Pinterest reported its first billion-dollar quarter last week. Revenue hit $1.008 billion in the first three months of 2026, up 18 per cent year on year, with monthly active users reaching 631 million for the tenth consecutive quarter of double-digit user growth.

The stock jumped on guidance that projects second-quarter revenue of $1.133 billion to $1.153 billion, a further 14 to 16 per cent increase. Wall Street treated the results as confirmation that Pinterest has finally become the advertising platform it always promised to be. But the interesting part of the earnings is not that Pinterest grew. It is why.

Pinterest did not cross a billion dollars in quarterly revenue by becoming a better social media platform. It crossed a billion dollars by becoming a search engine that happens to show pictures.

The engine

Pinterest processes more than 80 billion searches per month. That number is not a vanity metric. It is the foundation of an advertising model that works differently from every other social platform. When someone opens Instagram or TikTok, they are browsing. When someone opens Pinterest, they are looking for something: a kitchen renovation, a wedding dress, a pair of boots, a recipe for Thursday dinner.

The distinction matters because advertising attached to intent converts at rates that advertising attached to browsing cannot match. Pinterest’s Performance+ suite, its AI-powered campaign automation tool, delivered 24 per cent higher conversion lift in advertiser tests and won 80 per cent of A/B comparisons against manual campaigns. Its return-on-ad-spend bidding system now accounts for 22 per cent of lower-funnel retail revenue on the platform.

These are not engagement metrics. They are commerce metrics, and they explain why advertisers are spending more on Pinterest while scrutinising every dollar they put into platforms that sell attention rather than action.

The AI layer is what changed. Pinterest has spent the past two years rebuilding its advertising stack around machine learning models that match advertiser objectives to user intent signals extracted from visual searches.

When a user photographs a lamp and searches for similar products, or saves a series of pins showing mid-century modern furniture, Pinterest’s models construct an intent profile that is qualitatively different from the interest graphs that Facebook and Instagram build from likes and follows.

The arrival of advertising inside AI platforms like ChatGPT has reframed the conversation about where ad dollars flow, but Pinterest’s results suggest that the most valuable advertising real estate is not inside a chatbot or alongside a social feed. It is at the moment someone is actively searching for something they intend to buy.

The geography

The revenue breakdown tells a story about where the growth is coming from and where it is going. United States and Canada revenue grew 13 per cent. Europe grew 27 per cent. Rest of World revenue surged 59 per cent.

The US and Canada business is mature, generating the majority of Pinterest’s revenue from a user base that has been on the platform for years. The international growth is the early stage of a monetisation curve that Pinterest’s management believes will follow the same trajectory: users arrive for visual discovery, build intent-rich search histories, and become increasingly valuable to advertisers as Pinterest’s AI models learn to match their searches to commercial outcomes.

The 59 per cent Rest of World growth is particularly notable because it is happening on a platform that does not rely on the creator economy, influencer partnerships, or viral content loops that drive growth on TikTok and Instagram.

Pinterest’s international expansion is powered by the same behaviour that drives its domestic business: people searching for things they want. The cultural specificity of those searches, whether it is wedding fashion in India, home décor in Brazil, or street style in Japan, provides the kind of intent data that advertisers in those markets have not had access to on any other platform at this scale.

The contrast

Pinterest’s brand safety advantage has become a competitive moat. Meta faces lawsuits alleging that its platforms have profited from billions of dollars in fraudulent advertising, with internal documents suggesting that a significant share of ad revenue comes from scam accounts. TikTok’s advertising model depends on algorithmic content distribution that periodically surfaces material advertisers do not want their brands associated with. X’s advertising business has contracted since Elon Musk’s acquisition.

Pinterest, by contrast, operates a platform where the content is overwhelmingly aspirational, commercial, and brand-safe by design. People pin products they want to buy, rooms they want to build, meals they want to cook. The content moderation challenge on Pinterest is trivial compared to platforms built around user-generated video and text, and that structural advantage translates directly into advertiser willingness to spend.

