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[iamlost]

We briefly discussed Pinterest in Anybody Getting Traffic From Pinterest.com started by EGOL, 16-January-2012. It is interesting to see my briefly mentioned concern:

A minor concern - so far - is how they leverage content for their own affiliate marketing use.

A few days later What Affiliates and Merchants Should Know About Pinterest Links by Joel Garcia, GTO Management, 20-January-2012, wrote in greater detail. Perhaps the two most important points he noted are:

...I discovered that a pin that linked to one of our merchant clients was swapped out for a SkimLinks affiliate link as I was passed from Pinterest to the source page of the pin.
...I did another test in which I modified the URL of my original pin with an affiliate link. I was pleased to discover that the affiliate link I had placed was not overwritten by SkimLinks when I clicked on the pin and was transferred to the merchant site.

Note: do read the comments as well.

For those not familiar with SkimLinks:
* http://www.crunchbas...pany/skimlinks, CrunchBase
* http://skimlinks.com/about, SkimLinks, About page.

Why bring this up now? Because with Matt McGee's Skimlinks Downplays Pinterest’s Affiliate Link Practice in Search Marketing Land, today, 08-February-2012, there is likely to be a bandwagontrain's worth of follow on.

I can hardly wait on the deluge of re-re-reconstituted copy as this story touches so many bases: search and SEO, social and marketing, affiliate and lead, traffic and conversion, et al...

And it is not new. Not. What is interesting (to me) is - from my post quoted previously:

It is an interesting end run around copyright and pay for use....

Who needs bots to scrape when one can leverage real live web users? Who needs algos to filter and rank results when you can get real live humans to do so?

Interesting times.