The lobby at Pinterest’s San Francisco headquarters. Credit: Pinterest Pinterest has made James Dibbo its chief financial officer from 26 October, hired out of Amazon where he was finance chief for global entertainment, advertising and corporate development. He replaces Julia Brau Donnelly, who announced her departure in August, and he inherits a business whose European revenue grew 27% in the first quarter against 13% in the United States and Canada. Pinterest has hired the executive who ran the finances of Amazon’s advertising and entertainment businesses.
James Dibbo becomes chief financial officer on 26 October. Pinterest calls itself a search-and-discovery company, and its revenue is advertising revenue. Dibbo was vice president and chief financial officer for global entertainment, advertising and corporate development at Amazon, covering Amazon Ads, Prime Video, MGM Studios, Music, Audible and Twitch, as Bloomberg reported. He reports to the chief executive, Bill Ready, and is based in Los Angeles.
He spent about a decade at Amazon, and was chief financial officer of the restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s before that. The appointment ends a search that started in August. Julia Brau Donnelly announced her departure in August for an early-stage private company, and Vikram Naidu has held the post on an interim basis since.
Donnelly hands over on 26 October and advises until the end of the month. What a company hires tells you what it thinks it is. Amazon’s advertising arm took $17.2B in a quarter this year, up 24%, which is more than three times Pinterest’s annual revenue. Dibbo ran finance across that business and the studios beside it.
Pinterest is also an Amazon customer, with $4B committed to Amazon Web Services for cloud capacity. Europe is where its growth is. European revenue rose 27% year on year in the first quarter, against 13% in the United States and Canada, as we reported in May. The rest of the world grew 59%.
Pinterest had 640 million monthly users worldwide at the end of June, a record. About 87.5 million of them were in the European Union, averaged across the first half of this year, on Pinterest’s own published count. That is nearly twice the 45 million threshold that made it one of the first 19 services designated under the Digital Services Act in 2023. Dibbo said in a statement that he had long admired Pinterest’s “distinctive role at the intersection of visual search, shopping and advertising“.
Pinterest handles more than 80 billion searches a month, and the money comes from the advertising sold against them rather than from a social feed. Also tagged with
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