Pinterest Sets Record User Growth, Expands Shopping Features

Pinterest has reported a strong Q3 performance in its latest earnings report, adding 15 million monthly active users and reaching a new record of 537 million MAUs globally. This marks significant momentum compared to the 4 million users added in Q2 of this year, and marks some significant growth ahead of the holiday season.

As Pinterest’s global user base expands, its primary revenue-generating markets in the U.S. and EU have plateaued. While having more users in any market still means a notable boost to the revenue that the platform is generating, Pinterest is under some pressure to figure out why these major markets are stagnating, and to find a way to encourage more growth ahead of the incredibly-important holiday spending increases.

Pinterest also posted 18% year-over-year revenue growth, bringing in $898 million for the quarter, largely fueled by its growing emphasis on shopping. The platform has integrated more AI features, such as “Body Type Filters” for tailored product recommendations and AI tools for ad creation to enhance user experience and improve product discovery for brands. However, with research and development costs up nearly 25% this year, these upgrades required some risk to fully prepare and deploy.

Shopping is likely to be the platform’s short-term focus ahead of Christmas, but might also beocme a long-term priority if user growth continues to rise so rapidly. This likely hinges on those key EU and U.S. markets, which hold the most potential revenue for the platform if the user counts begin to climb again.