Pinterest stock price: PINS soars as digital advertising market rebounds for tech platforms

Investors in Pinterest are waking up to a very nice Halloween treat this morning: Shares in the image-sharing social media platform are skyrocketing after the company posted better-than-expected Q3 numbers yesterday. Here’s what you need to know.

What’s happened? Pinterest shares (ticker: PINS) are surging in pre-market trading this morning, up over 17% to $29.40 as of the time of this writing. Shares in the image-sharing website haven’t traded that high since January 2022.
Why are PINS shares spiking? In short, investors are feeling pretty good about the company’s Q3 2023 numbers. Pinterest announced its quarterly earnings yesterday, which saw the company’s revenue increase 11.5% to $763.2 million for the quarter. As Reuters notes, the results meant Pinterest has an earning per share of 28 cents—far outpacing the EPS of 20 cents that Wall Street was expecting.
What drove Pinterest’s better-than-expected earnings? There were a few things, but the most important one was better advertising revenue. For much of the past year, ad revenues across tech platforms have been softer as companies dealt with surging inflation and economic uncertainty. Such headwinds caused many advertisers to scale back their marketing, impacting ad revenue at various tech platforms. But Pinterest’s better-than-expected earning shows advertisers are coming back—and not just to Pinterest. Last week, Facebook parent Meta and Snapchat parent Snap both reported recovering ad revenue, suggesting a positive industry-wide trend.
Was there any other good news for Pinterest? Yes. The company’s all-important global monthly active users (MAUs) metric, which measures how many users are active on the platform each month, was also up. Its MAUs rose 8% to 482 million—putting it close to the half-a-billion user mark. (You can read more about Pinterest’s timeline and growth story on Fast Company Premium in a series published earlier this month.)
What about the Israel-Hamas war’s impact on advertising? Geopolitical conflicts often cause some major advertisers to pause or soften ad spend, and the impact of the Israel-Hamas war on advertising has been no different. As CNBC notes, both Snap and Facebook said last week that they saw ad spending soften with the outbreak of the conflict. Pinterest acknowledged ad softening related to the outbreak of the conflict, too—but its CEO said the company has since seen big advertisers return.
What else has Pinterest had to say about its recovering fortunes? In a recent interview with Fast Company, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready said he had been looking to transform the platform into a kind of happy place for the internet. “One of the things that we have shifted since I got here is being comfortable running our own race,” he said. “We’ve talked a lot about positivity, for example, and how we want to create a more positive platform. I’m quite happy we’re not a place you go to get the news—and I don’t think we want to be.”