Loading summary
Transcript13 lines
- [00:00]
Indiana University Narrator
Indiana University strengthens tomorrow's workforce with practical real world experience. IU grads make a difference in your community, serving as teachers, nurses and engineers who rise to tomorrow's challenges and meet them. Learn more at iu. Edu Impact
- [00:20]
Bloomberg Host
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio News Shares Pinterest best day in a year currently up 11%. The company reporting first quarter sales that top down its estimates and forecast revenue exceeding Wall street expectations too already. Pinterest CEO joins us now exclusively. It's great to speak with you, Bill. What's, what's driving the growth?
- [00:45]
Bill Ready
Thanks for having me on. So you know, we're really encouraged by the growth on the platform. It's 11 straight quarters of record high users, 10 straight quarters of double digit growth in users. And at the core of that is that we' we've really turned Pinterest into an AI powered shopping assistant that is really, really winning with with users, especially Gen Z, that's now more than half our platform and our fastest growing demographic. You know, Pinterest is where Gen Z goes to shop and that's been really great for users and increasingly advertisers are leaning into that and you see that reflected in our results.
- [01:18]
Bloomberg Host
So ad targeting improves, we can see more efficiency. But look, you're getting 80 billion monthly searches, as you say, record high views. What is the strategy here term? Because already you're seeing the efficiency in a flywheel.
- [01:33]
Bill Ready
That's right. So we've shared that we have more than 80 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 in sort of consumer versus enterprise. But even within consumer there are a lot of different use cases and we 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 of those 80 billion searches per month, more than half of them are commercial, which is a much more significant skew towards commerciality than most chat bots would have and that you would see in sort of, you know, historical general purpose search. So it really has become a great shopping destination for, for our users.
- [02:29]
Bloomberg Host
It's interesting those chat Bots had been sort of some of the investor an that this is where competition is coming from in visual search it is Google, it is OpenAI and the others. But. But how dependent are you on other frenemies, shall we say, for the large language models? You're, you're training your own, but how much are you using underlying models of others?
- [02:49]
Bill Ready
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 that through our own compact fit for purpose mod 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 10% of the cost. And in terms of shopping, we've shared that we're able to get to 30% 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 model so powerful, it's not just the models themselves. AI doesn't have taste or style. Humans have taste and 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 is users 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.
- [04:07]
Bloomberg Host
It's not just signal on your platform. Platform though you've been doing M and A. Talk to us about TV scientific and why you're going into performance driven sort of TV ads.
- [04:17]
Bill Ready
Yes. So you know, we now objectively 630 million plus users, you know, in 80 billion searches 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. Is Connected TV being one of the fastest growing areas of ads of ad demand? It's projected to surpass linear TV in 2028. 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 our, on this most recent call that when we add Pinterest audience data to TV Scientific's capabilities, the company that we acquired in Q1, we see a 65% 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 connected tv, you actually see more things. You say, oh, that's actually a product that would be useful for me. And so it's a great thing for users too.
- [05:24]
Bloomberg Host
It's interesting. It's almost feels like diversification briefly. Bill but there's also this moment of, of Gen Z and teen bands. How do you see that as your role in social media right now? Briefly?
- [05:36]
Bill Ready
Yes. So we've talked about this before and I've been very outspoken on this publicly. When I came into Pinterest as 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 16 approximately three years ago. We're the first and still the only platform to do that. And so I have publicly advocated for the fact that social media, as currently configured, is not safe for users under 16. So we turned off social features three years ago. We actually think it's quite an encouraging thing to see regulators around the world starting to really pay attention to that.
- [06:12]
Bloomberg Host
We have to leave it there. Thank you so much for talking to us through your numbers and your focus. Bill Ready Pinterest CEO when you're running
- [06:19]
The Hartford Narrator
a business, the best days are the ones where priorities stay on track. For midsize and large companies, risk can affect multiple parts of the organization at once, from property and liability to cyber and regulatory challenges. At that level, managing risk becomes an ongoing discipline. At the Hartford, the focus is on helping businesses manage risk before it turns into something more disruptive. And when losses do happen, that work is paired with insurance coverage shaped by years of underwriting, risk engineering and claims experience. Learn more@thehartford.com Riskmitigation policies provided by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its property and casualty affiliates, Hartford, Connecticut.