Yahoo Finance Live anchors discuss shares of Pinterest as the company announces its CEO will be stepping down.

Video Transcript

- Do you want to talk about Ben Silbermann for a moment here?

- Long overdue. This had to happen for numerous reasons. I understand Ben's the star of the company. He founded Pinterest. But still, when your stock is down 75% in the past year, something is clearly going wrong.

And two things probably went wrong here and ultimately caused this decision. One, he reportedly rebuffed PayPal. Earlier in the year, there was strong speculation that PayPal expressed good interest in buying Pinterest.

And two, Ben has not been able to pivot Pinterest to be more of a commerce player, hence enter Bill Ready. Now, I covered bill Ready. I've talked to him before when he was over at PayPal. And he was at Google before joining Pinterest. He is the real deal.

So I think, for over the next six months, it's important that Bill-- and I'm sure he will, veteran executive-- gets his team right, and gets executives in this company with a commerce mindset so you could start executing and just turning it into a more transactional website.

- Yeah. And that's the thing, at the end of the day. The shopability of Pinterest has always been in question, even coming into their IPO. This is a company that also was intertwined within that JPM downgrade that we were discussing earlier.

So a business that's still very much reliant on its advertising revenue while at the same time has been trying to pivot towards shopability for the past three years at this point. And that's had a hit on where their average revenue per user is able to grow out to.

That's had a hit on the conversion rates as well, that marketers would look at to say, OK, I'm still going to put dollars into Pinterest and into that platform despite me pulling back some of my spend.

And that's going to be the larger question for marketers who are pulling back on that spend. If I have to pick and choose exactly where I'm spending on to see a conversion rate, is it going to be Pinterest? And the shopability plays a major role in that.

- Yeah. Well, most analysts seem pretty positive on this move, including the folks at JP Morgan, on this hiring of Bill Ready.