Pinterest Affiliate Link Scheme Exposed

[mahol]

If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don’t have any disclosure of this link modification on their site, and so far, while it has been written about, no major news outlet has picked up on the practice or its implications.

Pinterest doing this is big news in my opinion for two reasons:

Continued at: http://llsocial.com/2012/02/pinteres...ubmitted-pins/

This kind of negative press is not going to do Pinterest any good. (A traffic spike for sure) A few other blogs wrote about this.

Your thoughts?

[wizzard74]

Erm why don't you just use quote tags instead of using code tags? Would make your post easier to read.

[J0hnnycl1ckz]

I read this a few days ago. Pinterest also announced that they quit doing it a while back. I don't use it anyways not my thing.

[mahol]

the official peoples are also committed that it was just test...

How these professional guys can make huge scams on internet!!!

[Gaz Cooper]

Well my thought would be if they say no affiliate links and a spammer comes along and posts an Affiliate link I can't see a better way of punishing a spammer than changing their link and hitting them where it hurts.

Spam should stop pretty quick Its there network and they are entitled to do what they want and you have the choice to pin or not and they have the right to protect there network from spammers.

Kickin it on Amazon

Gaz Cooper
Amz Training Academy

[Fraser SellHealth]

old news , cant hate on them for trying to monetize

[TiffLee]

This is really, really old news.

[mahol]

but the official person already said that "they made it as just test."

None of any official person told that it was to protect site from spammers

It seems this was just a test from what i just read. They get enough money as is anyways. Do what Facebook did as they grew there social site.

Check out this blog post.

Pinterest is no longer using Skimlinks, the company that provided a way to monetize affiliate links and actually make some money.

CEO Ben Silbermann got in touch with Josh Davis of LL Social, the site that spread news of Pinterest's use of Skimlinks' affiliate links. Of their conversation, Davis writes that Silberman..."indicated that the use of Skimlinks was a test, not a business plan, and that Pinterest had stopped using Skimlinks a week before I wrote the original story on the subject."

So if Pinterest had already stopped working with Skimlinks a week before this story came out, why did Skimlinks CEO Alicia Navarro go into depth about Pinterest's use of affiliate links? Here's a quote from the original story:

Source: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives...king_money.php

[Chris Kent]

I never knew that skimlinks converted affiliate links into their own? I thought it just converted ordinary links into affiliate links?

Even if they're doing this, so what. Pinterest owes nothing to anyone. It provides a service and women are going crazy over it. If they want to rewrite affiliate links, what on earth is wrong with that?

As for disclosure, maybe 0.01% of all affiliate links are actually disclosed as such. Look around, I don't see many people doing this at all.

[bitriot]

Skimlinks has an API ( I think) option that, once added to your site, will convert all of your amazon affiliate links to skimlink affiliate links.

I think the initial idea was that, if you had an amazon or cj.com or whatever affiliate site, instead of going in by hand and changing all the links, it could handle that all for you.

The question that *I* have is whether or not Skimlinks would change MY skimlink affiliate link to a pinterest link.

[SlicedGenius]

Indeed, they need to monetise somehow - and most of the press that came out around this stated that there was nothing wrong with the technique as such - more so that it wasn't right not to disclose that they were doing it somewhere in their terms.

But as others have said, I believe this has all been cleared up since then.

[tpw]

This was news a few weeks ago, not today.

[Chris Kent]

Originally Posted by bitriot

Skimlinks has an API ( I think) option that, once added to your site, will convert all of your amazon affiliate links to skimlink affiliate links.

I think the initial idea was that, if you had an amazon or cj.com or whatever affiliate site, instead of going in by hand and changing all the links, it could handle that all for you.

The question that *I* have is whether or not Skimlinks would change MY skimlink affiliate link to a pinterest link.

The whole point of skimlinks is that you can link normally (not affiliate link) to sites and, because they have relationships with the big affiliate companies, then they will get converted to affiliate links and you get paid.

Now if they also convert affiliate links to their own then this is very interesting and not something I was aware of.

[ChrisDeals]

I would not recommend adding affiliate links when posting on Pinterest. Link back to your site so you can better presell the potential buyer, your conversions will be so much better. Plus you get a Dofollow link to your post.

[Paul Gram]

No biggie. Pinterest is still awesome.