Pinterest quietly modifying users links to generate affiliate revenue | Hacker News Reader

Pinterest quietly modifying users links to generate affiliate revenue

llsocial.com

146 pointsbproper68 comments

I have absolutely no issues with this:

1. It's the most scalable way for them to generate revenue without shoving ads down your throat.

2. Skimlinks doesn't "modify" your links, they simply put it through a redirect to see if it affiliates. The link you've submitted to Pinterest will likely stay as is.

3. If users submit affiliate links already, then services like Viglink/Skimlinks don't overwrite your cookie (i.e. Reaffiliate it) so those users will continue to see revenue.

I would think the affiliate programs would be the ones who would have an issue. No affiliate link to adding one costs them profits they wouldn't otherwise have to give away.

What's Pinterest going to do if this option doesn't exist, remove the links? No.. they could change the display algorithm to display links with their affiliate code more often, but that may mess with quality of content and click-rates..

I don't see why affiliate programs would have an issue here. If Pinterest didn't exist they wouldn't be getting the traffic.

Pinterest has every right to monetize their website in the least intrusive way possible. These referal links are transparent and provide a neat way to get some income.

What suprises me is how they are giving away 25% of their profits by using a third-party service instead of making something themselves.

They may have an issue if this completely changes the scale, demographics, and therefore the economics of their affiliate program. It's one thing to have and affiliate program for bloggers that may bring dozens or hundreds of interested viewers, vs Pinterest bringing thousands or millions of casual viewers.

Some (many?) programs will need to adjust their terms for this practice, or they may face one of those Groupon-like situations where a family bakery needs to serve 100k muffins, at a loss, in a weekend.

Most affiliate programs I know reward actual purchases, not clicks, and share only a small fraction of profits. I don't see how 100k people ordering a book could ever be a bad thing for Amazon.

Some affiliate programs are loss-leaders.

They assume a proportion of the buyers will be repeat purchasers. Paying for a loss-leader product for 100k casual visitors with unknown demographics or purchase patters is riskier than many businesses are comfortable with (for good reason!).

Also, if you are Fred's custom napkin business, and you usually sell 10 napkins a week and suddenly you receive 100k orders you are going to have a problem scaling a physical business that quickly.

Say 100,000 people ordering a book makes $1,000,000 for Amazon.

Say if those 100,000 people came through an affiliate link, they only make $900,000.

If you're Amazon's affiliate manager, indeed your first thought is, "Wow, Pinterest is great! Look at all these sales"

But your second thought is, "Wow, if I just drop Pinterest from my program, I'll make an extra $100,000." In its current state, Pinterest will not do anything to stop these sales from being generated, so the merchants are just throwing away money.

The real problem here is that Pinterest doesn't deserve the commission, Pinterest's users do.

The thing is, if Amazon would have made $1 mil without the affiliate link, they probably will make something along the lines of $990,000 with it.

Also, I am not sure anyone "deserves" the commission. It isn't a right.

It's awesome that skimlinks exists...years ago I worked for a company that relied on affiliate revenue and we had someone working full time to maintain relationships. I imagine they lose some of the pickier affiliate programs, but this is an awesome way to test out the revenue model.

It also brings up another interesting point. If this revenue model works for pinterest, it means it could also work for pinterest users. Someone can create a browser plugin that automatically converts user links to affiliate links when they get posted to pinterest, and kicks back the commission to the poster. Probably too hard to distribute the plugin, but still thought it was worth mentioning.

Skimlinks does have subids I think, so technically they could "share" the revenue with users if they wanted to. Hypothetically.

There's a strange pattern of posts where commenters suggest an affiliate would be negatively impacted by a sudden uptick in referred customers successfully completing a sale.

In what bizarro world is this a problem?

If the customer acquisition cost (%) becomes higher than the vendor would like to continue paying, they will lower the commission they offer.

Vendors that pay affiliate fees do so willingly. They do this because all traffic comes from somewhere, and it is seldom free. If Amazon only has to pay one-referral for a completed sale vs. 100 click throughs required to complete the same sale, they're happy. If not, they'll down-correct their referral amount offered.

> Not disclosing this modification is putting individual stores at a disadvantage when they and their customers are putting in the work of adding pins.

I find it hard to sympathize for the trivial "work of adding pins" when it's Pinterest that created the universe in which those pins even exist and the community that gives them value.

> One specific, problematic issue is that when individual online stores pin their own content, it is unlikely they would insert an affiliate code. But if the store has an affiliate program, it is highly likely that those links now will have an affiliate code in them that gives Pinterest a percentage of any sales.

It's also hard to sympthasize with online stores having to cough up some money for marketing directly to Pinterest's community.

