Why Does Pinterest Have So Many Ads Now?
Tam Nguyen
· 6 min read
Pinterest shows so many ads because ads are almost its entire business. The company says it generates “substantially all” of its revenue from advertising, and for the last few years it has worked to turn more of the app into a place to shop, which brings in retailers who want their products in your feed. Personalization then fills your feed with ads that look a lot like the pins you actually came for.
If your feed feels like a catalog, you’re not imagining it. Here’s what’s behind it, with sources, and what you can do about it.
Why does Pinterest have so many ads?
Advertising pays for everything
Pinterest is free to use and doesn’t sell an ad-free plan. Its 2025 annual report is direct about it: “We generate substantially all of our revenue from advertising.” In 2025 that came to $4.22 billion in revenue, up 16% from the year before, and the growth continued in 2026, with second-quarter revenue up 18% and a record 640 million monthly active users.
The same annual report explains how ad volume is managed. Pinterest says it monitors how advertising affects users, to avoid showing “too many advertisements or irrelevant advertisements,” and that it “will, from time to time, change the number of advertisements.” In other words, how many ads you see is a dial Pinterest turns, balancing your patience against what advertisers want to buy. The report also lists an inability to “serve the volume of advertisements desired by our advertisers” as a business risk.
Pinterest wants every pin to be shoppable
Since Bill Ready, a former Google commerce executive, became CEO in 2022, Pinterest has leaned hard into shopping. On an earnings call reported by eMarketer, he said Pinterest hadn’t made it easy for users to shop because “shoppable content was not integrated into core experiences.” In 2023, Pinterest announced a deal that made Amazon its first third-party ads partner, and Ready said it “aligns with our goal of making every Pin shoppable” (Search Engine Land). When you click one of those Amazon ads, you’re sent to Amazon to buy.
That shopping push shows up in your feed as more than classic promoted pins. You also get shopping ads, which Pinterest’s annual report describes as ads “used by advertisers who wish to promote specific products in their catalogs,” plus product pins and sections like “Shop the look.” Even when a pin isn’t technically an ad, it can still be a product with a price tag.
Big retail advertisers buy a lot of space
Low-price online retailers have been among the advertisers people notice most. Reuters reported in April 2025, citing Sensor Tower data, that Shein’s daily US ad spend on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Pinterest fell an average of 19% over two weeks as the US ended the “de minimis” duty exemption for cheap imports. A month later, Reuters reported that Pinterest itself flagged lower spending from Asian e-commerce retailers, naming Temu and Shein among the Chinese advertisers cutting budgets.
So these retailers have been big enough spenders that a pullback showed up in Pinterest’s earnings commentary. Users still complain about them: a November 2025 PiunikaWeb roundup collected posts from people saying their feeds were mostly Amazon or Temu promotions. If those two brands are your main problem, we have a dedicated guide to stopping Temu and Amazon ads on Pinterest.
Ads are designed to blend in
Pinterest ads look like regular pins: same image grid, same layout, with a small label. Pinterest also automates a lot of the targeting. Its annual report describes Pinterest Performance+, an AI-enabled campaign tool that automates targeting, bidding and creative optimization for advertisers. And Pinterest uses your activity to personalize the ads you see. If you’ve been saving kitchen ideas, you’ll get kitchen ads that are hard to tell apart from the pins you wanted, which makes the feed feel even more ad-heavy than the raw count suggests.
Why does it feel worse than it used to?
A few things stack up:
- More ad formats. Promoted pins, shopping ads, third-party Amazon ads, product pins and shopping modules all compete for space in the same grid.
- More advertisers. Revenue keeps growing, and growth in an ad business means selling more ads or pricier ones.
- Better camouflage. Ads matched to your interests are easier to click by accident and harder to skip at a glance.
None of this is a bug. It’s the business model working as designed.
How do you get a calmer Pinterest feed?
You can’t switch ads off inside Pinterest (its help center says “you can’t turn off ads completely”), but you can cut a lot of the noise.
1. Block the advertisers you see most
Pinterest lets you block up to 1,000 advertisers. Open the advertiser’s profile, click or tap the … icon, and choose Block (Pinterest Help). This works in the app and on desktop, and it’s the most effective native fix for one brand that won’t go away.
2. Hide ads you don’t want
Open the … menu on an ad and hide it. Pinterest says it uses this feedback to show you more relevant ads. It won’t lower the number of ads, but it can steer what fills the slots.
3. Cut down shopping content
Shopping pins and modules are a big part of the clutter. See our step-by-step guide to turning off shopping pins on Pinterest.
4. Review your privacy settings
Under Settings > Privacy and data, you can limit how your data is used for ads. This controls targeting, not the number of ads, so think of it as a privacy step rather than a decluttering one.
5. On desktop, remove ads with an extension
This is the only option that actually takes ads out of the feed. Feed Cleaner for Pinterest removes promoted pins from the home feed, search and pin pages, and can also hide shopping pins and blocks like “Popular on Pinterest” and “Shop the look”. (Feed Cleaner is our extension. It’s free, with no account and no tracking.) It runs in Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi. It doesn’t work in the Pinterest phone apps, which don’t support extensions.
If a particular store floods your feed with regular pins, not just ads, the optional Pro plan can hide every pin from a website or account, such as temu.com or aliexpress.com.
What each fix does
| Fix | Fewer ads? | Works in the app? |
|---|---|---|
| Block advertisers | Removes specific brands | Yes |
| Hide individual ads | No, changes which ads you get | Yes |
| Privacy and data settings | No, changes targeting | Yes |
| Turn down shopping content | Less product clutter | Partly |
| Desktop extension | Yes, removes ads from the feed | No |
FAQ
Why does Pinterest have so many ads now?
Because nearly all of Pinterest’s revenue comes from advertising, and it has spent the last few years adding shopping ads, product pins and third-party ads from partners like Amazon.
Why is my Pinterest feed all Temu and Amazon ads?
Big retailers buy a lot of ad space, and personalization pushes products similar to what you browse. Blocking those advertisers is the fastest native fix.
Will Pinterest reduce ads if enough people complain?
Pinterest says it monitors how ads affect users and adjusts the number from time to time, and it runs an ads feedback form. It doesn’t promise a response.
The short version
Pinterest has so many ads because ads are how it makes money, and its shopping strategy keeps adding more ways to sell you things. You can’t opt out, but blocking repeat advertisers, trimming shopping content and using an ad-blocking extension on desktop will get you most of the way back to a feed full of ideas.
Written by Tam Nguyen, who builds Feed Cleaner for Pinterest. Feed Cleaner is independent and not affiliated with Pinterest. Spotted something out of date? Tell us.