Why are there so many ads on Pinterest?
What Pinterest’s annual reports say about its ads, why so much of Pinterest is for sale even when it isn’t an ad, and what you can do about it.
Guides, , 6 min read
If Pinterest feels like more ads than it used to, its own annual reports agree. Every year since 2021 it has shown more ads than the year before, and the number has grown much faster than the number of people using it.
This guide sets out what those reports say, why so much of what you see is for sale even when it isn’t an ad, and what you can do about it.
What Pinterest’s own figures say
Pinterest makes “substantially all” of its money from advertising. That is from its annual report for 2025, which it files with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Each of these reports also says how many more ads Pinterest served than the year before, and how its users changed:
| Year | Ads Pinterest served | People using it each month, on average | Average price of an ad |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | up 17% | down 1% | down 7% |
| 2023 | up 31% | up 8% | down 17% |
| 2024 | up 39% | up 11% | down 14% |
| 2025 | up 49% | up 11% | down 22% |
| First half of 2026 | up 20% | up 11% | down 2% |
Each row compares with the year before, and the last row with the first half of 2025. The figures come from Pinterest’s annual reports for 2022 to 2025 and its report for April to June 2026.
Put the four years together and Pinterest served a little over three times as many ads in 2025 as in 2021, to about a third more people. By our arithmetic, that is nearly two and a half times as many ads for each person. Pinterest doesn’t publish a figure for ads per person, and its percentages are rounded, so treat that as a rough guide rather than an exact number.
Two other things stand out. Each ad has been getting cheaper on average, so Pinterest has been selling more of them at a lower price. And in 2026 the growth has slowed: between April and June it served 16% more ads than in the same months of 2025, against a rise of 49% across 2025 as a whole.
Ads sold by other companies
Since 2023, some of the ads on Pinterest haven’t been sold by Pinterest at all. In April 2023 it announced a deal with Amazon, the first company allowed to place ads on Pinterest through its own advertising system. Tap one of those ads and you go to Amazon.
Pinterest’s 2025 annual report says “a portion of our revenue is derived from partnerships with third-party advertising platforms”. So an ad on Pinterest can come from a business that never set up a Pinterest campaign itself.
Not everything that looks like an ad is one
A lot of what makes Pinterest feel like a shop isn’t advertising. Pinterest calls these pins product pins. Each one shows a product with its price and whether it’s in stock, and links to the shop that sells it.
Shops can send their whole catalogue to Pinterest and it turns each product into a pin. Pinterest’s guide for shops says “all product Pins on Pinterest are distributed organically”. In other words, they appear among ordinary pins without anyone paying for that. A shop can also pay to promote the same pins, and then they are ads.
Pinterest puts products in several places. Its help page on shopping lists:
- a Products filter in search results
- Shop the look, next to or under a pin you open
- a Shop button at the top of some of your own boards
So a page can be full of things to buy even when only some of them are ads. Pinterest’s ad settings don’t affect product pins that nobody paid to promote.
Pinter, our browser extension, sorts what it hides into ads, shoppable pins, AI images and words you chose. The pins here are examples.
Why your own feed has so many
Pinterest’s help page on ads says ads are pins that businesses pay to promote, and that they appear in your home feed and search results. So the more you scroll the feed or search, the more you see.
Which ads you get depends partly on what advertisers know about you. Pinterest’s page on personalised ads gives two examples. A shop can share its list of customers’ email addresses. A shop’s website can also tell Pinterest who visited and what they bought, “for instance, this way you might get an ad for a pair of shoes that you looked at but didn’t buy.”
You can turn that off. In Pinterest’s settings, open Privacy and data and switch off Use of partner info. It changes which ads you see, not how many. Pinterest says plainly that “you can’t turn off ads completely”.
What you can do
Our guide to getting rid of ads on Pinterest goes through each option step by step. In short:
- In the Pinterest app on a phone, nothing removes ads. You can hide single ads, block advertisers and turn off Use of partner info.
- In a browser on a computer, an extension can take ads out of the page. We make a free one called Pinter. It hides ads from the start, and has a separate switch for shoppable pins, so you can hide product pins that aren’t ads too. It works in Chrome, Edge, Brave and Arc, but not on a phone. When you save your filters, Pinter sends your choices to our analytics, and the Pinter page says exactly what.
- For boards you’ve already made, you can open them in a separate app that has no feed, and so no ads.
That app is Pinx, our app for iPhone, iPad and Android. It signs in with your Pinterest account and shows the boards you made, with only the pins you saved to them. There are no promoted pins, no product suggestions and no home feed.
A board in Pinx: only the pins saved to it. The boards and pins are Pinx’s demo examples.
Know the limits before you try it:
- Pinx can’t show your home feed, search Pinterest or open boards you follow. Pinterest only lets other apps open boards you created.
- It can’t play video pins. It shows the cover, with a button that opens the pin in Pinterest.
- It only reads. To save new pins, you still use Pinterest.
Pinx is free for 25 boards of your choice, with up to 50 pins on each. Pinx Pro opens every board and every pin. It is a single purchase of £2.99 or $2.99, not a subscription, and it covers iPhone, iPad and Android. Get Pinx.
Common questions
Has Pinterest added more ads?
Yes. Its annual reports say it served 17% more ads in 2022 than in 2021, then 31%, 39% and 49% more in each of the next three years. Its number of users grew far more slowly.
Why is Pinterest all ads now?
Partly because there are more ads: Pinterest served about three times as many in 2025 as in 2021. Partly because of product pins, which show things for sale even when nobody has paid to promote them. Together they can make a feed look like a shop.
Are shopping pins ads?
Not always. Pinterest says product pins appear without anyone paying, and that shops can also pay to promote them as shopping ads. Both kinds show a product, a price and a link to the shop.
Why do I see Amazon ads on Pinterest?
Pinterest has shown ads sold through Amazon’s advertising system since a deal it announced in 2023. Tapping one of those ads takes you to Amazon.
Can I pay Pinterest to remove the ads?
No. Pinterest doesn’t offer a version without ads, paid or free.
Pinx and Pinter are independent. They are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Pinterest, Inc. We checked Pinterest’s figures against its filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and its settings against its help pages, on 1 October 2026.