Relatively few people here have a problem with Pinterest making money; the problem they do have, is making money by modifying the links the users are posting without disclosing that modification.

I'd be somewhat squicked if I saw that paragraph in the T&C when I was signing up, but at least I'd know and be able to decide if it was worth it. But by going ahead and not putting that disclosure anywhere; Pinterest has shown that they don't respect their users. And that may be somewhat poisonous to their prospects (or not, Facebook being the prime example).

Easy solution for the store, terminate the affiliate relationship.

They should disclose this, but it's a perfectly reasonable thing to do. It's a good way to make a little money that costs the users nothing (except for users who've attempted to use their own affiliate links).

Why do you think they should disclose it? (I'm actually curious). The only users affected are those using their own affiliate links so it would have no effect on the vast majority of users.

It seems to me that companies are being asked to disclose more and more these days even when it doesn't really affect users and the company has no reason to disclose the information.

I think it's smart to have it disclosed somewhere (FAQ) because people that know what affiliate links look like can figure it out themselves anyway by looking at the links.

But why does that matter? What does anyone gain from knowing that they are using affiliate links? What does anyone lose from not knowing?

I don't think there is an effective way to hide the use of affiliate links, so they may as well disclose it in their FAQ or TOS just to avoid complaints that they're not being genuine towards their users.

I can think of a couple of ways that might (!) work to hide affiliate links:

1. Add a click handler to your anchor tags that redirects to an affiliate-linked version of the href. 2. Modify the url on mousedown (since it happens before click.) I think someone told me this doesn't actually work, but I don't remember for sure.

I don't think they should hide it but I still see no reason to disclose that. I sort of understand your position but I don't understand how not disclosing something that doesn't affect users is disingenuous.

Sure there is, if you are talking about the links on the pinterest items users hover over and not the eventual destination url of the merchant. Just use an in house link shortner that does a lookup to the original destination url, identify if an affiliate program exists, modify if needed and complete the redirect.

Unless you use an iframe, the affiliated URL will be in the user's address bar at the end of the exercise either way. If you do try to trick that away, there'll still be an HTTP request to the URL unless you proxy the entire page. Someone interested or sufficiently bored will be able to see what is going on.

"Effective" masking of links is relative. To some members of the HN community saying that it is impossible to mask the links is the only empirically correct statement. But my aunt and her pinned collection of knitting crap isn't going to break out an HTTP sniffer to see what is going on behind the scenes, the masking of overt monetization so users continue to labor under the delusion that they aren't being marketed to could be all that is needed to be "effective".

Camouflage doesn't render a soldier invisible but that doesn't mean it's not effective.

It'll only be effective until a well-placed, shrill-toned media story exposes it to everyone. Be upfront about it and you'll be less likely to find yourself on the wrong end of "deception" charges, however trifle and ultimately meaningless the deception is.

When you make money off someone, it's generally seen as bad form to be secretive about it.

It could definitely piss off users who have their own affiliate links [someone upthread said the service they're using won't remove existing affiliate links, btw.] That's a small number of users to be sure, but they may be important users: consider people who run taste-making blogs that make money via affiliate links. If a number of popular blogs like this realized their affiliate links were being removed, and complained about it, it could make for some pretty bad PR for pinterest, and it would be well-targeted bad PR, since that's exactly the community pinterest appeals to.

I think leaving this undisclosed would be a bad idea, as the rumor mill could start up, and spread misinformation about what's happening with affiliate links. It would also be a good opportunity to get feedback on policy.

FTA: "... but also explained that if an affiliate link was in the original pin, Pinterest wouldn’t modify it." If that's true, then there is no cost even for users who have attempted to use their own affiliate links.

The article is almost 1000 words, but the title of HN post is more than enough to describe what's going on.

He could've just pinned that photo showing the link.

That's called "a good headline" in journalism.

DuckDuckGo (the search engine) is doing the same. E.g., search for something that returns Amazon search result, and the link to Amazon will have their affiliate tag included.

A positive point, however, is that they are open about this on their website: http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/216405-m...

Metafilter also does something similar with any Amazon link and are open about it, which does seem the best way to handle it

http://faq.metafilter.com/#51

This seems

It is not really the same as DDG is providing the links itself while pinterest is modifying user submitted links. However, I have no problem with either of them. It would be nice of they said it in their FAQ (or wherever) as DDG did.

Does Stack Overflow also do this, at least with Amazon links? Someone please correct me if I'm wrong because I wouldn't want to spread misinformation. But IIRC Amazon links turn into something like "rads.stackoverflow.com/..." which I always assumed were affiliate. I think it's pretty reasonable, as others have pointed out.

