Pinterest said during its latest earnings call that the service now has 450 million monthly active users worldwide, up 4% year over year. The company noted that while its user base in the US and Canada remained at 95 million, growth in other regions contributed to this milestone.
The social media company, which launched a short video product called Idea Pins in 2021, wants to increase its footprint across the format and monetize it as well.
“In the long term, we also want to make every pin shoppable. That’s why we’re making video content on Pinterest more usable with the same playbook we’ve applied to static images. During the course of this year, we will deploy our computer vision technology across our video corpus to find products and videos and make them shoppable,” said the company’s CEO, Bill Ready, during the earnings call.
Ready reported that video content on the platform grew 30% quarter-over-quarter thanks to Gen Z users, who contributed to half of video Pins on Pinterest in Q4. The good news for the company is that videos contribute to a large portion of its revenue.
“Importantly, while we see that over 10% of our engagement is on video, over 30% of our revenue is on short videos,” said the CEO.
Last June, Pinterest introduced short video ads as part of the “Idea Ads” project. At the time, the company noted that in addition to generating clicks, companies could also use the format to generate brand awareness. Later in July, the social network also brought support for video items in product catalogs. To make short videos more appealing, Pinterest partnered with major labels like Warner Music Group, Warner Chappell Music, Merlin and BMG in October to allow users to add licensed music to their clips.
Other big names in the short video world are looking at other ways to monetize as well. YouTube started testing a shopping feature for Shorts last November. In June, TikTok began experimenting with a dedicated shopping feed to showcase products.
In December, Amazon launched a new feed called Inspire, a mix of short videos and photos to give users ideas about shopping. This feed is currently available to US-based customers and also includes content from influencers, brands, and other users.
However, Pinterest doesn’t seem to be concerned about this. The company believes that just as it used images in a unique way, it could do something remarkable with video. The social network thinks its approach differs from other short video apps that aim to let users relax as they scroll through clips.
“We have the user in a hunched over and tent mode, you know, where we think shoppable content, this sort of thing, would be much better received by our users. And so, that’s, you know, a big part of, you know, what comes next for us, you know, is we look at how we do video shuffle,” Ready said.
The company uses the help of its AI and computer vision team to identify products and trends in the video so that the platform can provide better results for search terms.
In the past two months, Pinterest has cut two jobs that have affected more than 5% of its workforce. The company also shut down one of its creator rewards programs in November to “focus on other creator programs and features.”
