Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Mothership Spam Is Our Friend

Welcome to Pintensify, the spam mother ship.


Will Pinterest be dominated?


The swarm gathers steam and spam automation tools in the dark confines of Black Hat World forum. "Black Hat" refers to a web savvy crowd whose goal is to exploit the internet and search engines to their fullest extent, no holds barred, with every means at their disposal. They are the finders of loopholes. They are the hackers. Mostly, it's legal. There is a lot of buzz about Pinterest right now.

Many Black Hat World threads seek ways to mine Pinterest


Bugs are being worked out; how to cloak redirects, monetizing through CPA (cost-per-action) affiliate marketing, Amazon, diet scams, fake gift cards, pages serving pay-per-click advertising. They work in informal teams harvesting image libraries, programming bots, dealing in followers and invites, creating and selling Pinterest clone programs. Small spammers even complain about the larger spammers "ruining it for everyone."

Like the artists whose websites are being copied onto Pinterest by pinners, spammers are trying to evaluate the worth of Pinterest traffic. Unlike artists, these guys count their coins and keep statistics.

Black hat webmasters trying to market Pinterest-spamming bots are of course lauding it as "highly converting traffic," a.k.a. cash-in-the-bank for a spammer. Very few report high earnings "making a steady $300-400 from Pinterest" (a feat that appears to require about 20 thousand followers and thousands of accounts), they are outnumbered by skeptics:
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"I've dabbled in this and I still don't get it. The clickthrough rate is horrible."
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"i found pinterest requried too much work compared to other methods...i have no interest in spending tons of valuable time trying to make a hundred bucks/mo...i could make more at mcdonalds."
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April Total earning
Ad.sense Earnings: €62.83 = $82
Amazon Earnings: $6.01
CPA Earnings: $40.20
TOTAL: $128.21

Number of accounts: 74
Total followers: 1165
Total following: 1483
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"i am getting a decent amount of daily traffic from pinterest but not making much money. getting cpa offer conversions from pinterest traffic is not doing too well for me but i know a lot of money can be made from the site."
For many artists and photographers, thousands of pins result in negligible traffic. How much is this negligible traffic really worth? The spammer jury is still out.

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