Yup, Stack Overflow does do that: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/26964/auto-inserting... and http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising...

It seems like almost no one here takes issue with this... Would it be cool if Google inserted affiliate codes in it's search results (those that apply)? Slippery slope perhaps? Is it really that different?

Even on Google, that doesn't affect the user at all. I wouldn't mind.

However, it would definitely piss off the affiliate program...who should just boot Google from their program.

Now that I think about it more, that's the real problem with this. The businesses are most likely getting sales anyway, and pinterest can't argue that they're doing anything special to generate the sale. Since pinterest can't censor links to these merchants, they'll probably end up getting booted from their programs.

"and pinterest can't argue that they're doing anything special to generate the sale."

You can't be serious. The sales would never have been generated in the first place if pinterest never existed. Your logic would seem to preclude any affiliate program in existence. If I have a blog reviewing my favorite books, and being a book lover I want to make it easy for people to enjoy books I recommend so I go ahead and place links to Amazon. Should Amazon say "well you we're going to link to us regardless, so you aren't eligible."

You're right, it is ridiculous, but if you were a merchant why would you want to pay out Pinterest? If you didn't pay Pinterest for their leads, wouldn't you still get the same number of sales?

Currently, Pinterest doesn't have a foot to stand on if the affiliate programs simply kick them out. They can do things to bias certain merchants, but that's a riskier play.

"The sales would never have been generated in the first place if pinterest never existed."

That's true, the sale would never had been generated if Pinterest never existed. But the key point here is that the sale would still have been generated even if Pinterest was dropped from the affiliate program. The user generated link would still exist.

As a blogger you could say well I'm not going to link to any Amazon products now. Pinterest doesn't have that luxury. They could remove any links that they can't monetize but users would revolt since they are the ones adding the content and links.

Are you sure it wouldn't affect you as a user? If product A's affiliate program has a better percentage payout than competing product B does, then they could easily benefit from promoting company A over product B.

Would you trust them not to?

Soon they're approaching companies and selling placement, charging listing fees, etc.

It's a business and their entitled to do this. As a user I'm entitled to ignore their offerings on the grounds that the way they ultimately profit is at my (the user's) expense. Eventually they're just internet noise with a slick interface.

I remember reading Posterous is using skimlink's competitor Viglink http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1309403

The real question is WHY would companies let Posterous or Pinterest become affiliates at all? Where are the incremental sales? It makes sense for businesses to encourage USERS to become affiliates and promote their products, but allowing user-gen site to monetize their users' links does not encourage their users to link and promote products more.

I don't really see the problem here. At most it should be an update to their TOS and call it a day.

It appears that Pinterest is violating the Amazon Affiliates operating agreement.

https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/gp/associates/agreement...

Specifically:

  “Prohibited Paid Search Placement” means an advertisement
  that you purchased through bidding on keywords, search
  terms, or other identifiers (including Proprietary Terms)
  or other participation in keyword auctions. “Proprietary
  Term” means keywords, search terms, or other identifiers
  that include the word “amazon,” “endless,” “Kindle,”
  “smallparts,” “myhabit,” or “Javari,” or any other
  trademark of Amazon or its affiliates ( see a non-
  exhaustive list of our trademarks), or variations or 
  misspellings of any of those words (e.g., “ammazon,” 
  “amaozn,” “endlss,” “enldess,” “smalparts,” “kindel,” and
  “javary”). “Redirecting Link” means a link that sends
  users indirectly to the Amazon Site via an intermediate
  site or webpage and without requiring the user to click on 
  a link or take some other affirmative action on that
  intermediate site or webpage. “Search Engine” means Google, 
  Yahoo, Bing, or any other search engine, portal, sponsored 
  advertising service, or other search or referral service, 
  or any site that participates in any of their respective 
  networks.

Pinterest falls under both "Redirecting Link" and "Search Engine" parts of this clause.

In addition:

Section 10 requires affiliates sites to state they are an affilliate:

  You must, however, clearly state the following on your
  site: “[Insert your name] is a participant in the Amazon
  Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising 
  program designed to provide a means for sites to earn 
  advertising fees by advertising and linking to [insert the
  applicable site name (amazon.com, endless.com, 
  smallparts.com or myhabit.com)].”

Depends on if they have a business agreement with Amazon that excludes them from those terms. At their size, they very well might.

Same way large AdSense customers are treated completely different and have their own contracts with Google.

You're totally off base on the first part.

1) Prohibited paid search placement: This only applies to bidding on placement on search engines. Pinterest has not bid on terms on their own site, so that section has no relevance even if Pinterest itself could be considered a search engine.

