Pinterest to remove all affiliate links from ......

This is "spot on".

Every (even moderately) successful social platform has done this. I think Pinterest waited longer than they should have, but that delay just gave them even greater market penetration.

Of course, no one here has been foolish enough to direct link from Pinterest to a seller's offer in the first place... right?

I mean, we all know that we're leaving money on the table if we don't first get the traffic routed to our own opt-in offer so that we can develop leads for ongoing promotions - so this move shouldn't affect any good affiliate marketer.

This is not meant towards you personally, Robert. I'm referring to the Internet Marketing community as a whole here.

I find it amusing, though, how Internet Marketers overrate their importance sometimes. Pinterest would have been hugely successful even if they had disallowed affiliate links from day one. Most of the people using Pinterest are likely not marketers, just people who like sharing their images.

While I do agree with you that Pinterest did choose to allow affiliate links because they likely knew that it would aid in their growth, I doubt that they based their entire business model on the theory that without Affiliate Marketers they would not get huge. I think it was just one piece in the puzzle that they chose to put together.

I'm sure they knew that allowing marketers would be a good idea because marketers will inherently do what they do, and that is spread the word to everyone they know about Pinterest. And that's exactly what they did. I'm pretty sure Pinterest knew that once they got what they wanted out of marketers they would then shut down the affiliate links.

I never really liked Pinterest and only used it to share images from my blog posts, so I'll likely be fine. Anyone else who did the same will also not be affected. However, I never got much traffic from them anyway.

I think people are rapidly losing interest in them anyway, as 90% of the people I talk to are all about Instagram and have dropped using Pinterest months ago.

The philosophy worked out pretty well with Google and AdWords.

Apologies for the brief reply up top, buddy. I wasn't trying to be a smarty-pants. Just short on time today; that and some subjects I can't really talk about in public. The real concern here is market reaction. Pinterest have (I guess rightly) introduced this policy out of greed. And, as we all know, greed is good; I suppose making this a good move, if we follow that rationale. The concern is how other social networks will also react. Will it cause a chain reaction? Possible. Probable. However, as mentioned, you have to be clever. Here's the thing no social network either understands or (more likely) do understand but are powerless to do anything about: When you have a clever marketer who earns enough from your network to pay the bills, he will always - always - find a way to continue earning. And the more he makes, the less chance you have (the network) of doing a damn thing about it. Anyway - back on point. Without spelling everything out, I suggest you - or anyone who's currently skee-rood - spend a day, today, browsing Pinterest. All the answers are there. What's happened - for now - is most BH approaches have gone.

Tom

Don't use Pinterest to send people directly through an affiliate link.

Instead you can use it like survival life does to simply get traffic to their blog and let the blog convert people to product buyyers and pull people into a mailing list.

Or you can drive people to a squeeze page that has more about the image they clicked on (my approach). From there you simply market your affiliate products from your list.

First and foremost I never direct link to Pinterest in the first place. I promote my affiliate offers by creating product pages for them with an opt in form in the right side bar.