OpenAI has shifted ChatGPT’s advertising from impression-based pricing to cost-per-click after its initial $60 CPM launch pricing eroded within weeks, a sign that even the most hyped new advertising platform struggles to prove that its ads drive purchases rather than just visibility. Pinterest does not have that problem. Its advertising model was built from the ground up around commercial intent, and the Performance+ results demonstrate that the AI layer is making the match between intent and advertiser spend more efficient, not less.

The question for advertisers is not whether Pinterest’s ads work. It is whether Pinterest can scale the model fast enough to capture a meaningful share of the $295 billion US digital advertising market before the AI commerce platforms catch up.

The investors

Elliott Investment Management’s $1 billion convertible note investment in Pinterest, disclosed in March, was the activist firm’s bet that the visual search commerce thesis would translate into sustained revenue growth. The Q1 results validated that bet. Pinterest also announced approximately $2 billion in share repurchases, a capital return programme that signals management confidence in the durability of the revenue trajectory.

Elliott’s involvement typically accelerates operational discipline: cost management, margin expansion, and strategic focus on the highest-return initiatives. For Pinterest, that means doubling down on the AI-powered advertising infrastructure that produced the Q1 results rather than diversifying into social features, creator tools, or other distractions that would make Pinterest look more like the platforms it is outperforming precisely because it is not like them.

Alphabet’s Q1 earnings pushed its market capitalisation toward $5 trillion, driven by search advertising revenue that remains the single most profitable business model in technology. Pinterest’s billion-dollar quarter is a fraction of Google’s scale, but the underlying logic is the same: advertising attached to search intent is more valuable than advertising attached to content consumption. Google proved that model with text.

Pinterest is proving it with images. The difference is that Pinterest’s visual search captures intent that text queries often cannot express, the shape of a chair, the colour of a wall, the silhouette of a dress, and converts that visual intent into advertising revenue through an AI pipeline that improves with every search.

The question

Pinterest’s risk is that the same AI capabilities powering its advertising engine are being deployed by competitors who have more users, more data, and more capital. Google’s AI Mode shopping experience combines Gemini with its Shopping Graph to handle product discovery, fit uncertainty, and price timing. Amazon’s Rufus AI assistant now includes an auto-buy function. OpenAI is building conversational ad formats inside ChatGPT that turn advertisements into interactive dialogues. Shopify has launched Agentic Storefronts that make merchant catalogues available inside AI platforms. The commerce layer of AI is being built by companies with resources Pinterest cannot match, and the question is whether Pinterest’s head start in visual search intent data is a durable advantage or a temporary one.

The answer depends on whether visual search remains a distinct category or gets absorbed into the broader AI commerce infrastructure. If consumers continue to use Pinterest as the place where they search for things they want to buy by looking at pictures of things they like, then Pinterest’s intent data is irreplaceable, because no other platform has 80 billion monthly visual searches generating the same density of commercial signals. If AI assistants from Google, Amazon, and OpenAI learn to interpret visual intent as well as Pinterest does, the moat narrows.

Pinterest crossed a billion dollars in quarterly revenue not by winning the social media competition but by refusing to play it. The company built a search engine for visual intent, wrapped it in an AI-powered advertising model that converts searches into sales, and proved that the model scales across geographies and advertiser categories.

Whether that is the beginning of Pinterest becoming a major advertising platform or the high-water mark before AI commerce platforms subsume the category depends on a question Pinterest cannot answer alone: in a world where every platform is adding AI-powered shopping, does the platform that understood visual search first retain the advantage, or does the advantage migrate to whoever has the most compute, the most merchants, and the most aggressive AI deployment?

Pinterest’s billion-dollar quarter is the best argument the company has ever made that the answer is the former. The next four quarters will determine whether the market agrees.

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

American Express (Amex) is building a system that lets AI agents shop and pay on behalf of users — but right now it’s only within its own payment network, and still involves a black box that could hinder trust and auditability.

Amex already participates in agentic commerce protocol projects, especially Google’s Agent Pay Protocol (AP2), which focuses on interoperability. Amex’s Agentic Commerce Experiences (ACE) developer kit, on the other hand, touches on something most protocols currently lack: Full transaction control in the payment layer. 

