Computer Support Blog

Unlike some of the clone sites of Pinterest that sprouted up when Pinterest’s meteoric rise to popularity began, most notably Shopalong, Pinterest has been stumbling through monetizing the site.  While the executives at Pinterest are not at all resistant to the idea of monetizing, like Facebook’s founders were when they were simply focused on creating something new and cool, Pinterest has been slower than some similar sites to figure out how to make money off its own popularity.  For the last month, though, Pinterest has taken steps to stop others from making money off the site, even as it figures out how to better generate revenue itself.  Some of the ways Pinterest is working, under the guise of stopping spam, to prevent other individuals and sites from utilizing Pinterest include:

Removal of affiliate links.  Individuals who have affiliate accounts with other websites, whereby a code is inserted into the URL or image that gives the person who posts the image a cut of any sales, are being vigorously removed from Pinterest.  This means if, for example, you have an affiliate account with Hotels.com and you have posted images of various hotels from Hotels.com to your Pinterest board, you will not make money off any reservations people make by clicking on your pictures.  Pinterest is considering creating an affiliate program of its own, in which case instances like the one in this example would have you being paid by Pinterest, as opposed to Hotels.com (presumably at a lower percentage than Hotels.com would pay you) when you post images through Pinterest-related affiliates.  At the very least, Pinterest does not want users promoting items on their Pinterest boards which will refer shoppers to other sites and give you, but not Pinterest, a cut.  Those who have used Pinterest to promote affiliated links may as well desist now; you aren’t making money off the “pins” anyway!

URL stripping.  Anything beyond the .html or .htm in a URL is usually information tacked on by the website that helps that site track hits or collect other data (including cookies for some sites!).  Pinterest is, currently, able to show its effectiveness now through referral traffic.  As a result, Pinterest does not want anyone else’s tracking or referral information associated with the links posted to Pinterest.  The unintended benefit of this is that Pinterest is actually making it harder for you to inadvertently pin personal information to your Pinterest page, like web-based e-mails.

Removal of URL shorteners.  Many sites like Twitter utilize URL Shorteners that take up fewer characters than a full URL.  What URL Shorteners also do is take users to entirely different sites and there is no way for a user to tell what that site is unless they go there.  You may have managed to circumvent Pinterest’s ban on affiliate programs before by using a URL shortener, but now Pinterest is preventing the use of all URL shorteners in order to ensure that users who do click through links on Pinterest end up where they plan to go.

Pinterest may not yet have a solid revenue stream, but with its new measures to keep the credit it deserves for referral traffic, Pinterest is illustrating it knows how to prevent others from making money off the site!

About RESCUECOM:

RESCUECOM provides computer repair and computer support, 24/7: Meeting every tech support need including data recovery, virus removal, networking, wireless services, and computer support for all brands of hardware and software. For computer support or information on products, services, or computer repair, visit https://www.rescuecom.com or call 1-800-RESCUE-PC.

For More Information, Contact:

David Milman, CEO

315-882-1100

david@rescuecom.com

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