Wednesday, March 28, 2012

A Handy Guide to Figure out where you stand on Affiliate-Link Pinterest Bots

This post was triggered by the case of the super-successful Amazon Pinterest bot wrangler and the resulting discussion on HN.  In case you don't already know the background, here's a summary: Steve (the wrangler) set up thousands of fake accounts on Pinterest, had them work with each other to vote up pins with affiliate links in them and ended up earning $1000 a day when people clicked on the links.

Here's an easy guide to find out where you stand on this whole issue:

10: Steve is right (and smart). There's nothing wrong in what he did.
9: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using fake accounts is just wrong.
8: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using automation is just wrong.
7: I'm all for adding affiliate links but using low-cost MTurk web workers to pin your items is just wrong
6: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be just you and your team of Pinterest cross-promoters without any automation or fake accounts
5: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be just you (no automation)
4: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it has to be products that you've actually used
3: I'm all for adding affiliate links but it's not going to be by you (Pinterest, bring back Skimlinks and monetize, you poor thing).
2: No affiliate links. It screws up the equation.
1: I hate affiliate links. If I see it, I'll go to Amazon without clicking on a link, buy something for a $1000 and then add a screenshot of the purchase as a comment.

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