Pinterest said during its latest earnings call that the service now has 450 million monthly active users globally, a 4% jump year-on-year. The company noted that while the user base in the U.S. and Canada stayed at 95 million, growth in other regions contributed to this milestone.
The social media company, which debuted a short video product called Idea Pins in 2021, aims to grow its footprint over the format and monetize it as well.
“Over the 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 deploying our computer vision technology across our video corpus to find products and videos and make them shoppable,” the company’s CEO Bill Ready said during the earnings call.
Ready mentioned that the video supply on the platform grew by 30% quarter-over-quarter thanks to Gen Z users, who contributed to half of the video pins on Pinterest in Q4. The good news for the company is that videos are contributing to a good chunk of its revenue.
“Importantly, while we’re seeing more than 10% of our engagement is on video, more than 30% of our revenue is on short-form video,” the CEO said.
Last June, Pinterest introduced short video advertising under the “Idea Ads” project. At that time, the company noted that apart from generating clicks, companies 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 engaging, in October, Pinterest partnered with major labels like Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG to let users add licensed music to their clips.
Other big names in the short video world are also looking at different ways of monetization. YouTube started testing a shopping feature for Shorts last November. In June, TikTok started experimenting with a dedicated shopping feed to highlight 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 for U.S.-based customers, this feed has content from influencers, brands and other users too.
Pinterest doesn’t seem to worry about this though. The company believes that just like it made use of images in a unique way, it would be able to do something remarkable with video. The social network thinks that its approach is different from other short video apps that want users to sit back and get entertained while scrolling through clips.
“We have the user in a lean-forward and tent mode, you know, where we think shoppable content, these kinds of things, would be much more well received by our users. And so, that’s, you know, a big part of, you know, what comes next for us, you know, is that we’re looking at how we make video shuffle,” Ready said.
The company is taking the help of its AI and computer vision team to identify products and trends within the video so the platform can return better results for search terms.
In the last two months, Pinterest has made two job cuts that have affected more than 5% of its workforce. The company also shut down one of its creator reward programs in November to “focus on other creator programs and features.”
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