Pinterest's enormously popular online scrapbook wouldn't exist without the army of people across the globe who contribute to the thing. But the company doesn't really want others trying to make money from those fudge brownie recipes and vintage leather bag photos.
On Thursday night, as reported by VentureBeat, the company started stripping its social network of affiliate links, redirects, and tracking mechanisms posted by its users. Basically, Pinterest is removing the ability for its most influential "Pinners" to make money via outside marketing networks, including rewardStyle and Hello Society, according to an email obtained by VentureBeat.
However, Pinterest hasn't said outright that it wants to block that added stream of revenue for its power Pinners. "Recently, we observed affiliate links and redirects causing irrelevant Pins in feeds, broken links and other spammy behavior," a company representative said in an email sent to WIRED. "We believe this change will enable us to keep the high bar of relevancy and quality Pinners expect from Pinterest."
Pinterest says it has been removing affiliate links from its service for the past few years, but it let some networks stay on the site because the Pins still worked properly. It’s reversing that position now, according to the representative, because the company wants to bolster the quality of the site by providing faster click-through rates for users. "Our goal is to keep a high bar of relevancy and quality in all Pins," the representative said. "We believe it will be a better Pinner experience."
But the move is in line with the company's grander ambitions for monetizing its social network. Pinterest is already a massive e-commerce engine, accounting for 23 percent of all e-commerce that begins on social sites, according to analytics outfit AddShoppers. That’s just behind Facebook’s 28 percent slice of the pie of socially driven e-commerce sales. And the startup hopes to completely capitalize on this position in a financial sense.
On Thursday, the company also announced it would allow users to pin apps to their Pinterest boards, which push more advertising dollars to the site. And earlier this year, it allowed American advertisers to buy Promoted Pins, which it said gave advertisers an extra 30 percent boost in exposure.
