Pinterest kills affiliate links, making monetization difficult for bloggers

Pinterest has begun removing affiliate links, redirects and trackers on pins from today, reports VentureBeat.

The move won’t visibly affect users’ posts on the social network, but the tracking links will be stripped. This means that bloggers who previously earned a percentage of sales when shoppers clicked through to products they shared on Pinterest will no receive a cut from those stores.

The company suggested that bloggers seek out other methods to make money via its network: “participate in paid social media marketing involving Pinterest, be paid to curate a board or be paid to create original content for a business.”

Pinterest specifically targeted links from RewardStyle and Hello Society. Both companies enable influential bloggers to monetize their content by pinning products available online on Pinterest. Now that Pinterest has begun removing the links that indicate which blogger posted what, they won’t be able to claim and receive commissions for the sales they drive.

The social network claims that it doing so to prevent broken links and irrelevant pins cropping up in users’ feeds, so as to maintain a high quality experience for its audience.

While Pinterest claims that the decision to ban affiliate links was made with its users’ best interests in mind, It’s possible that the company is working on ramping up its own monetization strategies. Pinterest recently launched Promoted Pins for advertisers to publish paid content, and made a deal with Apple to make it easier for users to discover and install iOS apps via the social network.

We’ve reached out to RewardStyle and Hello Society to find out more about how the companies and its blogger networks are affected by this, and will update this post when we hear back.

➤ Pinterest bans all affiliate links, asks power users to monetize in other ways [VentureBeat]