Breaking news that Pinterest is changing user submitted pins to make money. Are they now one of the biggest affiliates on the Internet?... That's the question [note MG]
I swore I wasn’t going to write about Pinterest again for a while after finishing a six part series of blog posts, but major developments keeping coming and no major news organizations seems to be covering them.
If you post a pin to Pinterest, and it links to an ecommerce site that happens to have an affiliate program, Pinterest modifies the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. If someone clicks through the picture from Pinterest and makes a purchase, Pinterest gets paid. They don’t have any disclosure of this link modification on their site, and so far, while it has been written about, no major news outlet has picked up on the practice or its implications.
Pinterest doing this is big news in my opinion for two reasons:
Read more: http://llsocial.com/2012/02/pinterest-modifying-user-submitted-pins/
Via Martin Gysler, Kurt Frenier