Pinterest

Pinterest, Inc.
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: PINS
Industry	Social media; Internet
Founded	2009; site launched March 2010
Founder	Ben Silbermann; Evan Sharp; Paul Sciarra
Headquarters	San Francisco, California, United States
Key people	Bill Ready (Chief executive officer); Ben Silbermann (Executive chairman)
Products	Pinterest, Pinterest Lens, Pinterest Business
Revenue	Approximately US$4.2 billion (2025)
Employees	Approximately 4,000
Website	pinterest.com

Pinterest, Inc. operates a visual discovery platform on which users collect and organise images, called pins, onto themed collections, called boards. It reported approximately 619 million monthly active users and revenue of approximately US$4.2 billion for 2025, up 16 per cent, with net income of US$417 million.

The company was founded in 2009 by Ben Silbermann, Evan Sharp and Paul Sciarra and launched publicly in March 2010. It differs from other large social platforms in a way that has determined everything about it: people use Pinterest to plan rather than to communicate. The dominant activities are finding ideas for a kitchen, a wedding, a meal, an outfit or a holiday and saving them for later, which means the platform's users are frequently in a state of commercial intent, and which is the basis of its advertising business.

That orientation has also given it a materially different social profile from its peers. It has comparatively little of the argument, harassment and political conflict that characterise text-based platforms, its users skew female though less so than in its early years, and it has been used as a counter-example in debates about whether social media is inherently harmful or whether the harms follow from particular design choices.

Pinterest listed on the New York Stock Exchange in April 2019. Bill Ready, formerly of PayPal and Google, became chief executive in June 2022, with Silbermann moving to executive chairman.

History

Founding

Ben Silbermann grew up in Des Moines, Iowa, in a family of doctors, and collected insects as a child, an origin he has cited frequently because the company is fundamentally about collecting. He worked at Google in a non-engineering role, left in 2008 wanting to build something, and with his college friend Paul Sciarra produced Tote, a shopping application for the iPhone that allowed users to browse catalogues.

Tote failed, but its users did something interesting: they saved items they liked rather than buying them, and emailed themselves collections of images. Silbermann and Sciarra concluded that the collecting was the product.

Evan Sharp, an architecture student at Columbia who had worked at Facebook, joined and designed the interface. The defining decision was the grid of images of varying height, known as the masonry or waterfall layout, which fits images of different proportions without cropping and which produces the browsing experience the product depends on. The layout has been copied very widely.

Pinterest launched as a closed beta in March 2010 and grew slowly. Silbermann has described writing personally to the first several thousand users, meeting them, and hosting events at a local boutique in Palo Alto. The company came close to failing and raised money with difficulty; investors repeatedly declined on the reasoning that the product was a scrapbook rather than a business.

Growth arrived in 2011 and was extremely rapid. The platform's early adopters were concentrated in the American Midwest and South rather than in coastal technology circles, and skewed heavily female, which is why Silicon Valley investors had underestimated it and why the company's early growth surprised the industry.

Scale and listing, 2012 to 2019

Pinterest added mobile applications, a follow model based on boards rather than only on people, and in 2013 the Rich Pins format which carried price, availability and source information for products, recipes and articles.

Advertising began in 2014 with Promoted Pins, and the proposition to advertisers was unlike that of other platforms: a user searching for kitchen ideas is not being interrupted by an advertisement for a kitchen, they are looking for one. Pinterest's own research and third-party studies have consistently found higher purchase intent per session than comparable platforms, which supports higher prices per impression and partly compensates for a much smaller audience.

The company raised at increasing valuations through the 2010s, reaching approximately US$12 billion in 2017, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 18 April 2019 at US$19 a share.

Paul Sciarra left operational involvement in 2012 and later became executive chairman of Astra Space.

The pandemic and the correction, 2020 to 2022

The pandemic produced an extraordinary and temporary surge. People confined at home planned renovations, baking, gardening and exercise, which is precisely what Pinterest is for, and monthly active users rose above 470 million by early 2021.

