Why is Pinterest losing advertisers?

Pinterest is in a tough spot right now.

Last week, the social media platform that acts like a digital vision board posted disappointing Q4 results and issued a weak outlook for Q1. The company posted $4.2 billion in full-year revenue for 2025 and $1.32 billion in revenue for Q4, pointing to 16% YoY growth and 14% YoY growth, respectively.

Pinterest CEO Bill Ready blamed tariffs for the company’s weak performance.

“We are not satisfied with our Q4 revenue performance and believe it does not reflect what Pinterest can deliver over time,” he told investors on an earnings call. Ready added that the Pinterest advertiser base, which leans heavily on large retailers, slashed ad spending in response to tariff pressures.

In Q4, Pinterest CFO Julia Donnelly reported that Pinterest’s largest retail advertisers “created a more meaningful headwind than we expected as they sought to protect their margins in this dynamic environment and pulled back on ad spend.” The social media platform expects growth in Q1 to further slow down with estimated revenue to come in between $951 million and $971 million.

Pinterest has quietly become one of Gen Z’s favorite planning tools and visual search engines. But despite Gen Z making up more than half of Pinterest’s user base, and Pinterest making improvements to its ad tools, advertisers aren’t prioritizing the platform—choosing to funnel budgets toward Meta and Google instead. According to ad experts, Pinterest hasn’t moved with the pace of AI innovation, and last month, the platform cut about 15% of its workforce.

“When it comes to Pinterest, it’s been tough, because [while] they entered the AI space almost two years ago with some of the launches they announced, but they were still very late to the game,” Katya Constantine, CEO of agency Digishopgirl Media, told Retail Brew. “It takes time for those products to mature, and because the space changed so fast, their tools—when it comes to this AI infrastructure world—are just not quite there yet.”

Zoom out: In October 2025, Pinterest rolled out a new where-to-buy links feature to make ads more shoppable by letting people tap once to see multiple in-stock retailer options for a single product. Two years ago, it introduced an AI-based ad tool kit called Performance+ to drum up retail advertiser interest.

Still, among Constantine’s client base, roughly 80% are no longer spending on Pinterest compared to the same time last year. However, Constantine said she is not ruling out the possibility of advertising on Pinterest later in 2026, as the ad market can change quickly.

“What Pinterest has going for it is it has an incredibly large and loyal customer base, and that customer base focuses on things which are aspirational,” Constantine said, referring to the 619 million people using the platform. “And because of it, Pinterest is not going away, but from an advertising perspective, it’s just tougher.”

“I do believe that they’re making the right capabilities enhancements,” Constantine added. “It’s just that the space is evolving very fast.”

Literally searching for it: Pinterest is reportedly trying to incentivize advertisers to stay on the platform with things like ad credits, Constantine added, without sharing specifics because she is not authorized to. Other major social media platforms, from Snap to Google and Meta, have offered ad credits to bring people back to their platforms.

“We are seeing a little bit of that, and that is usually one of the ways that we can get our funds to approve a test budget,” she said.

According to Jack Dunphy, social media and sponsored content specialist at NBCU, ad platforms are now competing for advertiser diversity, not just user growth. “The healthiest ad ecosystem isn’t the one with the biggest brands,” Dunphy wrote in a LinkedIn post. “It’s the one with the most brands.”

Still, Ready highlighted the positives including a stat that Pinterest processes 80 billion searches in a month, more than the 75 billion monthly user prompts ChatGPT sees, making it one of the largest search destinations in the world. The challenge now is converting that engagement into advertiser spend.

“So we have talked about how we needed to go from winning that engagement to then getting the advertisers behind that and then getting measurement so they could see that and lean more into their budgets,” he said.

Ultimately, Pinterest is still one of the few mostly positive places online. Constantine said Pinterest is in a “state of regrouping.”