640 million people now come to Pinterest every month. We’ve reached record users for 12 straight quarters.1 Gen Z now represents more than half of our audience and is our largest, fastest growing demographic.2
Consumers are ready for a real alternative to the attention-hacking that has come at such great cost to them. People know when an experience is designed for them, and when it’s just designed to harvest their attention. Whether it is designed to be additive, or addictive. And they’re choosing accordingly.
You can see it well beyond Pinterest. Parents, schools, and young people themselves are pushing back. This isn’t just a trend. It’s a verdict.
So let’s be honest about what people are rejecting. Somewhere along the way, this industry lost sight of its purpose. Success got measured by how much of people’s attention could be captured, not by whether they got anything worthwhile out of it. And an entire generation of young people bore the cost.
For more than a decade, young people have been treated as test subjects in the largest social experiment in history. The costs of that experiment are only now coming into full view: in classrooms, at our kitchen tables, and yes, in courtrooms too.
The biggest platforms in this industry knew what their products were doing to kids, and they kept optimizing for engagement anyway. Because it was working.
And look, parental controls and screen-time limits may help at the margins. But thicker filters don’t make cigarettes less addictive. And guardrails won’t fix a business model built to keep people glued to a screen.
Now, with AI, they’re running the same play again, faster and at a scale that will make the last decade look quaint. Except this time, the product doesn’t just decide what a kid looks at. It talks back, pretending to be a friend, and competing to replace real human connection.
I’m a parent. I know many of you are too. And I don’t accept that. Pinterest has never accepted that. And you don’t have to, either.
You didn’t build this. And nobody in this room wants to advertise in a place that harms kids. You just haven’t had an alternative.
If you wanted reach, you invested in the biggest platforms, whether or not you liked how they operated. Now the old paths to traffic are disappearing. And you’re being asked to grow in an AI-native world, with less clarity than ever about where your next dollar should go. But your customers are moving on.
And I’m not here to ask you to do the right thing at the expense of your business. We’re here to prove it’s possible to have a good business by doing the right thing, for us and for all of you.