The reversal was equally sharp. Users fell through 2021 and 2022 as normal activity resumed and as changes to Apple's advertising tracking on iOS reduced the measurability of advertising across the industry. The share price, which had exceeded US$85 in early 2021, fell below US$20.

The period also brought serious internal difficulties. In June 2020 Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, two Black former employees in public policy, published detailed accounts of discrimination and retaliation, which prompted a public apology from Silbermann and contributed to Ozoma's subsequent work on the Silenced No More Act in California, which limits the use of non-disclosure agreements to conceal discrimination. In November 2020 the company settled a gender discrimination claim by its former chief operating officer Françoise Brougher for US$22.5 million, among the largest such settlements involving an individual executive, and Brougher published an account describing a culture that excluded senior women from decisions. A shareholder derivative suit was settled in 2021 with a commitment of US$50 million to diversity and workplace reforms.

Bill Ready became chief executive in June 2022. His background in payments, at Braintree, Venmo, PayPal and then Google's commerce organisation, indicated the direction: converting a platform where people plan purchases into one where they make them.

Commerce, artificial intelligence and 2023 to 2026

Under Ready the company has concentrated on shopping and on advertising performance, adding direct links from pins to merchants, a mobile deep-linking arrangement so that a click opens a retailer's application, third-party demand partnerships with Amazon from 2023 and Google from 2024 which fill advertising inventory Pinterest's own sales force cannot, and improved measurement.

The results recovered. Monthly active users passed 600 million in 2025, reaching approximately 619 million, up 12 per cent, with revenue of approximately US$4.2 billion for the year and GAAP net income of US$417 million. First-quarter 2026 revenue exceeded US$1 billion for the first time, at approximately US$1.0075 billion, up 18 per cent.

Artificial intelligence has been applied to recommendation and to search. Lens, the camera search feature introduced in February 2017, which identifies objects photographed by a user and finds visually similar pins and purchasable products, was rebuilt in May 2025 on multimodal vision-language models. The company has also introduced personalised board generation and collage tools.

Generative imagery has also created a problem. Large volumes of low-quality machine-generated content, widely called AI slop, appeared on the platform from 2024, diluting the original material that users came for. Pinterest introduced a "Gen AI" label on 30 April 2025, applied by analysing image metadata and content, and added controls allowing users to see less of it. Reporting in late 2025 indicated that the company had earlier admitted large volumes of generated content in pursuit of engagement metrics and that this had damaged perception of the platform and reduced traffic to original creators, a criticism that goes to the core of what Pinterest is for.

In late April and May 2025 Pinterest removed pins and suspended accounts in very large numbers, citing its community guidelines, producing substantial user anger. The company later attributed the episode to an internal error rather than to a policy change, an explanation that was not universally accepted given the scale, reported in the millions of accounts.

In January 2026 Pinterest announced Bring My Pinterest to Life, a television-style series for Roku debuting in March 2026, and in the same month reduced its workforce by approximately 15 per cent, citing the difficulty of competing for advertising against much larger platforms. In August 2026 it announced a partnership with Zillow allowing advertisers to use Zillow's audience data to target users by housing-related interest.

Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications designated Pinterest as a large-scale specified telecommunications service provider under the Information Distribution Platform Countermeasures Act on 30 May 2025, bringing it within a regulatory regime requiring responsiveness to content removal requests.

Product

Core mechanics

A pin is an image, or increasingly a video, with a link back to its source. A board is a collection of pins on a theme, which may be public or private and which may be shared with collaborators. A user follows boards, people or topics, and the home feed combines followed material with recommendations.

The home feed is generated by a recommendation system rather than chronologically, and Pinterest's engineering on this problem has been substantial and widely published, including work on large-scale embedding systems, graph neural networks over the pin-board graph, and PinSage, a graph convolutional method published in 2018 that was among the first demonstrations of such methods operating at web scale.

Search is central and is unusual in being conducted visually. A large proportion of sessions begin with a query, and Pinterest's queries are distinctive: they are long, descriptive and forward-looking, of the form "small kitchen storage ideas" rather than "buy kitchen cabinet", which is why the platform is described as a discovery engine rather than a social network and why its advertising inventory is valuable.

