Pinterest Spammer Makes $1,000 a Day and Gets Mega Media Coverage in the Process
With all the attention on Pinterest as of lately, there’s two ways to look at the site. The average person thinks… “cool, a new way to find fun stuff to look at online”, while the rest of us are thinking, “sweet! a new traffic source! how can I make money from it?”. You know you are always thinking the same thing whenever something new and huge comes out.
Well, that is the discussion this week as a spammer/affiliate/internet marketing is taking the fame game for a bit while he cashes in on the un-monetized success that is Pinterest. Already getting big media coverage from sites like Mashable, MSNBC, Daily Dot and many more… “Steve” is cashing in on the Pinterest craze and making more than $1,000 a day spamming their networks.
While $1,000 a day might not seem like a ton of money, it seems to be enough to get all of the media coverage you need, which is priceless. When someone is making a ton of money online and not doing it in the most ethical and acceptable ways, most people would keep quite and keep milking the cow for all they can get. “Steve” is very upfront about what he does and how he makes his money spamming Pinterest and simply says he will just keep doing it until they find a way to make it so he can’t.
UPDATE: It turns out that the Pinterest spammer has come out and retracted his comments, saying the whole thing was a hoax. Or was the all media attention simply too much???
Here are some of the highlights from various interviews with “Steve” across the internet.
How do you describe what it is you do? We’ll refer to it as spamming for now. Have you spammed other social networks before?
It’s spam; no other way of putting it. I’ve been through Facebook and Twitter. I’m sure if you ever heard of one of those spammy looking Facebook apps, I was one of the ones doing that.
What do you do when your bots get shut down? What would you do if they all got shut down, and could that ever happen?
Back when I started on Feb. 20, you could pin as many pictures as you wanted to with the same account and all the pins would show up on the boards. Well they changed that around the 23rd I think, and they banned one account. That was my first and only ban so far, maybe more when this interview is publicly posted. Oh how sad I would be. But like I said before, I do have a stockpile of accounts and I can easily create more if needed. Â
Do you feel any guilt about what you’re doing? What would you like to say to Pinterest users who like, friend, and click on your bots — if anything?
Nope, I have no guilt. I’m not trying to scam anyone, or upload viruses to their computer or anything like that. I simply show products to the Pinterest community. I realize that I’m spamming the crap out of the site, but it’s nothing personal, just business.
While there is nothing surprising about finding a way to monetize and make money off Pinterest, it is interesting to see how Pinterest will act and change around their network. This is nothing new, as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and a ton of other social networks and content generated sites have gone through the same exact thing.