But it still isn’t completely transparent in how it handles validation. ACE uses a closed-loop system — serving as both the card issuer and the payment network — to validate agent-led transactions. 

Luke Gebb, Amex’s EVP and global head of innovation, told VentureBeat that the company believes this model is the missing piece in agentic commerce.  

“Some of what is missing so far is the perspective of a company like ours: We feel that trust and security are critical to advancing this space,” Gebb said. “This is really the first time that an issuer is coming to the table.”

Amex sits in that interesting space: Unlike other financial institutions or card providers like Chase or Bank of America, Amex can route transactions through its American Express Network. Visa and Mastercard are two of the most well-known payment networks, but these companies don’t issue cards themselves and must work with a bank.

The continued black box of agentic commerce 

The ACE kit is just one approach to addressing some of agentic commerce’s biggest problems: trust, control, accountability, validation, and security. 

Consumers generally don’t want rogue agents to run away with their bank accounts and start buying things. Merchants don’t want to be stuck with unpaid items. Banks don’t want to deal with an influx of chargebacks and the potential for fraud. 

Projects like the ACE kit aim to build trust and accountability by verifying an agent’s identity and goals. This can build the trust agentic commerce desperately needs.

Amex claims it offers validation, too, although the process behind that is unclear. It is abstracting how it performs validation, even though it explains at which layer it does it. More traditional systems feature a mix of deterministic checks and a flexible, semantic evaluation that helps match intent and outcome for validation. Amex said agents built with ACE can submit user shopping carts and check them against the agent’s original intent. However, they did not disclose how this works.

Practitioners building to the agentic commerce ecosystem lament that, despite strides in creating a trust layer, many black boxes remain that could hinder widespread adoption.

Raj Ananthanpillai, founder and CEO of identity and verification system provider Trua, told VentureBeat that payment protocols and software kits like Agentic Commerce Suite from Stripe, Google’s Verifiable Intent proof chain, and the ACE developer kit “excel at handling proofs, verifiable authorizations and the mechanics of fund movement, but leave upstream human validation opaque and underdeveloped.”

Ananthanpillai continued: “Without a clear, high-assurance cryptographic link proving that an agent is acting under the explicit authority of a verified human owner, merchants, issuers, and networks face heightened risks of repudiation, massive chargebacks, sanctioned people conducting financial transactions, and fraud.”

The ACE kit

The ACE developer kit solves several running issues with agentic commerce, Gebb said, and gives developers access to integrated services:

• Agent registration

• Account enablement

• Intent intelligence

• Payment credentials 

• Cart context

First, it deals with agent registration, establishing identity and trust with both the consumer and company agents. When a transaction begins, the agent acting on behalf of the customer and the merchant’s agent can verify each other’s identities and trust that they are dealing with the correct entity. 

Next comes account enablement, which links the user’s Amex account to their agent and grants the agent permission to act, or, in the case of agentic commerce, buy something.

Intent intelligence creates what Amex calls an intent contract, where the user defines what they want the agent to do. Once the intent is defined, the ACE system generates an Intent ID and a Proof of Intent Token that definitively proves authorization in the event of a dispute.

Amex handles the actual transaction part, where the user pays for the product through a single-use token. ACE establishes payment credentials used for the transaction, bound to intent and constraints. 

“Once the agent has found the item that the customer has asked for, like red shoes, they’ll make a call for the payment credentials, which is a token that has the boundaries that the card member has provided,” Gebb said. “So, for instance, if they said they only wanted to spend $500, that token won’t allow for a purchase of $600 because it has controls built in.”

The last piece is cart context and validation, which Gebb said helps banks and brands compare a user’s cart that their agent submitted to their intent. 

Amex’s approach shows that for agentic commerce to really soar, providers must understand what systems will allow agents to do and who is ultimately accountable if something goes wrong. 