Lens performs search from the camera. Shop the Look identifies individual products within an image. Try On uses augmented reality for cosmetics and, more recently, furniture placement.

Advertising

Advertising is essentially all of Pinterest's revenue. Formats include standard and video promoted pins, carousels, collections, shopping advertisements drawn from a merchant's catalogue, and idea advertisements.

The commercial argument is intent. On most platforms an advertisement interrupts something else; on Pinterest the advertisement is frequently the thing the user was looking for, which raises click-through and conversion rates. The countervailing weakness is scale: with around 600 million users against several billion for Meta and Google, Pinterest cannot offer reach, and advertisers allocating budget algorithmically will place it where volume and measurement are best.

The third-party demand partnerships with Amazon and Google address this directly by importing advertisements from those platforms' networks into Pinterest inventory, which raises fill rates and prices at the cost of ceding some of the customer relationship.

Advertising revenue is heavily weighted toward the United States and Canada, which produce the majority of revenue from a minority of users, and the company's principal growth opportunity is raising revenue per user in Europe and the rest of the world, where it is a small fraction of the American figure.

Corporate affairs

Bill Ready has been chief executive since June 2022. Ben Silbermann is executive chairman. Evan Sharp left the executive team in 2022 to join the artificial intelligence design company Airbnb-adjacent studio and later returned to an advisory role.

The company has a dual-class share structure giving the founders enhanced voting rights, and is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in a number of countries.

It has repeatedly been the subject of acquisition speculation, most concretely in 2021 when PayPal was reported to be considering a bid at approximately US$45 billion, a report PayPal denied and which moved both companies' shares substantially. Microsoft was also reported to have approached the company in 2020.

Technology

Pinterest's engineering problems are unusual because the object being recommended is an image whose meaning is not contained in text.

Representation

The platform holds many billions of pins, and its core technical asset is a set of learned representations that place visually and semantically similar pins near each other in a high-dimensional space. PinSage, published in 2018 with Stanford collaborators, applied graph convolutional networks to the pin-and-board graph, using the structure of what people have saved together as a signal about what things mean, and was among the first demonstrations of graph neural networks operating at web scale. It remains among the more cited industrial machine learning papers.

Subsequent systems have used unified embeddings serving search, recommendation and advertising from a shared representation, and since 2024 multimodal vision-language models that relate images and text in a single space, which is what allowed the May 2025 rebuild of Lens.

Serving

The home feed is assembled in real time from candidate generation, which retrieves a few thousand plausible pins from billions, followed by ranking, which orders them, and blending, which mixes organic material with advertisements and enforces diversity so that a user saving one picture of a bathroom does not receive only bathrooms.

The company has published extensively on its infrastructure, including its use of approximate nearest neighbour search at scale, its feature store, and its migration to a unified machine learning platform, and it maintains open-source projects including the workflow system Pinball and contributions to Apache Kafka tooling.

Visual search

Lens and the related Shop the Look and visual similarity features are the technical capability Pinterest has invested in most distinctively. Identifying an object within a photograph, distinguishing the sofa from the rug and the lamp, and matching each to purchasable items is a harder problem than whole-image similarity and is directly commercially useful.

The 2025 rebuild on vision-language models allowed queries combining an image with text, so that a user can photograph a chair and ask for the same style in a different colour, which is the kind of query the platform's users had always wanted to make and could not express.

Users and culture

Pinterest reported approximately 619 million monthly active users for 2025. Roughly a quarter are in the United States and Canada, which produce most of the revenue; Europe and the rest of the world account for the majority of users and a minority of revenue.

The user base has historically been predominantly female, at around 70 per cent in the early 2010s, and has broadened since, with male users and users under 25 the fastest-growing segments. The platform reports that more than half of its users are from Generation Z, a shift that has been accompanied by growth in categories including men's fashion, fitness, gaming-adjacent design and, notably, the aesthetic categories that circulate as named visual styles.

