Customize The No-Pin Meta-tag

Did you know that you can now display your own custom message when someone attempts to pin from your website?

<meta name = "pinterest" content = "nopin" description = "Buzz off my images, PIN HAG!" />

Pinterest Sputters

Pin hags are getting bored of red velvet shit.
After a meteoric rise, and subsequent leveling off of traffic, Pinterest's 2013 second quarter appears to demonstrate that stealing images from artists, photographers and bloggers gets old after a while. One can always hope that Pinterest will myspace itself.

Let's take a closer look at the last 3 months:


Pinterest is trending down, artists hopeful
While it's reasonable to expect traffic downturns during the summer months while pin hags are out gardening, this downturn does appear more pronounced and sustained than it was at the corresponding time last year.

What factors might contribute to this excellent downturn?

• It takes a few months for pin hags to realize how futile their picture collections are.
• Bing, Yahoo and Google Image searches now show full-size images without having to visit source websites, competing with Pinterest's highly successful business model of shamelessly grabbing other people's pictorial content by way of crowdscraping.
• Even spammers are beginning to realize that Pinterest referral traffic is just a worthless trickle.
• All the pictures have already been pinned, so Pinterest is degenerating into an incestuous orgy of monotonous re-pinning.
• Maybe the "strikes" are working a slow grind?

Pinterest is not going down without a fight.

• The image displays are even bigger!
• Analytic features for overtly commercial boards, so that their owners get to see in charts and numbers how completely useless Pinterest referral traffic really is!
• Hassling the content providers: DMCA take-down requests are more error-prone than ever with the "strike system" radio buttons popup text interfering with the use of the buttons, glitches like the button that is clicked causing the button in the following entry field to unclick, error messages that wipe out the check-marks and pull-down selection menus, DMCA confirmation letters that do not list the images that have been taken down (if they have been taken down).

If Pinterest flouders, how about crowdscraping the written word, next?

Hype, Meet Reality

After a peak in traffic in spring 2012, Pinterest has sputtered
despite dropping the invitation-only requirement.


To put things in perspective, Pinterest isn't doing all that much better
than the slowly imploding myspace.


That's right!
An 8% drop in traffic in the past 3 months.

Granted, this data is obscured to some degree by variations in the cat-and-mouse game between Pinterest, and our strange-bedfellow allies, the spammers; but before you buy that e-book from that self-appointed Pinterest guru whose byline is to instill a sense of panic YOU HAVE TO GET IN ON THE PINTEREST ACTION!, remember that Pinterest blows chunks, outside of recipe blogs and home decor brand names.

The hype machine doesn't appear to have run out of gas, yet, but it seems like the pin hags that spent 50 hours a week scraping third-party content to fuel Pinterest's hungry chase for venture capital, may have fallen behind on the laundry, and are too busy catching up folding threadbare socks and faded towels to infringe on pictures of cutesy socks and spiffy towels.

Google Pinterizes Its Image Search

Google Images' thumbnails are now much larger
at a set 180 pixels in height,
as shown in this unscaled screenshot.

I did a Google image search just yesterday. This morning, when I did it again, the array of images jumped at me. They were much, much larger.

They are measured at 180 pixels in height, and the even larger image that hovers over the thumbnail is now a relatively insignificant ~10% larger than the thumbnail itself. After you click to reach the actual website, there is a further intervening image that is near full-size (this is not new). Pin hags now have a choice of 2 large thumbnails hosted on Google, and a third, near full-size image that is hovering over the real one, but hosted by the content creator's website.

Pinterest's unique combination of wanton disregard for the creators whose images its users are feverishly scraping, and unfortunate success, has started a veritable conflagration of imitation that is changing the internet as we know it. And not in a good way. Where once citizen-publishers could turn a profit displaying their own images, there will be nothing but ashes left.

The latest Pinterest imitator is a heartbreaker. Google. It's a heartbreaker because Google is so large. It's not difficult to foresee a competition between search engines for who can display the biggest thumbnails without getting its wrists slapped by the law. Right now, competitor Bing's thumbnails are 75% smaller or less than Google's new supersized thumbnails. But for how long?


Bing Image search thumbnails haven't yet been pinterized.

How the other hand, it's easy to guess what Google might be thinking. Why not render Pinterest image collections even more pointless than they are now, by "improving" Google Image search? The downside is that the unashamed pinning from Google Images (which over-rides a site's nopin metatag, to add insult to injury) will be more rewarding to the pin hags, and that visitors can now spend more time on Google Images and have another reason to avoid visiting the creator's websites.

Pinterest forcing content creators to compete against their own websites was one thing. Now, Google is doing much of the same.

Picstopin To Picstospam

This post is for giggles.

Picstopin is a website I can only call a spammified Pinterest knockoff. Primarily, it is exploiting Bing's Image Search API to display thumbnails that the search engine Bing would show for some pre-defined search terms, or user-entered search terms. These thumbnails images might be deemed to be fair use in a court of law when diplayed by Bing in the course of a user's search, although they may be considered on the large side. When the same images are exploited by Picstopin through the Bing API, 'fair use' may be compromised - that's the sort of unprofitable legal hair splitting that no one would be expected to drag in front of a judge. It's not surprising that nopin metatags aren't respected, since the source Bing doesn't process them.

