Aced it.

After he read our article about his process of spamming Pinterest through thousands of bot accounts, Steve, who declined to give his last name, contacted us with an offer to clarify some of his methods. He proved his identity by providing a screenshot of his Amazon Affiliate account—the same final-fantas07 that we discussed in the aforementioned article. 

We were shocked by some of the facts Steve shared. For instance, he makes $1000 a day, and out of his thousands of spambots, Pinterest has only deleted one.

So <em>someone</em> is making money out of Pinterest.

“A lot of what gets pinned on Pinterest is aspirational—what could be, what I’m going to have, where I’m going to go,” said <a href="http://www.gartner.com/">Gartner</a> senior research analyst Jenny Sussin. What sets Pinterest apart from other social networks is that it isn’t about sharing what’s happening to you right now, it’s about sharing and collecting what you like and what you want and what inspires you.
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Some of bloggers I talked with who use Pinterest say they depend on it as a personal tool rather than a social one. “I am always saving images for inspiration, future post ideas, and projects, so I use Pinterest every day,” said Joy Cho of <a href="http://www.ohjoy.blogs.com/">Oh Joy</a>. “It’s just fun looking at a beautiful page of images that make me happy and inspire my work.” Visual bookmarking isn’t a totally new idea—sites like <a href="http://ffffound.com/">Ffffound</a> have offered similar features. Pinterest just does it better.

That's the key thing about a social network - have a USP.

Many lines are involved.

On Pinterest, every pin ties back to an external link. We used RJMetrics to extract the top-level domain of those links for the pins in our sample. What we found was a pretty tremendous long-tail effect. In our sample of about a million pins, over 100,000 distinct source domains existed.

Top pin sources: Etsy; Google Image Search (so actually other sites); Flickr; Tumblr (more third-party stuff?). After the top 5, no domain represents more than 1% of pins.

Basically, Pinterest is the long tail turned into a website.