different signal based on what our users do on the platform, and that's what lets us take much smaller but really fit for purpose models and deliver better results for users.
It's not just a signal on your platform. Though you've been doing M and A talk to us about TV scientific and while you're going into performance driven sort of TV ads.
So we now objectively six hundred and thirty million plus users, you know, in eighty billion starches a month, more than half of them being commercial, have one of the highest commercial intent platforms anywhere in the world. And so far we've been making that a really great platform for advertisers to connect with users here on Pinterest, but we're also looking at how we can make it so that we can help those advertisers meet those users in other places.
Connected TV being you know, one of the fastest growing areas of a of ad demand. It's projected to surpass linear TV in twenty twenty eight, and we're able to help advertisers show more relevant ads that deliver better returns for advertisers on TV and users get to see things
that are actually helpful and useful to them. And we showed on this most recent call that when we add Pinterest audience data to TV scientifics capabilities, the company that we acquired in Q one, we see a sixty five percent improvement in the purchases that result from the ads that are shown, which is great for advertisers, but also just means as a user, when you're watching connective TV, you actually see more of thesa say, oh, that's actually a product that would be useful for me, and so
it's a great thing for users too. Thanks.
It's interesting, it's almost feels like diversification. Briefly, Bill, but there's also this moment of gen z and teen bands. How do you see that as your role in social media right now?
Briefly, yes, So we've talked about this before, and I've been very out spoken on this publicly. When I came into Pinterest's CEO nearly four years ago, I wanted to prove that there was a more positive business model possible in social media, and so youth online safety has been very out in front for us. We made Pinterest private
only for users under sixteen approximately three years ago. We're the first and still the only platform to do that, and so I've publicly advocated for the fact that social media as currently configured, it is not safe for users under sixteen. So we turned off social features three years ago, and we actually think it's quite an encouraging thing to see regulators around the world starting to really pay attention to that.
Do you have to leave it there? Thank you so much for talking to us through your numbers and your focus. We already Pinterest CEO