I had no idea it was that lucrative. I expected revenues maybe in the 100s per day.
This story is going to bring a lot of new "fresh blood" into spamming SNs.
A Pinterest spammer tells all
101–110 of 118 posts
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#102I had no idea it was that lucrative. I expected revenues maybe in the 100s per day. This story is going to bring a lot of new "fresh blood" into spamming SNs.
That's what I was thinking... I assumed the click-through rate of Pins was terrible, it's quite difficult to even figure out that you can.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't you need an invite for that? If you have any handy, can you send one my way?
You do. I do not have an account yet, but I am already visiting the site a few times daily for refreshment. I plan on emailing info@piccsy and see if i can convince them to give me a few invites. Will def. share then. EDIT: Email daniel at piccsy dot com. He's the founder.
Try Wookmark. I see it kind of like this: Pinterest:YouTube::Wookmark:Vimeo. It's super clean and easy to use, and it has a paid version where you can save private images and start private groups. http://www.wookmark.com/
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> simply doing it at scale That's the most abusive part. As a Pinterest user I want to see what other real users are pinning. I don't want to see what 4,000 bots are pinning.
Everyone talks about authenticity in social media (that somebody wants to see "real" content from "real" people) which really makes sense because it is the most human thing. But what if the bots pass a Turing test and deliver relevant content with said links? Does it not become spam anymore? That's the weird part. All of the spam I get in my email I don't want because it is completely irrelevant. Same goes for ads on…
The ancient email phrasing is "Spam is about consent, not content."
Having said that, you do make a very good point.
If a bot could find things I like, and put it in a sensible pinboard, then I'd probably follow it.
I don't care about Pinboard skimlinking any affiliate links, even ones I'm using. (another post in this thread explained how bots would avoid that limitation with redirects.)
I do mind, a little bit, if a bot owner is making hundreds of dollars a day by manipulating flaws in Pinterest, because arms-racing could make Pinterest much less useful.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#105Will Skimlinks (or someone similar) offer a reverse-affiliate service that strips affiliate IDs from links on your site instead of adding them? Does this already exist? (It would be trivial for Pinterest to manually do this, say, for Amazon, which could instantly crush a spam model based only on Amazon, without any spam network detection/banning required) Personally, though, I think affiliate links in social networks…
You'll always lose in an arms race that you didn't start. If you start stripping affiliate IDs, I'll just write a redirector and link to that, or link to an existing redirector. Are you going to ban all of bit.ly? Or t.co? or letter.obscure_tld from your website?
There's a better way.
Make a crawler that follows your redirects. If it hits an affiliate page, you can presume (with some likelihood) that it's a spam link.
If you put in intermediate redirects that the crawler wouldn't pick up, there's a chance your targets won't either and you'll lose customers.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone talks about authenticity in social media (that somebody wants to see "real" content from "real" people) which really makes sense because it is the most human thing. But what if the bots pass a Turing test and deliver relevant content with said links? Does it not become spam anymore? That's the weird part. All of the spam I get in my email I don't want because it is completely irrelevant. Same goes for ads on…
It's not going to be cool though is it? AI is nowhere near being able to know what cool is.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Promoted tweets are a fucking scourge, at least so far. I've seen two - both times for something totally irrelevant to me. (What the hell is the Shell Houston 2012 Open? I have zero idea, and less than zero interest.)
I agree I don't like them either. I thought Twitter was going to settle on having people with >XX,000 followers pay something, Freemium style. But I guess ads are a better moneymaker and they will convert better in the feed.
> I thought Twitter was going to settle on having people with >XX,000 followers pay something, Freemium style.
That seems weird, like punishing people for their success, or letting others decide how much they should pay. (Unless, I suppose, that once you hit XX,000 followers nobody could follow you until you paid up.)
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Promoted tweets are a fucking scourge, at least so far. I've seen two - both times for something totally irrelevant to me. (What the hell is the Shell Houston 2012 Open? I have zero idea, and less than zero interest.)
The few promoted tweets I have seen were frighteningly targeted.
I'd be happy to learn that I'm hard to market to.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Paypal not allow multiple accounts tied to the same bank account?
Why would you tie your paypal account to a bank account?
To get money out. (I don't have mine tied, because I don't receive any money via paypal, and probably never will because of all of the horror stories.)
Anyway, you can easily exchange "bank account" with "credit card" - and it seems that they don't allow that sort of thing, based on the other comments in this thread.
Re: A Pinterest spammer tells all
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does Paypal not allow multiple accounts tied to the same bank account?
Yes, but they are also quick disable an account with suspicious activity. Some would say too quick.
You really only need the account for about five minutes, in order to register your spambot.