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Foreign welcome back to the Simple Pen Podcast. I'm your host Kate all, and this is Kate's Take number five. If you're new to this, we are doing these every other week on our podcast, audio only only in the podcast feed and it gives me an opportunity to share with you my thoughts in five minutes or less. So here we go. Lately I've been asking myself the question, where is Pinterest going and how does it serve creators as their founding business adopters, our team has actively been investing in e commerce sellers as Pinterest has given us clear signals since 2022 that it is headed in that direction. From the hiring of bill ready from PayPal and Venmo to his stacking of the C Suite team with other E Commerce Forward C Suite leaders, the writing on the wall has been clear. E commerce is the path forward. But that still leaves that question so where do creators fit as content is one of the number one ways that you warm up a buyer to make a decision. And then the other question is, do people on Pinterest still find content more discoverable than e commerce products? Lately I've been playing around with Pinterest more as a user. I highly recommend you do this as well. I wanted to see what was going to come up for me. Of course you have the typical AI slop, which is generally around the Internet everywhere, but products are definitely something that comes up strong in my feed the moment I give the algorithm any signal of what I like. So I'm going to Spain in the fall for my 50th birthday. We're going to spend two weeks exploring the country with friends and I cannot wait. By the way. I have moved from Croatia to Montenegro to Albania to Corfu to Sicily and I finally settled on Spain with the help of Claude, my AI chatbot and it's been so fun. But I digress. I've already started looking at clothes and new swimsuits and the moment I clicked on a suit, my feet was completely flooded with resort wear and more swim. It was really hard to find content, but now I'm searching for tips on Spain and it's back. So that being said, search is still alive and well. In fact, Pinterest in Q4 2025 investor report said they have more searches than chat GPT, which is impressive. Also, users grew to 614 million monthly users. I really didn't expect that, but something lacked in their report and caused the stock to dip significantly. Advertisers were impacted by strong headwinds due to tariffs. Let me use English. Those were their words, not mine. So that's why we're going to use English. So what does that mean? E commerce sellers on a large scale think Target and Walmart were hit super hard. So essentially they pulled back all their advertising dollars. Well, not all of them, but a big significant amount of them on Pinterest. Which means they didn't make as much money as the market had predicted. Hence the stock dive. So Q A new C Suite member who specifically targeting small and medium sized businesses for advertising. Those who are selling products are prime for spending money on Pinterest ads. Our clients proved this out with our E commerce sellers having some of the Highest ROI in Q4 of 2025. Last I'll say this, we are leaning into also experimenting with Substack and how to leverage Pinterest for growth of subscribers. We have two accounts running the experiment right now and they are eager to prove out this model by going through our accelerator model first and then transitioning into ads. Our team is is so curious and so excited. We are absorbing everything that we possibly can. So is Pinterest dead for creators in 2026? I don't think so. It's definitely a question I ask every year and have been asked, but I think the old models might not be working. It's time to think about it differently and more creatively enter this whole experiment with Substack. So that's what I have for you today. Just to think on how we can use Pinterest differently and in a new way that we weren't using it before to get out of our habits. And this is important for those listening who they are still putting priority on Pinterest marketing. And I would assume if you're listening to this podcast, you are putting a priority on Pinterest marketing because it matters in your business. So take time to use the app to play around with it and see what comes up in your search results and share this with a friend. If somebody else is asking this question about where do creators fit? Or is Pinterest Dead in 2026? Share this episode with them and have a great conversation about it. You can always email me with your thoughts@hellosimplepinmedia.com we would love to hear from you. Alrighty. Thanks so much for listening.