The cultural function of the platform is distinctive. It is where a very large proportion of weddings, kitchen renovations, tattoos, recipes and school projects in the English-speaking world are planned, and it has become the principal reference archive for visual style, to the extent that design and fashion trends are frequently identified first through Pinterest search data. The company publishes an annual Pinterest Predicts report drawn from rising searches, which has an unusually good record because the platform's users search for things months before they buy them.

The vocabulary the platform generated, including the pin, the board and the mood board as a general consumer practice, has passed into ordinary use.

Competition

Pinterest competes for advertising budget rather than for time, which makes its competitive set broad.

Meta is the principal competitor for the advertisers Pinterest wants. Instagram in particular overlaps heavily in fashion, home and food, has far greater scale, and has better measurement and targeting infrastructure. Meta's shopping features have repeatedly been built, promoted and de-emphasised, which has spared Pinterest a more serious attack.

TikTok competes for the discovery behaviour that Pinterest depends on, and a substantial proportion of younger users now search for ideas there. The video format suits some categories, particularly recipes and how-to content, better than a static image; it suits others, particularly anything a person wants to save and return to later, considerably worse, because video is difficult to browse.

Google is a competitor in search and a partner in advertising. Google Images and shopping results address the same intent, and Pinterest's traffic from Google search has been a long-standing dependency and a vulnerability, since changes to Google's ranking have repeatedly moved Pinterest's user numbers.

Amazon is both a demand partner and the destination that captures the eventual transaction, which is the structural weakness of Pinterest's position: it generates intent and does not own the purchase.

Smaller competitors include Houzz in home, Etsy in craft and design, and a number of regional platforms, of which Xiaohongshu in China occupies a comparable position in a market Pinterest does not serve.

Financial history

Revenue was approximately US$473 million in 2017, US$756 million in 2018, US$1.14 billion in 2019, US$1.69 billion in 2020, US$2.58 billion in 2021, US$2.80 billion in 2022, US$3.05 billion in 2023, US$3.65 billion in 2024 and approximately US$4.2 billion in 2025.

The company was loss-making on a reported basis for most of its listed life, principally because of stock-based compensation, and reached sustained profitability in 2024 and 2025, reporting GAAP net income of US$417 million for 2025. A very large one-off gain in 2024 from the release of a valuation allowance on deferred tax assets produced an unusually large reported figure for that year.

Monthly active users peaked at approximately 478 million in the first quarter of 2021, fell to around 431 million by early 2022, and then grew consistently to approximately 619 million by the end of 2025.

Average revenue per user is approximately US$7 globally and several times that in the United States and Canada, against figures many times higher for Meta, which is both the measure of the gap and the measure of the opportunity.

Timeline

2008 Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra build Tote, a shopping application, and observe users saving rather than buying.
2009 Pinterest is founded; Evan Sharp designs the grid layout.
2010 The site launches in closed beta in March.
2011 Growth accelerates sharply, concentrated in the American Midwest and South.
2013 Rich Pins add price, availability and source information.
2014 Promoted Pins introduce advertising.
2015 Searches associated with eating disorders are blocked.
2017 Lens introduces camera-based visual search in February.
2018 PinSage is published; political advertising and vaccine misinformation searches are restricted.
2019 Lists on the New York Stock Exchange on 18 April.
2020 Discrimination accounts are published by former employees; the Brougher settlement is US$22.5 million; pandemic usage surges.
2021 Users peak at approximately 478 million and then decline; weight loss advertising is prohibited; PayPal is reported to be considering a bid.
2022 Bill Ready becomes chief executive in June; the Molly Russell inquest names the platform.
2023 The Amazon advertising partnership begins.
2024 The Google partnership begins; users pass 500 million; the company reaches sustained profitability.
2025 Large-scale account removals in April and May are attributed to internal error; Gen AI labelling is introduced on 30 April; Lens is rebuilt on vision-language models in May; Japan designates the platform under its content regulation regime; users reach approximately 619 million.
2026 A Roku series is announced and about 15 per cent of staff are cut in January; a Zillow data partnership is announced in August.

