Pinterest (NYSE:PINS) executives highlighted continued user momentum alongside a revenue performance they said fell short of the company’s expectations, as tariff-related pressure weighed on ad spending from large retail advertisers. On the company’s fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 earnings call, CEO Bill Ready said Pinterest has produced 10 consecutive quarters of record-high monthly active users (MAUs) and is leaning further into AI-powered visual search and shopping experiences, while also accelerating changes to its sales and go-to-market organization to broaden its advertiser base.
Q4 results: record users, revenue growth, and mixed geographic performance
For the fourth quarter of 2025, CFO Julia Donnelly reported global revenue of $1.319 billion, up 14% year-over-year (or 13% on a constant-currency basis). Global MAUs rose to 619 million, up 12% year-over-year, marking the company’s tenth straight quarter of record-high users.
- U.S. and Canada (UCAN): 105 million MAUs, up 4%
- Europe: 158 million MAUs, up 9%
- Rest of World: 356 million MAUs, up 16%
Revenue also varied by region. UCAN revenue was $979 million, up 9%, while Europe revenue was $245 million, up 25% reported (or 18% constant currency), and Rest of World revenue was $96 million, up 64% on both a reported and constant-currency basis. Donnelly said Europe growth was “lower than our expectations,” citing a “second-order effect” from certain large global retailers pulling back ad spending in Europe as they recalibrated budgets due to tariff and margin pressures.
On advertising dynamics, Donnelly said Q4 ad impressions grew 41%, while ad pricing declined 19% year-over-year, driven primarily by mix shift as ad impressions expand in under-monetized international markets.
AI-led product strategy: visual search, new models, and Pinterest Assistant
Ready positioned Pinterest as a “visual-first shopping assistant and search destination” designed for users with intent who may not know the exact words, brands, or products to search for. He said Pinterest now sees over 80 billion monthly searches on the platform—“most of which are visual”—and generates 1.7 billion monthly outbound clicks.
Ready also described several AI investments and model deployments during 2025:
- OmniSage, trained on Pinterest’s Taste Graph, which he said drove a 450 basis point lift in site-wide saves.
- PinFM, a “foundation ranking model” that distills lifetime user actions into recommendations, which he said drove a 240 basis point increase in saves across the platform.
- Navigator I, a model framework used to fine-tune open-source models, which he said reduces latency and delivers an approximately 90% cost reduction versus using a leading third-party proprietary model.
Ready said Pinterest launched Pinterest Assistant in beta in Q4, describing it as a voice-activated, visual-first conversational assistant. He said users ask a “significantly higher share of commercially-oriented questions” when using the assistant—about 25 percentage points more than traditional text-based search—and that the company expects to “meaningfully broaden access” to U.S. users over the coming months. Ready also noted internal efficiency gains, stating that roughly 50% of Pinterest’s new code is AI-generated.
Revenue headwinds: tariffs, retailer pullbacks, and a push to diversify advertisers
While emphasizing user and engagement growth, Ready said the company “is not satisfied” with Q4 revenue performance. He attributed a meaningful portion of the shortfall to an “exogenous shock” tied to tariffs that have disproportionately affected ad spending from Pinterest’s top retail advertisers.
In response to analyst questions, management said large retail advertisers pulled back on ad spend more than expected in Q4, and that Pinterest felt the impact more than some peers due to its revenue mix. On the home category, management referenced a furniture tariff enacted in October and said the category remained challenged, but performed “generally in line” with expectations at the time of guidance.
Ready said the company’s next phase is to broaden its revenue mix and accelerate its sales and go-to-market transformation, with a focus on mid-market, SMB, and international advertisers. He said Pinterest has historically started with the largest retailers as it built a performance ads platform, which helped improve selection and inventory for shoppers and contributed to paid clicks to advertisers rising roughly fivefold over the last three years, but also increased exposure to this cohort.
Go-to-market changes and Performance+ measurement investments
Pinterest said it is upgrading leadership to drive the next phase of monetization. Ready said Lee Brown joined in late January as Pinterest’s first Chief Business Officer to lead global monetization efforts, and Claudine Cheever joined in February as Chief Marketing Officer. Ready acknowledged the changes could cause “modest disruption” in the near term, and said management built that assumption into Q1 guidance.
Executives repeatedly pointed to measurement and attribution as an area requiring deeper technical expertise and more sophistication. Ready said Pinterest Performance+ is central to serving SMB advertisers and described ongoing enhancements, including pilots that integrate Pinterest bidding with advertisers’ proprietary measurement systems. He said one pilot advertiser increased bids on Pinterest by more than 30% under a value-based optimization approach. Pinterest expects to expand the pilot to additional large advertisers in the first half of 2026 and later enable deeper direct integrations with measurement partners to support automated two-way data transfers.
Ready also discussed a beta feature for Pinterest Performance+ New Customer Acquisition, saying initial testing showed new customer conversions increased by an average of 64% versus control campaigns without the feature enabled.
Profitability, capital return, and Q1 2026 outlook
For Q4, Donnelly reported Adjusted EBITDA of $542 million, with an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 41%, up 20 basis points from the prior year period. Cost of revenue was $221 million, up 15% year-over-year, which Donnelly attributed to increased infrastructure spending tied to user and engagement growth. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $562 million, up 13%, driven by headcount investments in sales and marketing and R&D, as well as legal costs and the lapping of prior-year insurance proceeds affecting G&A.
For full-year 2025, Donnelly said free cash flow increased 33% to $1.25 billion, compared with full-year adjusted EBITDA of $1.27 billion, implying 99% free cash flow conversion. Pinterest ended 2025 with $2.5 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities. Donnelly said the company allocated $500 million to share repurchases in Q4, bringing full-year repurchases to $927 million (a total of 30 million shares), and also used $399 million for net share settlement of equity awards.
Looking to the first quarter of 2026, Pinterest guided to revenue of $951 million to $971 million, representing 11% to 14% year-over-year growth. Donnelly said the outlook assumes foreign exchange will be about a three-point tailwind. The company guided to Q1 adjusted EBITDA of $166 million to $186 million.
For 2026, Donnelly said Pinterest is making investments in GPU capacity to enable AI initiatives and expects “modest headwinds” from cost of revenue as a percentage of revenue, noting diminishing returns from prior infrastructure cost optimization. She said Pinterest announced a restructuring in January to simplify operations and increase efficiency, generating approximately $100 million of annualized non-GAAP operating expense savings, with roughly half expected to be reinvested in sales transformation and AI talent.
The company said it expects full-year 2026 adjusted EBITDA margin to be roughly in line with 2025 at approximately 30%, excluding the tvScientific acquisition. Donnelly added that if the acquisition closes in Q1 or Q2, it is expected to create an approximately 100 basis point drag to adjusted EBITDA margin in 2026, leading to about 29% overall on a combined basis.
About Pinterest (NYSE:PINS)
Pinterest, Inc operates a visual discovery platform that helps users find inspiration and ideas for projects ranging from home design and fashion to cooking and travel. Users create and curate “Pins” — images or videos linked to content — organized on thematic boards. The service is available through its website and mobile applications and emphasizes personalized recommendations and visual search to surface relevant content based on user interests.
The company’s primary revenue model is advertising, offering promoted content formats that integrate into user feeds and search results.
