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?

Reality Sets In At Etsy

Earlier this year, Creators Against Pinterest published: Etsy Loves Pinterest, featuring the lovestruck ramblings of enthusiastic Etsyans.

Four months later, Estyans are singing a completely different tune. Etsy has fallen out of love with Pinterest.

Some excerpts:

I've tried to look at it from a business perspective and the ROI would be much too low to make it worth while. Time is money, too. Don't forget that. My time is much better spent listing.

Very few sellers admit to getting many views from there, and you're not supposed to self-promote. So yes, you get a few views, and maybe an occasional sale. But is it really worth the time? Not to me.

I get occasional views from it and repins but I mostly like it for my own personal use.

I get some views from Pinterest.

I absolutely love Pinterest, but more for personal entertainment than for sales.

Is it even really a good idea to post your items on pinterest? I vaguely remember reading that when you post something, you're saying you have the rights to it, but you're also giving the rights to pinterest to do with as they please.

I don't know if it's brought me any sales, but it's fun!

There's so much going on in there that it's stopped making sense to spend to much time with it.

Pintrest has never helped me, but I try to help sellers by having a board titled, Favorite Etsy Finds. I have noticed some of them get repinned so sure hope someone is getting sales from it!

Tried it, didn't like it. No method to their madness!

[...] don't think it helps business but I love the site.

These comments are surprising given Pinterest's emphasis on recipes and crafts. One might have a reasonable expectation that the beautiful pictures taken by Etsy sellers, splayed all over Pinterest, would convert into a noticeable amount of conversions to sales. Apparently, it isn't the case.

We Will All Fall Unless We Stand United

Artists allowing Pinterest to scrape their content looks like a personal decision. On some levels, it is; an artist can evaluate how much referral traffic they are receiving from Pinterest relative to the number of infringements they allow, and decide whether that's worth losing control over the distribution of their images and websites everywhere hotlinking these pictures with links back to Pinterest.

One useful metric is the monthly referral rate per infringement. Suppose the following data:

1000 images pinned.
10 referrals from Pinterest per month.

In this simple example, referral rate is 1% per month, or 0.01 monthly visitor per infringed image. In other words, the content creator must allow 100 units of infringement in order to gain one extra visitor per month.

That takes care of the personal decision aspect.

Another important consideration is a collective one. Should the community of content creators, as a whole, embrace Pinterest?

• If people are looking for your content as text, or images, they have search engines at their disposal and they should find you directly, not with Pinterest as an intermediary.
• You are competing with Pinterest for a most valuable resource, visitors. Visitors can be expressed as the total number of time people spend engaged on the internet. This is a finite resource. The more visitors are engaged on Pinterest, because the content is there, the less motivated they are to find you with search engines, or even follow a link to your site from Pinterest. The more content we let Pinterest get away with, the fewer visitors ALL CONTENT CREATORS will have to share, with Pinterest getting, by far, the largest chunk of the pie.
• Some years ago, a webmaster could create a craft website, work on it for some years, and expect a reasonable amount of success and rank in search engine pages. They were then competing against other content creators with similar resources. Now, a webmaster wishing to launch a craft website needs to compete not with his/her peers, but with Pinterest, a place where everyone's best work is now aggregated. Success stories are expected to be extremely rare in such an environment.
• If enough content creators say "yes" to Pinterest, all of them will lose out in the short term, and more devastatingly in the long term. This is a heavy price to pay for an illusory trickle of traffic.

In Pinteresting or not? A look at #Pinterest, Rob O'Hara observes:

If it sticks around long enough, I can see Pinterest taking a slice out of the blogosphere — specifically, blogs that are set up for the sole purpose of sharing pictures. Why manage an entire website for pictures when you can just point picture to your Pinterest collection?

You don't need a crystal ball to see that one coming.

We can do our share to stop it. We can stand united against Pinterest, and contribute to keeping the internet an environment where citizen-publishers can make a living without being robbed by crowdsourced scrapers like Pinterest - like it's meant to be.

• BOYCOTT pin buttons.
• EDUCATE fellow artists wherever opportunity arises.
• REMOVE all our pinned content via DMCA notices.

Thank you!

Pinterest Deflates Again

...all of that hype never seems to fully drown out the hum of online merchants telling us that, despite the hours and hours of time they spend on Twitter, Facebook or Pinterest [...] marketing their sales, the returns are negligible.

When content providers decide to compromise their copyright by allowing their content on Pinterest, or even posting it themselves, they do so with the expectation of some measure of promotion of their product or website, or better yet, sales.

Pooling data from 5 anomymous online marketplaces, David Steiner, writing for EcommerceBytes reveals dismal referral traffic from Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter.

The much-hyped "Pinterest high conversion rate" suffers a devastating blow:

Twitter had only a quarter of Pinterest's traffic, the quality and conversion rate was about double that of Pinterest

CornerstoneConsultingInc reports that:

...according to Bloomberg, the data found that Pinterest facilitates buying, but only to a relatively unimpressive extent. An average Pinterest purchase came out to $.75 as contrasted against $2.08 per order from Facebook referrals and $33.66 from Twitter.

In view of these statistics, coupled with the standard NOFOLLOW attribute link scheme of most of the crowdsourced scrapers, there is very little to gain by allowing Pinterest to re-distribute your content, and possibly more to lose in the long run as you lose sight of where your intellectual property ends up.

Pinterest's Hype Bubble Is Deflated

Charlie Warzel reports in Buzzfeed (Reddit generates huge referral traffic while Pinterest falls flat.) some facts that match what many have observed in their web logs: the hype about how links to your website on Pinterest will result in a welcome deluge of traffic is, well, just hype.

At Pinterest's peak in April 2012, the photo-centric social site was churning out nearly 400,000 social referrals. In July, Pinterest served up only 114,000 referrals (virtually unchanged from 110,000 in June), illustrating that for many publishers, Pinterest may be more of a social gimmick than anything else.

Compared to the 3.1 million referrals Reddit.com brought in July, Pinterest's peak of 114,000 referrals is positively anemic, and barely registering. This is hardly surprising since the audience for mindless columns of image thumbnails are hardly expected to want to dwell deeper, especially into daunting walls of text.

According to Josh Sternberg in Is Pinterest of Interest to Publishers, online magazine publishers report that in terms of traffic referrals, Pinterest is a dud. The print/online magazine The Atlantic doesn’t see much traffic coming from Pinterest. “Pinterest is not an effective referral tool for us,” said the magazine's Scott Havens. Pinterest isn't even in the top 50 of its referrers.

Right now, the internet is teeming with articles praising Pinterest's referral traffic potential, preaching that every business should consecrate much precious time posting images, cultivating followers, interacting with pinners, following them, etc., not to miss out on Pinterest's much touted referral traffic miracle.

Like untruths sparked by wishful thinking and set afire by self-styled Pinterest gurus striving to sell e-books and a name for themselves, this one will soon be a handful of ashes in the wind.