Pros - there is some growth:
- User base grew to 367 million monthly active users in Q1, up 26% from last year.
- Q1 revenue came in at $272 million, up ~35% quarter on quarter.
Cons - the growth is slowing and they couldn’t capitalise on the Covid-19 lockdowns and resulting e-commerce jump:
- The user growth has been slowing.
- Pinterest’s revenue for April was down 8% compared to April 2019, showing they didn’t capitalise on the lockdown.
Pinterest’s revenue comes from digital advertising, which needs two things:
- A lot of users, and the above chart shows a lot (although far from the behemoth known as Facebook of course), but growth seems low (depending on how you look at it).
- Advertising spend. According to friends at digital advertising agencies, was quite a bit down in April but came somewhat (but far from entirely) back up in May.
I’ve been looking at e-commerce companies like Boohoo and Etsy that benefited a lot from what our American friends call the health crisis. Too bad Pinterest never properly got into social commerce as they said they would.
Unfortunately, advertising-driven businesses got the short end of the stick, but that might make Pinterest attractive at the right price point. It’s still a smaller user base that can grow and it has leadership in its niche, but it might as well suffer for years due to the epidemic induced advertising spend issues.
TLDR: Maybe, but not for me right now.