Sources: Pinterest revenues were up 58% in 2017 to $473M; company now has almost 250M monthly active users
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg : Tweets: @shiraovide and @rrhoover Tweets: Shira Ovide / @shiraovide : For comparison, Snap had $405 million in revenue the year before its IPO. http://twitter.com/... Ryan Hoover / @rrhoover : New Pinterest numbers: $473M in sales last year 250M MAU $12.3B valuation at last fundraise http://www.bloomberg.com/... by @sarahfrier
Context & Ripple Effects
This Bloomberg report landed in May 2018, when Pinterest was still private and its financials were guesswork: Sarah Frier's sourcing put 2017 revenue at $473M, up 58%, with almost 250M monthly active users, while Ryan Hoover flagged the $12.3B valuation from the last fundraise. Shira Ovide's comparison point — Snap at $405M in the year before its IPO — framed Pinterest as already at or beyond Snap's pre-IPO revenue scale.
The months around the leak exposed the central tension: by September, [[a:933246|reporting described investor and employee frustration with Pinterest's deliberately steady pace]] even as the company grew users 27% and revenue 50%. It went public within a year, and the quarterly record since — a 62% YoY Q2 2019 beat with 300M MAUs, then FY 2021 revenue up 52% even as MAUs fell 6%, and $1.15B in Q4 2024 on 553M users — shows exactly what that 2017 baseline compounded into.
First-order effects
- Late-stage investors and ad buyers got their first hard read on Pinterest's economics: $473M against Snap's $405M pre-IPO year made Pinterest's scale directly comparable, attaching a concrete revenue multiple to the $12.3B last-private valuation.
- The leak forced Pinterest's hand on disclosure — within months it was confirming 250M MAUs and 50% growth publicly, ending the era of opaque private metrics.
Second-order effects
- Once the numbers were out, the gap between Pinterest's patient monetization and its backers' expectations widened: the reported investor frustration pushed the company toward proving an IPO-ready growth story rather than extending its private runway.
- Snap and other visual-advertising rivals gained a benchmark competitor growing revenue faster than its user base — evidence that Pinterest was closing the monetization-per-user gap without having paid the public-market scrutiny bill yet.
Third-order effects
- The subsequent record validated the 2017 framing: Pinterest followed the classic path from hypergrowth private company (62% YoY revenue in its first public quarters) to mature ad platform where monetization deepens (FY 2021 revenue up 52%) even as absolute user counts decline.
- By the time Pinterest posted $1.15B in a single quarter with 553M MAUs, the company the 2017 leak introduced had become a slower-growth, scaled advertising business — the structural endgame for the high-growth social cohort of that era.
The trend: Pinterest's arc from leaked private financials to a decelerating but far larger public ad platform is one data point in the maturation of the 2010s social-media cohort, where user growth peaks years before monetization does.