Why Pinterest Bought tvScientific

In recent years, several independent companies have vied to be the go-to performance CTV platform. Companies like MNTN, Vibe, and tvScientific look to bring the same type of performance advertising, focusing on outcomes, that’s long been available on search and social to the living room screen.

While DSPs like The Trade Desk or DV360 cater to the largest agencies and advertisers, niche performance CTV advertising DSPs serve small and medium-sized businesses that are less interested in branding exercises typical of the largest advertisers. Instead, they provide access to the same high-quality CTV inventory, typically at lower minimums, while focusing on outcomes and performance.

While these businesses continue to grow independently, a pure-play performance CTV DSP is an alluring acquisition target for a social media company with an existing self-serve advertising business that wants to extend its reach to CTV — someone like Pinterest.

Pinterest has agreed to acquire the performance CTV advertising platform tvScientific for an undisclosed sum (one we know is north of $125 million, since the deal requires regulatory approval). When it comes to performance CTV advertising platforms, there are only a handful of pure-play assets available — and Pinterest just took one of them off the board.

Pinterest brought in a smidge over a billion dollars in revenue in Q3 2025. While it doesn’t break out advertising revenue specifically, it’s assumed that most of these earnings come from advertising.

However, the company remains well behind its social media brethren, with 600 million monthly active users (compare this to Snapchat's 943 million MAUs and $1.5 billion in revenue or Meta's 4 billion+ MAUs and $51 billion in revenue).

But what it lacks in users and rev, it makes up for in unique offerings. Bucketing Pinterest into “social media” may not be a fair comparison at this point, given how different its offering is from those of companies sometimes mentioned in the same breath. People flock to Pinterest for creative inspiration, home decor ideas, fashion, and more.

A main interaction method with the platform is search, where a user types exactly what they are looking for, including potential products to purchase. This means the company holds valuable search data and serves as a gateway for purchase intent. Pinterest views the marriage of this unique data with tvScientific’s platform as a win:

Pinterest could integrate tvScientific in its existing offering to extend the reach of Pinterest advertisers to CTV. But Pinterest will need to leverage tvScientific’s existing performance advertising capabilities to clearly demonstrate the value of CTV advertising, as existing Pinterest advertisers may not be ready to pay the elevated cost of high-quality CTV inventory.

Pinterest doesn’t own the CTV inventory accessible to tvScientific (compared to the inventory they sell on-platform today), so it would need to demonstrate clear value for any markup applied between inventory acquisition and the bid prices from its advertisers.

If Pinterest wants to leverage its existing audience data on CTV, it needs to elegantly bridge the gap between Pinterest users and CTV viewers across the various inventory sources on which tvScientific serves ads.

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In CTV targeting, an easy yet blunt approach is to bridge that gap using IP addresses, but this path can result in serving ads for the dresses a daughter has been shopping for during Dad’s football game. All devices in the house share the same IP address, which can lead to undesirable coarse targeting issues.

So while using IP addresses to target isn’t as precise, the upside for a platform operator is that it opens up more inventory, since it pulls in more eligible devices in a given household. It also creates more surface area to credit attribution, which may be a key aspect Pinterest is after.

Performance advertising typically requires advertisers to drop conversion pixels or integrate with a conversion API to send conversion data back to the ad platform. (Pinterest already has a conversion API.)

Pinterest already recommends passing IP address on all conversion events (sign-up, add to cart, checkout, etc.), so I would expect Pinterest to seamlessly integrate any CTV exposure data from tvScientific directly into its existing conversion API for CTV-extended campaigns. This could realize a goal of the acquisition — Pinterest may be after more opportunities to tie an IP address from an ad exposure to a conversion event.

If Pinterest is having trouble gaining credit for its advertising offering, the tvScientific acquisition is a perfect way to capture more opportunities to claim credit for a conversion. If they serve a single ad on a TV screen in a household, then they can now claim credit for any conversion registered from that same household IP address on any other device in the house.

The validity of this blunt attribution approach has always been a semi-contentious debate. In our prior example, if Dad saw a CTV ad for a dress his daughter shopped for, but the daughter never saw the ad and still bought the dress, should it still be attributed to the CTV ad the daughter never saw? It may matter to the advertiser, but the platform can still claim the credit and show what a great job it is doing in driving outcomes.

If Pinterest can demonstrate success with this acquisition of TVScientific, will it start a pattern of additional acquisitions in the performance CTV space? There’s a very limited number of pure-play platforms in this area, and perhaps other social media platforms might want to assess whether acquiring a performance CTV platform aligns with any future ambitions to extend self-serve advertising options into CTV.

It will also be interesting to see whether Pinterest continues to let tvScientific operate independently or eventually absorbs the company into its offering. Unless they see tvScientific’s business as a true growth driver to the bottom line, it adds a confusing side hustle for Pinterest shareholders to analyze. Maybe Pinterest wants to maintain an air of stability in the short term to limit employee retention and pacify existing business partner integrations.

CTV supply partners already integrated with tvScientific should view this as a win, as it could open a new revenue stream from Pinterest advertisers, along with increased business with existing and new tvScientific clients looking to leverage Pinterest audience data.