Pinterest Stock Up 35% 6 Months After New CEO Arrived

Pinterest stock has risen 35% since the arrival of new CEO Bill Ready in June.

It’s a shift that’s happened as the platform works to attract advertisers and ride a social commerce wave, while many of its social media rivals face a variety of struggles.

Ready was named CEO in late June, joining Pinterest following two years at Google, where he had served as head of commerce.

“Having built multiple businesses from zero and operated at the scale of billions of users, I have a deep appreciation for what it takes to scale a business like this to the next level,” he said at the time.

As PYMNTS wrote a day after Ready’s appointment, the new CEO and his team had their “work cut out as Pinterest is lagging in the pandemic eCommerce boom, handing in unimpressive financials in recent quarters and being eclipsed by more sales-focused rivals.”

The previous months had seen the company lose suitors and users, with its market value declining by nearly three-quarters in the prior year.

The company’s stock shot up 20% one month after his arrival, as Ready told investors he planned to tap into and monetize the ailing platform’s unique potential.

“Pinterest has inspiration, discovery, and strong user intent, all in the same place,” Ready said, citing the “unique mindset” of its 433 million active users’ — or “Pinners” — who are deeply invested in the process of seeking out and saving the content they love.

Soon after Ready’s arrival, Pinterest debuted several merchant features to make the platform more shoppable, though Pinterest Senior Vice President and Head of Engineering Jeremy King told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster that the platform was already working on a shopping catalog a few years ahead of Ready’s appointment.

“We needed a canonical catalog — we built it over the last three years and now have hundreds of millions of items and feeds from everybody from Etsy to Wayfair to Walmart to Amazon,” he said. “We have a good baseline set up for a shopping ecosystem.”

Meanwhile, the months since Ready’s arrival have seen other social media platforms deal with a variety of headaches that have kept advertisers away.

Congress is reportedly about to set to ban TikTok from government phones. It’s part of a broader government crackdown on the Chinese company, with lawmakers on both sides worried that the app is being used to spy on Americans.

And Meta saw itself under attack from its investors for its continued focus on its metaverse plans, which the company — as of this week — says will continue to get 20% of its investments.