• by Colin Kirkland , February 7, 2025

In the competitive world of social media, Pinterest's “joy revolution” seems to be working.

In its latest quarterly report, the platform built on its success in Q3, hitting its first billion-dollar revenue quarter. As it continues to develop its AI ad tools and in-app shopping capabilities, Pinterest reached an all-time high in users, reported its biggest holiday shopping season to date and grew clicks for advertisers.

In Q4, Pinterest made $1.15 billion in revenue, bringing its yearly revenue up to $3.6 billion for 2024 and doubling its growth rate from 2023.

In its 15-year history as an app, this is the first time Pinterest has ever reached $1 billion in a single quarter -- showcasing the platform's potential as a main hub for social commerce and product discovery.

Unlike other leading social-media platforms, data shows that Pinterest users come to the app with the intent to shop and discover products.

“People don't come to us for entertainment,” Pinterest's Chief Content Officer Malik Ducard told MediaPost ahead of the company's earnings report. “When users come through the Pinterest front door, it is not a lean-back, passive entrance; our users come in leaning forward, they're looking to do, discover -- to act.”

Over the past year, Pinterest has focused on channeling this natural user intent into revenue and full-funnel opportunities for brands, building out its repertoire of AI-powered ad tools and holiday-specific product initiatives.

In Q4, Pinterest says retailers took advantage of celebrity and publisher-created gift guides, promotion ads, and Pinterest Performance+ tools, with an enhanced focus on the lower-funnel driving more returns for advertisers and growing clicks to advertisers by 90%.

As the company spends more on sales and marketing, with an increase of 10% year-over-year -- as well as its research and development expenses, which double that -- Pinterest is particularly focused on building out its visual search capabilities through AI automation.

“AI is not only powering our visual search and content understanding,” Ducard told MediaPost. “It's supercharging the content understanding and the associations of what content goes with what content, and what items go with what content.”

In other words, the company is using AI to hash out signals within the 1.5 billion saves, or pins, created every a week -- as well as the 10 billion user-curated content boards on the platform.

As a result, Pinterest says it had its biggest holiday shopping season-to-date, seeing its highest volume of revenue ever during Cyber 5 -- the five-day period between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday.

In addition, Pinterest reported an all-time high in its number of users, with 553 million monthly actives, showing growth of 11%.

The platform surpassed 100 million monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic, and added significantly more users in Europe, where it was on track to lose ground versus the beginning of last year.