Pinterest Q2 2021 Results: Loss of Users?

Source: Today in Digital Marketing podcast> https://todayindigital.com/

PINTEREST:
Why Did They Lose Millions of Users?

After 11 quarters of consecutive user growth, Pinterest shared some surprising news with analysts this week in its Q2 reports — a decline in overall users.

Pinterest lost 24 million users over the last three months. 

The company says the re-opening of physical stores is largely the cause here, given that online browsing has dipped.

[]Pinterest is trying to spin itself here as primarily an e-commerce platform, and sure it’s made some big strides to embrace that, but [we] think most people still consider the platform to be a social media site that people use more for visual discovery, design inspiration, and so on. 

Maybe this is just about people having less free time at home now. Pinterest itself acknowledged this in its report, saying:

Given that many of Pinterest’s core use cases (e.g., decor, garden, cooking, DIY) are especially relevant at home, we believe we disproportionately benefited from increased time spent at home during pandemic lockdowns.

They also reported that people who use Pinterest on the web are ‘less engaged and generating less revenue’ than people who use the mobile app.

As for the all-important ARPU metric — that’s Average Revenue Per User — that’s doing just fine. This past Q2 was more than double the revenue per user than Q2 last year.

In terms of top-line revenue, that was up 125% YoY.

So maybe the user loss is more a market correction than anything else. That might explain the awfully cautious language it used in its report:

The evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions remain unknown, and we are not providing guidance on Q3 2021 MAUs given our lack of visibility into certain key drivers of engagement.