PinDollars Brings Affiliate Links Back to Pinterest — But Gives Money Directly to Pinners
But Gives Money Directly to Pinners — Here's a little hack meant to nudge Pinterest into sharing revenue with its curators. PinDollars is a substitute for Pinterest's bookmarklet that scans pinned items and attaches affiliate links to related products when appropriate.
Context & Ripple Effects
In February, LL Social reported that Pinterest was quietly generating revenue by modifying user-submitted pins — attaching affiliate links to products and keeping the commissions — which punctured the 'Pinterest has no business model' narrative that had built up around its fast growth past 10 million monthly visitors.
PinDollars flips that mechanism toward the people whose pins created the value: its substitute for Pinterest's bookmarklet scans pinned items and attaches affiliate links where products match, routing any earnings to the pinner rather than the platform. Framed explicitly as a hack to nudge Pinterest into sharing revenue, it lands amid other signs of turbulence at the company, from co-founder Paul Sciarra's departure earlier this month to a Fortune profile asking whether CEO Ben Silbermann can make Pinterest the next Facebook.
First-order effects
- Pinners who adopt the substitute bookmarklet start collecting affiliate commissions on their own product pins, turning unpaid curation into direct income overnight.
- Pinterest loses exclusive control of the commercial layer inside its feed: third-party code is inserting monetized links into user content that Pinterest neither approved nor profits from.
Second-order effects
- Retailers and affiliate networks gain a new distribution channel run by curators rather than by the platform, shifting leverage over who gets paid for driving purchases.
- Pinterest is forced into a binary response — tolerate or block the tool — either of which sharpens the question of whether it will formalize payouts to the users who generate its content, a question compounded by the unresolved copyright exposure flagged in the March Fortune profile.
Third-order effects
- If platforms continue capturing value from unpaid user curation while withholding a cut, third-party routing-around tools like PinDollars point toward an industry reckoning over creator compensation — platforms will eventually have to either pay curators or police the mechanisms that pay them.
The trend: Social networks built on free user curation are being pushed toward formal revenue-sharing as intermediaries route affiliate money around the platforms that host the content.