Earlier in the week Pinterest announced that they would soon be launching their new ‘buy it’ button, which will allow visitors to buy a variety of the products featured on their site with just a few clicks. This new feature has been long awaited, and will help many brands generate a lot of direct income. In addition, Pinterest will make a lot of money because more people will be buying the ‘sponsored pins’ and that will drive the profits up for the social media company.
The one group of people who are not at all happy with this are affiliate marketers. Many marketers have been making thousands of dollars per month off of Pinterest by featuring products with affiliate links. That option was killed off just a couple months ago. Pinterest eliminated the option to have affiliate links within their system.
Many of the people who were using affiliate marketing on Pinterest were not only making a ton of money themselves, but were also generating a lot of traffic for Pinterest. This, of course, helped Pinterest to grow into one of the largest social networks online today.
Most of the marketers feel like Pinterest metaphorically slapped them in the face by cutting them and their primary source of income out of the equation so large companies and Pinterest itself could increase their own profits.
While there are some options available to make money from the site, such as using it to drive traffic to their own page where they can feature affiliate links or partner with already approved brands that might be willing to feature their own products, this is not nearly as good as the way it was.
It will be interesting to watch to see whether these major pinners will stick with the site despite the fact that Pinterest is no longer allowing them to make money they way they once did. Some Pinterest users will likely get fed up with this and find another platform to use. The question is whether or not the visitors will follow them to their new ‘home’ or not.
This actually could be an opportunity for a good start up Pinterest ‘clone’ that can entice the largest pinners to come to their site, with the promise of unrestricted affiliate links. Whether this happens or not, of course, is yet to be seen.