Pinterest Creates Affiliate Opportunities for Competition

Even after a cash infusion from Linkshare parent company Rakuten, Pinterest remains decidedly anti-affiliate. After stripping Amazon affiliate links, Pinterest expanded their block on certain types of tracking URLs to include removing Google Analytics UTM codes and declaring Linkshare URLs as spam. That hasn’t stopped other companies from building a business around making it easy for people to share photos of the things they love.

Fancying Products for Fun or Profit

Fancy, a site that’s been around since 2009, bills itself as a style curation site. Much like Pinterest, you can add things you love to the site, as well as “Fancy” things other people have added. One key difference with Fancy is they focus on providing a sales outlet for products, in addition to having the ability to curate. Fancy recently added referrals, meaning any time you share a product with friends, you have the potential to get paid when they buy. While that’s not quite like adding your own affiliate links to things you share, it’s a better compromise than banning affiliates altogether. It seems like there’s a solid potential for some smart affiliate marketer to drive enough commerce transactions to make Fancy a lucrative side business, if not a full-time gig.

Super Affiliate of Aspirational Shopping

I call most of what people do on Pinterest aspirational shopping, because people are sharing stuff they like as they kill time, without necessarily having any intent to buy the products. There have been some interesting studies around moving customers from pinning to purchase, but 20% of people buying at least one thing they pinned isn’t exactly an indication that Pinterest is a wishlist of future transactions. People buying 20% of what they pin would be far more interesting.

Pinterest briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a massive affiliate when they integrated Skimlinks a few months ago. They received some largely unfounded backlash as a result and quickly pulled the links, though they claimed it was just a test.

I just met the folks from Wantering, which is a GROWLab startup that allows you to create an account, “heart” (aka favorite) fashion items, and share them with friends. The Wantering presentation is very similar to Pinterest. At the moment they are using naked links to products, but I have to think the obvious business model is to add purchase links to the various product pages.

Wantering actually reminds me a great deal of StyleFeeder, which was ultimately acquired by People Magazine and integrated as StyleWatch. With StyleFeeder users created accounts to track fashion items and the site got paid anytime someone purchased an item. While Wantering doesn’t have the volume of traffic StyleFeeder did, a Skimlinks or VigLink integration would be a rapid path to monetization.

Claiming the Commerce of Curation

Who do you think will become the Pinterest of shared photo commerce? Or will Pinterest finally cave and reveal a revenue model that benefits both users and brands alike?