Pinterest, Inc.

Good afternoon. Thank you for attending today's Pinterest first quarter 2022 earnings call. My name is Bethany, and I will be your moderator for today's call. All lines will be muted during the presentation portion of the call with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to our host, Neil Doshi, head of investor relations with Pinterest. Please go ahead.

Thanks, Bethany. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us. Welcome to Pinterest Earnings Call for the first quarter ended March 31, 2022. I'm Mule Doshi, Head of Investor Relations for Pinterest. Joining me today on the call are Ben Silverman, Pinterest President and CEO, and Todd Morgenfeld, our Chief Financial Officer and Head of Business Operations. Now we'll cover the safe harbor. Some of the statements we make today regarding our performance, operations, and outlook, including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, may be considered forward-looking, and such statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. In addition, our results, trends, and outlook for Q2 2022 and beyond are preliminary and are not an indication of future performance. We are making these forward-looking statements based on information available to us as of today, and we disclaim any duty to update them later unless required by law. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in our most recent form, 10Q or 10K, filed with the SEC and available on the investor relations section of our website. During this call, we will present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP measures is included in today's earnings press release, and letter to shareholders, which are distributed and available to the public through our investor relations website located at investor.pinterestinc.com. And now we'll turn the call over to Ben.

Hi, everyone. We appreciate you joining the call. We'll open up with some comments and then take your questions. But just before we get started, I wanted to express on behalf of our entire company that our hearts continue to go out to all those impacted by what's happening in Ukraine. We had members of our team who lived in the region and are now thankfully safe, and I'm proud of how our company came together to support humanitarian efforts for Ukrainians. We'll continue to keep everyone affected in our thoughts during this unimaginable time. Turning to the business, a few minutes ago we released our Q1 shareholder letter. Revenue is strong with 18% year-over-year growth to $575 million. This was due to strength from retail advertisers, our international business, and our managed SMB advertisers, all of which offset the economic weakness we're seeing in CPG and in Europe because of the war. Meanwhile, we continue to face engagement headwinds. We had 433 million global monthly active users, down 9% compared to Q1 last year, a quarter that was driven by pandemic-influenced growth. We also felt the impacts of lower traffic from search and time spent by people on competitive platforms. We're doing a number of things to improve the Pinner experience and tackle engagement headwinds head on. In the near term, we're applying sophisticated machine learning to every aspect of our platform. As a result, we've seen marked improvements in the relevance of home feed recommendations, the quality of search results, and engagement with notifications. All of these enhance the quality of our platform for pinners and are leading indicators of deeper user engagement. We also plan to launch a global brand awareness and comprehension marketing campaign starting in Q3. In the medium term, we continue to invest in a rich content ecosystem with publishing tools that allow creators to publish rich lifestyle content onto Pinterest. And we're also allowing people to take the content they find and create on Pinterest and share that inspiration with their friends, family, and followers across the internet. To do this well, we're also working to connect pinners with the most inspirational creators and native content in dynamic formats like short-term video. As we've discussed in past calls, this investment has come at the cost of some MEUs in the short term as we get the ecosystem off the ground. But we're committed to this strategy because we believe it will drive engagement over time and because we believe that native content, and video in particular, is fundamental to helping people get inspiration and shop in the future. In 2021, I'm especially proud of our teams that laid the foundation for a native content ecosystem. It's gaining traction. The number of video idea pins is up 15 times year over year, and this content is resonating with more and more people as we continue to see that pinners who follow multiple creators visit Pinterest more often compared to those who do not. We plan to continue building new publishing tools with the help of our new acquisition, Vochi, so creators can make even better content, content that's not only entertaining but helps move our user base from inspiration all the way to action, content worth saving. We're also expanding rewards to bring on more inspirational creators to Pinterest. Finally, we continue to invest in making Pinterest a shopping destination, and we've taken some big steps here. We launched the Pinterest API for shopping to help merchants and give pinners real-time information about the products they see, from pricing to availability. We also started beta testing Your Shop, which uses our unique ability to understand tastes and preferences to deliver an experience for each pinner that's personalized to them. This work is fundamental to our vision, so users can not only come to Pinterest with the expectation of being inspired, but also know that they can turn those inspirations into a reality with purchases. Across the board, we continue to make progress in helping pinners grow from the spark of inspiration through to buying, making, trying, and doing. We're confident that our strategy will deliver great results for pinners, creators, advertisers, merchants, and to our business. And we remain excited about the enormous opportunity to help people live a life they truly love. With that, I'll turn it over to Todd to give you more color into the business.