A very important announcement.

Pinterest is releasing the news that co-founder and CEO Ben Silbermann is stepping down. He will be taking another role within the company while online commerce expert Bill Ready takes over as the Pinterest chief, effective June 29th, 2022.

Silberman posted a passionate update on the Pinterest blog, noting the importance of the platform to himself and his life.

"This was a tough decision. So much of my heart belongs to Pinterest. I guess you could call it a founder's love. And when you care about something that much, the natural instinct is to hold it as close as you can. Often, though, the most loving thing to do is let it go and see it flourish in new ways."

Silbermann will take up the role of Executive Chairman where he will still keep an eye on growth and development of the app but this time from a distance.

Silbermann's move is quite significant in itself, but more significant is the appointment of Ready who, in his last stint at Google, was that search giant's president of commerce and payments.

As Ready puts it:

"There is no better time to join Pinterest. I have long admired the brand and platform that Ben and the Pinterest team have created and everything the Company stands for. I am excited to build on that foundation to further scale the Company's ecosystem and drive increased value for shareholders.". Having built multiple businesses from scratch 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. I look forward to working closely with Ben, the Board, and the rest of the leadership team to capitalise on the many opportunities ahead and usher in Pinterest's next chapter of growth and success.

Under Ready, Google had incrementally been upgrading its e-commerce toolsets, which focused on the connection between search and purchase. Which is not so unlike what Pinterest's mission actually is — and at times, that saw the platform tread on Google's toes a little.

This might have made Google to replicate it as well; search giant made their visual results look more like Pinterest by making them appear more Pin-like and have added the visual search that is largely identical to the Pinterest Lens, and hence throttling the referral traffic coming from Search results for Pinterest.

Based on the update of Pinterest's Q4 21:
Lower search traffic, driven also by the Google algorithm change in November, impacted MAUs year-over-year. We actually believe that it was lower search traffic and, specifically, the sequence decline from Q3 into Q4 in both markets - the US and internationally.

There is no direct correlation, as such, but Pinterest seemingly lost a heap of Google traffic, which could have been Google's way of diluting its rising presence as a search platform, which again, steps into its core territory.

This is ironic because Google, essentially being a competitor in the same market, has the power to negate any and all advantages that Pinterest may gain. However, Pinterest now possesses inside knowledge of Google's exact plans and strategy on this front, with Ready having played a key role in that exact process from Google's end, which could give Pinterest a big advantage moving forward.

I mean, Google still controls search traffic and still owns a massive advantage in this regard. But Pinterest hosts more than 5 billion searches per month, all of which are primarily product-based, and with the deep insights that Ready held into how the world's biggest search platform wanted to cash in on such, that could help take the Pinterest platform to the next level.

Of course, it still needs to drive in users, which hasn't been doing so great lately, and it continues to need new ways to inject more merchants and listings into the site. However, the experience and expertise Ready brings to the table will be indispensable in continuing to evolve the platform toward becoming a full-fledged discovery network.