Social image pinboarding and shopping inspiration platform Pinterest touted its recently announced Amazon partnership and AI efforts as part of its Q2 2023 earnings, which showed a 6 percent gain in year-over-year revenue of $708 million, beating analyst expectations. Pinterest announced the multiyear partnership with Amazon that marked a Pinterest first for third-party ads. On the investor call, Pinterest CEO Bill Ready told analysts the company has been testing Amazon ads traffic and is “very pleased” with the early results. When users click on Amazon ads on Pinterest they land on Amazon’s site to complete their purchase.

Ready said he feels Amazon will bring more shoppable content to Pinterest, but cautioned that fulsome integration will take time and meaningful revenue results are unlikely to hit Pinterest’s bottom line before early 2024.

Pinterest’s AI investments are also kicking in across the site —  impacting areas including engagement, relevance and ads — and will also take multiple quarters before bearing financial fruit.

While Pinterest executives declined to share early test results with analysts at this point, Ready did say the partnership is “pacing ahead of expectations.” Pinterest is “now working to make sure that it got the relevancy right for the user” and “AI may help in that regard,” writes TechCrunch.

Ready said more information would be made available at the company’s investor day on September 19 and emphasized expectations are high that Amazon will enhance shoppable content on the site.

“We see that it’s contributing to more relevant shopping content that further bolsters our view that we can take ad load much higher,” TechCrunch quotes Ready telling analysts of the Amazon deal.

While Pinterest doesn’t break out ad revenue, the company “said it had already been growing at 30 percent plus year-over-year in terms of overall monetizable supply while also increasing engagement,” TechCrunch reports. In a Q2 earnings release, Pinterest said global monthly active users (MAUs) grew by 8 percent, to 465 million.

The addition of 2 million new users was “Pinterest’s slowest growth rate in a year,” writes Social Media Today, noting any growth is “welcome news after the platform suffered a decline in usage following the pandemic bump.”

Social Media Today expressed concern that growth for the visually-driven social site was flat in its biggest markets, North America and Europe, with expansion in “other” territories.

One positive trend, however: “In Q2, Gen Z were our largest contributor to overall engagement growth and the fastest growing cohort, growing double digits and accounting for a larger portion of our overall mix,” Social Media Today reports the company explaining.

Pinterest posted a net loss of $35 million for the period ending in June.