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"We've pointed to it again and again, but here we are saying it one more time - Pinterest's popularity has spawned quite the third-party ecosystem around the social network - \u00A0with people finding one way or another to capitalize on its growth.\r\n\r\nFor the most part, the ecosystem focuses on marketing and traffic or outright clones, but in the case of PinDollars, this is undoubtedly not the first or last service that is trying to capitalize on Pinterest financially.\r\n\r\nPinDollars is a service which offers Pinterest users an alternative bookmarklet to share content on Pinterest, by posting affiliate links. Pinterest itself had an affiliate link system in place, but came under fire for keeping the practice under wraps.\r\n\r\nWhile PinDollars gives Pinterest users the opportunity to get a few affiliate links of their own onto the site, this is actually a violation of the Terms of Service.\r\n\r\nPinterest's license to its users reads (emphasis our own):\r\n&amp;quot;Subject to the terms and conditions of these Terms and our\u00A0Acceptable Usage Policy, we grant you a license to use the Service, including accessing and viewing Pinterest Content, for your personal, noncommercial use....\u00A0&amp;quot;\r\nThe Acceptable Usage Policy hammers the point home saying that users agree &amp;quot;not to use the Service for any commercial purpose or the benefit of any third party...&amp;quot;\r\n\r\nPinDollars will no doubt be shut down faster than you can say affiliate link.\r\n\r\nPinterest has already had its fair share of controversy, with lawyers labeling the site an out-right copyright disaster, and we'd imagine that the idea of other people making money off of potentially copyrighted material is the last thing the social network needs.\r\n\r\nWithout even taking into account Pinterest's terms of use, the PinDollars site itself raises a few alarms. Its FAQs\u00A0are sparse, and the explanation of how the site works doesn't give the user much information:\r\nWith PinDollars, when you pin something we run it through our system to see if it\u2019s a link where you can profit from an affiliate referral. If it is, we process the link and you get make money whenever someone clicks through your pin and makes a purchase.\r\nSo what are the actual chances of making money off a site like PinDollars? We do know that 21% of Pinterest users have purchased items they have found on the site - and that 21% translates to well over 2 million users.\r\n\r\nThe emergence of sites like this, however, are a cause for concern, not only because they violate Pinterest's TOS, but they also encourage spam, even if, on the surface, they try to do the opposite.\r\n\r\nSpam is yet another problem\u00A0Pinterest has begun to face, which has also\u00A0led to the service targeting affiliate links so, any way you look at it, PinDollars is dead in the water.\r\n\r\nIf anything, all of these growing pains that Pinterest is experiencing are simply a sign that the social network has come of age. When the spammers and money makers arrive, as long as you have a way to combat them, you know you're doing something right."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2012/04/23/pindollars-wants-you-to-capitalize-on-pinterests-popularity-but-violates-its-tos/>