Focal’s Omada speaker line just became a lot more interesting for anyone building a serious stereo or home theater system at a more attainable price. Four models in the series are now on sale for up to 35% off, with the promotion running through June 21, 2026, while supplies last. That last part matters. The best speaker deals rarely hang around long enough for endless spreadsheet therapy.

What Are Focal Omada Speakers?

Focal’s Omada series is an exclusive loudspeaker line for ProSource members that has been available since November 2025. The lineup sits between Focal’s Theva and Vestia series, giving buyers a mid tier option for both two channel listening and home theater systems without jumping into the brand’s more expensive models.

What’s on Sale?

• Omada N1 (Bookshelf Speaker) – $1,399 $898/pair at Crutchfield or Amazon (save $500)
• Omada N3 (Floorstanding Speaker) – $3,798 $2,598/pair at Crutchfield or Amazon (save $1,200)
• Omada N4 (Floorstanding Speaker) – $4,598 $2,998/pair at Crutchfield or Amazon (save $1,600)
• Omada Center (Center Channel Speaker) – $699 $499 at Crutchfield or Amazon (save $200)

Focal Omada Core Features:

The Omada series uses Focal’s TAM tweeter and Slatefiber cone technology, both of which first appeared higher up in the company’s lineup. That matters because Omada is not just a pretty cabinet with a familiar badge on the front. The goal is to deliver natural, detailed sound for both two channel listening and home theater systems, using proven Focal driver technology without pushing buyers into the brand’s more expensive loudspeakers.

Design: Omada speakers come in a high gloss black finish with a subtly curved front baffle and a leather like texture on the front panel. It gives the line a cleaner, more refined look without turning the room into a hi-fi showroom crime scene. The finish, cabinet shape, and front panel detail should help the speakers fit into a wide range of rooms, which matters if the system has to share space with actual furniture and people.

TAM Tweeter: Focal’s M-shaped dome TAM tweeter is designed to deliver clean, controlled treble with wide dispersion and low distortion. Originally developed for Focal’s car audio products and later adapted for home loudspeakers, it gives the Omada series a proven high frequency platform that fits neatly into Focal’s broader loudspeaker ecosystem.

Slatefiber Cone: The Omada series also uses Focal’s Slatefiber cone technology, first introduced in the Chora line in 2019. Made from recycled carbon fibers, Slatefiber was developed to deliver a useful mix of rigidity, damping, and tonal balance. Focal has continued to refine the material since its debut, and it has since appeared across other parts of the catalog, including Alpha Evo studio monitors and Slatefiber automotive kits.

Bass Reflex: Every Omada model uses a bass reflex design to improve low frequency extension and output. The N1, N3, and N4 feature a front firing port, while the Center speaker uses two smaller rear ports. The port directs air pressure generated inside the cabinet into the room, reinforcing bass response without requiring more amplifier power. The result is fuller, more impactful low end while helping the Omada lineup maintain useful efficiency across the range.

Focal Omada Speaker Line Comparison

The Bottom Line

The Focal Omada series is for listeners who want proven Focal driver technology, clean styling, and a practical speaker lineup for both music and movies without paying for features they may not need. With the TAM tweeter, Slatefiber cones, and a focused range of models, Omada makes the most sense for buyers building a solid two channel or home theater system who want Focal performance at a more accessible price.

Sale Pricing 

The Focal Omada Speaker sale runs through June 21, 2026. 

• Omada N1 (Bookshelf Speaker) – $1,399 $898/pair at Crutchfield or Amazon (save $500)
• Omada N3 (Floorstanding Speaker) – $3,798 $2,598/pair at Crutchfield or Amazon (save $1,200)
• Omada N4 (Floorstanding Speaker) – $4,598 $2,998/pair at Crutchfield or Amazon (save $1,600)
• Omada Center (Center Channel Speaker) – $699 $499 at Crutchfield or Amazon (save $200)

To round out an Omada system, the speakers can be combined with the SUB 600P subwoofer for deeper and encompassing bass for $1,399 at Amazon. Meanwhile, the speaker stands for the N1, which is available for $269/pair at Crutchfield.

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