Pinterest said in its latest earnings call that the service now has 450 million monthly active users worldwide, a 4% year-over-year increase. The company noted that while the user base in the United States and Canada remained at 95 million, growth in other regions contributed to the milestone.
The social media company, which launched a short video product called Idea Pins in 2021, aims to grow its footprint on the format and monetize it as well.
“Long term, we also want to make every pin shoppable. To that end, we’re making video content on Pinterest more actionable using the same playbook we applied to static images. Over the course of this year, we’ll be rolling out our technology computer vision on our video corpus to find products and videos and make them shoppable,” company CEO Bill Ready said on the earnings call.
Ready mentioned that the video offering on the platform grew 30% quarter-over-quarter thanks to Gen Z users, who contributed half of the video pins on Pinterest in the fourth quarter. The good news for the company is that videos contribute a good chunk of its revenue.
“It’s important to note that while we’re seeing over 10% of our engagement is on video, it’s over 30% of our revenue on short-form video,” the CEO said.
Last June, Pinterest introduced short video ads as part of the “Idea Ads” project. At that time, the company noted that in addition to generating clicks, businesses could also use the format to generate brand awareness. Later in July, the social network also brought support for video assets in product catalogs. To make short videos more appealing, in October Pinterest partnered with major labels like Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG to allow users to add licensed music to their clips.
Other big names in the short video world are also exploring different ways to monetize. YouTube began testing a shopping feature for Shorts last November. In June, TikTok began experimenting with a dedicated shopping feed to showcase products.
In December, Amazon launched a new feed called Inspire, which is a mix of short videos and photos to give users ideas about shopping. Currently available to US-based customers, this feed also features content from influencers, brands, and other users.
Pinterest doesn’t seem to care. The company believes that just as it used images in a unique way, it would be able to do something remarkable with video. The social network believes its approach is different from other short video apps that want users to sit back and entertain themselves while scrolling through clips.
“We have the user in a lean-and-go mode, you know, where we think purchasable content, that kind of stuff, would be much better received by our users. And so that’s, you know, a big part of, you know, what comes next for us, you know, is we look at how we do video shuffle,” Ready said.
The company uses its artificial intelligence and computer vision team to identify products and trends in the video so the platform can return better results for search terms.
In the past two months, Pinterest has made two job cuts that affected more than 5% of its workforce. The company also shut down one of its creator rewards programs in November to “focus on other creator programs and features.”
