Should Affiliate Managers Worry About Pinterest?

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

Content curation and sharing startup, Pinterest recently took some heat for making money using Skimlinks to replace product links on the site with affiliate links that provide revenue directly to the company. Some critics are questioning whether this is a potential FTC violation, while others simply feel Pinterest should have been more forthcoming with its approach to monetizing the site. Pinterest has stopped using Skimlinks and added a section to their help page about making money. On reading the Pinterest Terms of Use, which few members have or they wouldn’t be sharing anything, it is pretty clear Pinterest intends to use content as they see fit.

By making available any Member Content through the Site, Application or Services, you hereby grant to Cold Brew Labs a worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license, with the right to sublicense, to use, copy, adapt, modify, distribute, license, sell, transfer, publicly display, publicly perform, transmit, stream, broadcast, access, view, and otherwise exploit such Member Content only on, through or by means of the Site, Application or Services.

The above is the second sentence from the Member Content section (emphasis added by me) of the Pinterest Terms of Use. In layman’s terms, uploading a photo to Pinterest would give them the rights to sell t-shirts with your kid’s picture on them, use your likeness in advertising their site, and generally do whatever they please with anything posted to the site. Monetization of links certainly falls under the “otherwise exploit” verbiage.

Affiliates already market with Pinterest

Savvy affiliates are already using Pinterest as a way to generate revenue by pinning product images and linking to an affiliate offer or landing page. I’ve run across a few examples of Amazon affiliate links among my own friends on Pinterest, which is just the tip of the iceberg. From an affiliate perspective, Pinterest is no different than using any third-party site, like YouTube or a forum, as a means of generating revenue. I know from personal experience that YouTube can be an effective source of affiliate revenue, so I’m sure with some experimentation, Pinterest will be too.

How are affiliate managers dealing with Pinterest?

Keeping up with social sites and how affiliates are using them is not an enviable job. Affiliates often enthusiastically test new markets and beg for forgiveness rather than asking permission first. But should Pinterest be a point of concern for affiliate managers?

I already know of one affiliate program explicitly prohibiting the use of Pinterest. The Wayfair Affiliate Terms of Service start section 6 with the following, “Submitting affiliate links to social sharing sites such as Pinterest, Reddit.com, Digg.com, Twitter, StumbleUpon.com, and others is prohibited.”

Right now, it seems Pinterest raises more questions than answers for affiliate managers. Does an early move to prohibit the use of Pinterest signify anticipation of a potential marketing disaster? Could it be a preemptive measure to make sure affiliates aren’t competing directly with the company, much like prohibiting keywords from CPC campaigns would be?

If you are an affiliate manager, are you seeing significant traffic to offers via Pinterest? Does this traffic convert any better or worse than traffic from other traffic sources?

More to the point, does your affiliate program have a Pinterest policy? Why or why not?