A few days ago the Daily Dot reported on how professional spammers (yes, such a thing exists) were using Pinterest — the online pinboard site just about every female I know, along with Mitt Romney, seems to be obsessed with — to rake in cash. Apparently, they’re doing this by running thousands of automated Pinterest profiles (I thought these came invite only?), all of which connect to the spammer’s Amazon Affiliate account, where the spammer “automatically earns money every time a user from Pinterest clicks the pin and makes the Amazon purchase.” So how much money are spammers making in this way? Can’t be much, right?
How about $1000 bucks a day? I could live on that, I think.
After reading their piece a few days ago, The Daily Dot was contacted by a 24 year-old Pinterest spammer named “Steve” who’s using the site to rake in cash — he says that Pinterest is “by FAR the easiest social network to spam right now.”
How much money do you make off Pinterest?
Well, when I started I did a test run to see what kind of traffic I could get. I manually posted pins for 4 hours straight and let them sit for a day. Next day I made something like $20 I think. So I decided to automate it cause I could see the huge potential this had.
As the days came my earnings increased and increased and increased. First week of doing this I made around $2,000 which was Feb. 20-29. I stepped my game up and changed the way I was doing some things, and I saw a dramatic increase in my earnings. Went up to $500-800 a day. Kept at it and for the past two weeks I have made over $1,000 a day with the highest earnings being around $1,900.
I fully expect next week’s earnings to be $2,000-2,500 a day. There are no guarantees in this business and it could all come crashing down soon. Not a matter of if, but when will it happen.
As much as I want to hate this guy I kind of respect him for the game he’s running. He’s not breaking the law (at least I don’t think he is) — he’s just gaming the system to his financial advantage, and he’s not really hurting anybody. And it doesn’t sound like he plans to stop anytime soon.
In our earlier story about you, we found tons of bots that traced to your Amazon affiliate account. How many would you estimate you have out there?
I’m using a ton of accounts and have a stockpile of accounts waiting to be put to use once the ones I’m using right are deleted.
We called out your affiliate account in particular because it was the only one we could find. Are there a lot of other people on Pinterest doing what you’re doing? How many would you guess?
There are two other tags I use that I did create and they are making their way around Pinterest as we speak. There are others doing what I’m doing, but not near the same scale as me. I’m basically three weeks ahead of everyone else but with all these new bots [like the Black Hat World model] coming into the picture, more and more people will figure out how to do what I’m doing. I have more twists up my sleeve and I will start working on them soon, so you will see new types of spam in the future.
High Five Shark approves!