2) Redirecting links: This prohibits placing links that point to an intermediate page that then redirects to Amazon. Pinterest is linking directly to Amazon (with affiliate identifiers in the query string), not to an intermediate page that performs any redirection.

Any idea what the "redirecting links" clause means for URL shorteners and other redirect-based services?

I think it has to be taken in the context of paid search placement. You can't arbitrage/hide the traffic source(and the keyword for paid search) from amazon through redirection.

Really surprised that no one has a problem with this.

How would we feel if PG turned every Apple, Amazon, or other ecommerce link into an affiliate link, with our name pinned to it? Horrible decision on their part, and I think it's going to bite them in the ass when the average user gets wind of it.

The average "Pinterest User" has no idea what an affiliate link is.

Well, if you claim that it's such a horrible thing you should at least try to explain why. Personally, I wouldn't mind if Amazon links from HN had an affiliate code attached.

15 days ago, in a PR piece about Pinterest, I wondered just how, if at all, it was different from Tumblr.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3501938

Well, now I know.

It's not enormously different, but A) you're encouraged to break things up by category ("Clothing", "Art", "Household Items"), B) you can follow all of a person's categories or just some of them, C) it's got a strongly consistent aesthetic - Tumblr is far more customizable (think Facebook vs. Myspace), D) grid-based layout rather than vertical blog style (though Tumblr allows this as well)

This reminds me of the debate on Path's address book upload activity. I don't think it was malicious. It could be covered in a TOS update. But I rarely read the TOS for a site. When I do, it's a serious investment of time to understand what they're trying to say.

I think we need to simplify TOS language and standardize on a set of images to represent privacy, affiliation, and payment terms for a service. I would actually read an at-a-glance TOS summary.

What if you could parse a website's TOS and generate the summary? Startup idea :)

There's no understood expectation that Pinterest is going to leave any links you upload to them alone - they are responsible for the data just as much as you are.

I find this much more tolerable than Facebook and most search engines' practice of clicking you through an encoded link, which adds latency for no good reason.

The reason most do that is to rob the site you're visiting of context about the page you're just on. If I click through from a friend's Facebook profile they can't see the referrer URL is, for example, facebook.com/nickbarnwell

In Facebook's case, this is to protect the user from potentially giving away information about themselves in their Referer header and from potentially malicious links that we didn't have enough information on at display (or email) time, but which we now have enough information to know it is malicious.

This is explained in more detail at https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/link-shim-p...

A bit off topic but I think this is nothing link the Path address book issue. I think a lot of the privacy debates in the last few months have been blown out of proportion but when I saw the Path news I immediately closed my account. Path storing details of all my contacts on their servers without my permission is a huge abuse of my trust. This doesn't seem anything like the Path debate in my opinion.

I do agree that TOS language should be simplified. Something like a simple bulleted list explaining each point of the TOS simply.

It's been tried http://khulaproject.com/

I don't think it's a particularly viable business, it might be a good feature of a larger business that was focused on helping customers navigate the complexities of modern life; but on it's own, the value in one instance is too small to motivate purchasing.

Amazing. This is why I like HN. I just wrote up a quick note with an example image here: http://clearsignal.posterous.com/do-we-value-our-laundry-mor... When I get back, link to actual example. Thanks!

It's not a viable business, the potential for revenue generation is very small without resorting to questionable tactics (see TRUSTe). I was hoping it would function more as a community effort with the human-readable TOS hosted on the relevant site much like Creative Commons. Sadly I think the human-readable TOS is going to have to come from the business itself (or possibly from an established user-rights organization, i.e. CC or EFF).

As for Path's storage of user contacts; while I find the practice sketchy, especially since I just signed up for Path and had no idea this was happening, but not unexpected especially considering facebook's status as a 'role-model' for privacy issues.

Side-note: Khula Project in its current form is deadpooled. I do plan to relaunch sometime in the future with a project more focused on information distribution.

That's why we made http://privacyparrot.com The AI isn't perfect, but it's better than not reading a policy at all.

This is what deal forums have done since time immemorial (1996-ish).

Don't see why they should/would disclose this to users. Does not affect the end users experience unless they are in fact adding their own affiliate links. I find the point the author made about bloggers disclosing the use of affiliate links a stretch. I can see his point but pinterest is not a blog, they're a business and want to/should produce revenue.

I don't see this as a problem at all. From a user perspective, I would much rather see this than flashy banner ads polluting the experience.

The same thing happens on sites such as RetailMeNot.

Good on Pinterest for monetizing and they should continue being aggressive and explore other opportunities.

Skimlinks has officially responded - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3566369

Has facebook experimented with converting links into aff links when possible? How much would that be worth...

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