Content policy and criticism

Health and self-harm

Pinterest's visual and aspirational character creates specific risks, and the company's responses have generally come after external pressure.

From 2015 it blocked results for thinspiration and related search terms associated with eating disorders, and partnered with the National Eating Disorders Association to display helpline information when users search for such terms. The measure followed criticism that the platform's imagery, particularly around weight and appearance, contributed to disordered eating.

In 2022 a coroner's inquest in England into the death of Molly Russell, a 14-year-old who died in 2017, concluded that she had died from an act of self-harm while suffering the negative effects of online content, and named Pinterest alongside Instagram. A Pinterest executive gave evidence, acknowledged that the platform had not been safe at the time and apologised, which was noted by observers as a markedly different posture from that taken by Meta's representative. The inquest led to substantial policy attention in the United Kingdom and contributed to the Online Safety Act.

Pinterest has since prohibited advertisements for weight loss products, in 2021, becoming the first large platform to do so, restricted content promoting weight loss claims and before-and-after imagery, and introduced controls allowing users to exclude body type-based recommendations.

Misinformation

Pinterest was among the earliest platforms to take a restrictive approach to health misinformation, blocking searches for vaccine-related terms in 2018 and 2019 rather than attempting to rank reliable content higher, and later returning results only from recognised public health organisations. The approach was cruder than competitors' and was widely regarded as more effective, and it was possible partly because the platform is not a venue for public argument and partly because its commercial interest in engagement on those topics was negligible.

It also prohibited political advertising in 2018 and content promoting conspiracies including QAnon.

Creators and generated content

The platform's relationship with the people who make its content has become its most significant current problem.

Pinterest depends on original images produced by bloggers, photographers, designers and small businesses, who post because the platform sends them traffic. The arrival of very large volumes of machine-generated imagery, which is cheap to produce and optimised for the recommendation system, has diluted that material and reduced the traffic returned to its creators, which weakens the incentive to post.

The Gen AI labelling introduced on 30 April 2025 and the user controls that followed are the company's response. Reporting in late 2025 suggested that the influx had been at least partly the consequence of the company's own pursuit of engagement metrics, and that the strategy risked damaging what the platform is actually valued for.

The large-scale account removals of April and May 2025, attributed by the company to internal error, further damaged the relationship with creators who lost archives built over years.

Copyright

Pinterest's model, in which users post images they did not create, has produced longstanding copyright criticism, most prominently from photographers and illustrators who find their work widely reproduced without attribution or with links to aggregators rather than to the original.

The company relies on the safe harbour provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and operates a takedown process, and has added source attribution features, and the criticism has persisted. A 2021 lawsuit by the photographer Harold Davis alleging that Pinterest displayed his work alongside advertising without permission was dismissed on fair use and safe harbour grounds.

Workplace

The 2020 accounts by Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, and the US$22.5 million settlement with Françoise Brougher in the same year, exposed a culture that the company subsequently acknowledged required change. Ozoma's subsequent advocacy produced California's Silenced No More Act, which prohibits non-disclosure provisions that prevent discussion of discrimination and harassment, making the episode one of the few technology workplace disputes to produce legislation.

The January 2026 reduction of approximately 15 per cent of the workforce is the largest the company has made.

Features and product history

Pinterest's feature set has accumulated over fifteen years and a selection indicates how the product has changed.

Secret boards, introduced in 2012, allowed private collections and were among the most requested features, since a great deal of what people plan, including gifts, weddings and medical matters, is not something they wish to publish.

Guided Search, introduced in 2014, presented descriptive tiles alongside search results to help users narrow a vague query, addressing the fact that the platform's users frequently do not know precisely what they are looking for.

Buyable Pins in 2015 and Shopping Pins subsequently attempted to place the transaction inside Pinterest. The early attempts were withdrawn, because merchants were unwilling to cede the customer relationship and because Pinterest lacked the payments and fulfilment infrastructure. The later approach, deep-linking to the merchant's own application or site, accepts that Pinterest is the top of the funnel rather than the checkout.

Lens in 2017, Shop the Look and Pincodes extended visual search into the physical world.

