🤔 Pinterest Traffic Throttling Update

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How’d you spend your weekend?

I’ve had this earworm stuck in my head since my niece and nephew introduced me to it on vacation.

And if this isn’t your first email from me, then you already know that I was shook by the Pinterest throttling niche site traffic revelation from the weekend.

I got quite a few replies to that one, so I have a few more things to share regarding it.

More on that in a moment.

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What People Are Saying About The Pinterest Traffic Throttling Situation

Probably the most important/interesting reply that I got regarding this was from Chris from Marketing Pulse.

Here’s what he sent me -

“Facebook has an algorithm or ai or something that can check a landing page for code they don’t want on a landing page like pop ups or copy they don’t like. But it never clicks through like inputting an email or downloading anything. It just looks at the landing page. It’s all automated. So I could see Pinterest coming up with something that can do similar and look for code that suggest a site has display ads on it.”

When I said that I couldn’t think of a way they could detect sites running ads at scale, I told you that I wasn’t a coder or anyone with any real knowledge on that sort of thing.

So, it’s nice to have people smarter about this than me teach me (and maybe you?) something.

Chris also shared this old article for reference.

Several people also wanted to share that they think Pinterest needs niche sites and/or so many big sites run ads that there is no way Pinterest would do this.

Personally, I think this is the same argument we used to make about Google. Then we all fucked around and found out.

And we all know that big sites get a pass on any rules that are only applied to us small potatoes.

I also had a couple of people mention being in a private group/forum with Tony Hill and how he essentially thinks this is bullshit. (I’m paraphrasing here, obvs)

Personally, I don’t know Tony and have had no real interactions with him other than the odd Twitter exchange here and there.

What I do think is this -

1. It’s still odd that Pinterest would turn away someone trying to give them money for ads.

2. The only people who know with certainty if this is true are people at Pinterest/on the Pinterest payroll.

3. I know nothing, except that companies/people tend to do what most benefits their bottom line.

4. You should always try to have diversity in traffic and revenue sources.

Week 16 of Newsletter Life Starts Now

Today marks week #16 of doing a local newsletter on Beehiiv.

We’re currently 25 subscribers over 2,900 (as of this morning).

In terms of revenue we did decent enough for July.

• $200 in premium subscriptions

• $14 in Beehiiv Boosts

• $4 in Beehiiv Ads (we only ran one, it was our first)

This was really our first real month of revenue. Not too bad considering this is only week 16 and I’ve been lazy about monetization.

Reminder: I'm writing updates about my local newsletter on Twitter here.

Next Time…

Upcoming topics: more tips and ideas on Etsy and KDP, details on how I’m getting local newsletter subscribers, how it’s going with my chatGPT fiction ebook and the AI music thingie, and growing an ecomm site.

Stay awesome,

Shawna

P.S. Beehiiv just changed the newsletter game - you now get a custom app for your newsletter (in addition to the first 2,500 subs for free). Haven’t turned the app for this newsletter on yet though.

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