These images are arranged in the familiar format popularized by Pinterest, each image decorated by a PIN IT button. That's when the fun begins.

If a user uses the PIN IT button, the image will be credited to the website Gamerboat.com, NOT Picstopin. Gamerboat? What is Gamerboat? I looked up gamerboat.com reviews and found out, ironically, that the web domain I typed in the search query (gamerboat.com) gets obliterated from the search results, and the top result is some random Pinterest page. This demonstrates the negative power of Pinterest links: as they are treated by Google right now, having links on Pinterest is bad for the source website. Here is a screenshot:

That's the first chuckle. In trying to boost the search engine ranking of gamerboat.com via an underhanded linking scheme in Pinterest, Picstopin destroys this ranking, as outlined in this blog's Nasty Linking Practices and Clone Wars.

You can see here: pinterest.com/source/gamerboat.com/ all the images allegedly pinned from gamerboat.com; none of these images actually come from the site.

The second laugh is when a Picstopin user clicks on one of the Bing-provided image thumbnails, they are re-directed to the affiliate website of the day, mediated by Peerfly or Clickbank, for example. In some cases these websites will be denied by your virus blocker, in others, they may have intrusive pop up windows that prevent you from leaving the spam website. You may be enticed to pay for "satellite" service that consists of streams freely available on the internet, entreated to fill out phishing surveys, etc.

Picstopin is just a big old spam/virus delivery system with a honeypot aimed at pin hags. Let's hope the website is a thorn in Pinterest's side, and the hags' sides.

UPDATE: I'm sad to report that Pinterest has flagged Picstopin as a spam site and blocks pinning from it; however, pin hags can still get caught with the PIN IT button as it's coded by the spam-master as belonging to gamerboat.com,

ShopInterest.co

ShopInterest.Co is a new Pinterest clone startup. The variety of ways webmasters try to hitch their wagons to the Pinterest horse is comedy gold.

Here's how it works. I pin stuff on Pinterest. Then I sign up with ShopInterest.Co, who will upload any pin or pinboard to its own set of servers. I add price tags to my pins, et voilà! ShopInterest.Co has made a copy of my pinboards, except that I can now sell what I have pinned. I plug my state tax rate, connect with my PayPal account, and when someone wants to buy whatever is pinned, I ship it.

...our user base expressed an interest is leveraging Pinterest for selling, and shared with us that there was a lot of duplicative work between selling via Etsy, Ebay and posting in Pinterest

These geniuses have probably heard a lot of uncritical Pinterest hype from the self-appointed Pinterest marketing gurus, but it appears that they haven't bothered to check out Pinterest with their own eyes.

How does a pinboard full of images taken without permission, representing objects pinners can't afford, translates into something the pin hags have the power to sell? Remember, Pinterest frowns upon self-promotion, so how can pinners package and ship other people's things... especially when most of these things are just pretty pictures of objects that aren't for sale?

..it’s not about building a traditional online store – it’s about turning your Pinterest board into a store.

Good luck with that.

A Spammer's View of "Pin Hags"

The image pinners wish to project.



Busted.

How spammers view pinners (excerpts from Black Hat World Forum):

Don't get these glamorous pictures fool you, Pinterest is mostly older, fat ass women spending all their time on the internet, lazily clicking on pictures to pin them and getting their egos stroked for their amazing taste.

They're dreaming about high heels and castles but trust me, what I make money on is the peddling of donuts and limited edition Pop Tarts. [...]

WHAT SELLS

Thomas Kinkade crap

Amazon grocery products with quality photos: donuts [...], fruit and nuts [...], gift baskets [...], chocolate & candies are super hot [...], chocolates with really nice pictures [...], shit like these cupcakes sell like mad [...], candy apples [...], cute shit with jelly beans [...], 12-flavor gummy bears [...] - you get the idea.

Trendy shit like decorating items with seashells that you can put in their own folder. Example: [...]

ANY EFFING ANYTHING WITH HEARTS. Just search Amazon with the "heart" keyword in Home & Garden. They have heart-shaped measuring cups that no pinning hag will want to be caught without. You could fill up an entire fake account with heart junk merchandise. [...]

Niche stuff targeting the gullible and more likely to follow the links, like a folder of merchandise with Jesus or the Virgin Mary.

Bacon products, they'll pretend it's for their husbands but it's really for them [...]. I tried the bacon thing as a joke, now I'm laughing all the way to the bank.

AVOID

Dresses (overdone, and pinners won't fit in them anyway)

Electronics (reading instruction manuals is intimidating)

Jewelry (looks spammy)

Diets. These gals love to eat more than they love to diet. Give them food instead. Easy food, none of that hard-work recipe business.

Craft stuff. They like to look at it, not do it.

Link to Google Trends

See the other websites that the pin hags visit?

1. yummytastyrecipes.com (FOOD)
2. helpwithweightloss.org (OPPOSITE OF FOOD)
3. onegoodthingbyjillee.com (FOOD)
4. sixsistersstuff.com (FOOD)
5. plainchicken.com (FOOD)
6. zhishuba.com (NO IDEA, CHINESE SITE, NOTHING LOADS. SITE PROBABLY EATEN)
7. chef-in-training.com (FOOD)
8. the-girl-who-ate-everything.com (FOOD)
9. realmomkitchen.com (FOOD)
10. iknowhair.com (HAIR - probably EATING IT)