Story Pins, renamed Idea Pins in 2021, were the company's attempt at short-form video in response to TikTok, and were unusual in not permitting outbound links, which was intended to encourage creators to publish natively and which removed the reason publishers used the platform. The format was de-emphasised from 2023 and links were restored, and the episode is generally regarded as the clearest strategic error of the period: Pinterest copied a format that did not suit its purpose and weakened the mechanism that made it useful to the people supplying its content.

Try On, from 2020, applies augmented reality to cosmetics, eyewear and, later, furniture.

Collages, from 2023, allow users to combine cut-out elements from several pins, which restores something of the physical mood board and which has been popular with younger users.

Boards with AI, introduced in 2025, generate collections from a description, and the personalised shopping features under Ready have been directed at converting saved pins into purchases.

Regulation

Pinterest is subject to the same regulatory framework as other large platforms and, because of its size and its comparatively low level of harmful content, has generally attracted less attention.

The European Union's Digital Services Act imposes obligations on platforms concerning illegal content, transparency and risk assessment; Pinterest falls below the threshold at which the very large online platform obligations apply in some assessments and has committed to the framework regardless. The Digital Markets Act does not designate it as a gatekeeper.

The United Kingdom's Online Safety Act 2023, to which the Molly Russell inquest contributed, imposes duties concerning content harmful to children, and Pinterest has made changes to its recommendation and search behaviour for accounts believed to belong to minors.

Japan's designation of the platform under the Information Distribution Platform Countermeasures Act on 30 May 2025 requires responsiveness to removal requests and transparency about the process.

American regulation has concerned advertising disclosure, children's privacy under COPPA, and, in several state legislatures, proposals addressing design features said to be addictive, to which Pinterest has generally been a less prominent target than video platforms.

Reception

Pinterest occupies an unusual reputational position: it is among the larger consumer internet services and is rarely discussed in the terms applied to its peers.

Users describe it as calm, which is a word almost never used about social media, and surveys of user sentiment have consistently placed it above other platforms on measures of wellbeing and satisfaction. A 2021 study by the company with researchers found that users reported feeling more positive after sessions than before, which is the opposite of the finding for most comparable services and which the company has used in its advertising to brands.

Critics have made three durable arguments. The first is that the platform promotes an aspirational consumerism whose effects on satisfaction and on spending are not benign merely because they are pleasant. The second is that its image culture, particularly around bodies, interiors and weddings, sets standards that are unattainable and that the company's later restrictions on weight loss content acknowledge. The third, more recent, is that a business dependent on the work of creators has not adequately protected them, from copyright infringement, from generated content, or from the account removals of 2025.

Financially the company has been a disappointment relative to its listing, trading for most of its public life below its 2021 peak, and its recovery since 2023 has been built on advertising partnerships with much larger companies rather than on closing the gap with them.

The most common judgement made about Pinterest, in both directions, is that it is worth more than it earns: a service people genuinely like, holding the intent that other companies capture, and unable to convert it.

Assessment

Pinterest is the most instructive counter-example in arguments about social media, because it demonstrates that most of what people object to in the category is a consequence of design rather than of the medium.

The platform is built around what a user intends to do rather than around what other people are saying. There is no feed of opinions, no quote function, no mechanism for pile-ons, and no reward for provocation, because the unit of value is an image saved for later rather than a statement made in public. The result is a service of comparable scale to X that has produced a tiny fraction of the political and social controversy.

It is also, commercially, a much smaller business than its peers, and the two facts are connected. Argument generates engagement, engagement generates impressions, and a platform that declines to host argument forgoes them. Pinterest's answer has been to argue that its impressions are worth more because its users are about to buy something, which is true and which has not been sufficient to close the gap.

The current risk is specific and is not about competition. A platform whose value rests on the quality and originality of what people post is unusually vulnerable to a technology that makes plausible imagery free to produce, and the company appears to have admitted a great deal of it before recognising the cost. Whether Pinterest can restore the distinction between what a person made and what a model generated, and whether its users care enough for the distinction to matter commercially, is the question its next several years will answer.