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Why does Pinterest limit creative content?

theburntsunsetnovel
Loves to help

I write novels. About one in every five hundred pins I post has a picture of one of my novels. Most of the time I am pinning flash fiction, drawings, poetry, lyrics, and videos that relate to my stories. Often I feature other authors or series in a similar genre like Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, Percy Jackson, Divergent etc. Sure, nearly all my pins (except for stories of course) have a link to my website. But overall I'm not overtly advertising a product. There are no CTAs nor prices on the images, nor any deals being offered. I am just for the most part giving away entertainment for free.

I'm wondering why Pinterest feels the need to limit what is mostly creative content. 99.9% of what I pin is original content created by me. The sole purpose of my content is to create awareness around my brand while providing entertainment. Most people can't even tell I write books other than by looking at my profile name. My most complicated and time consuming pins don't even feature my products. 

Additionally since I'm not in the DIY or food business I bring a certain level of variety to the platform. 

It seems like this is the kind of content Pinterest would want to promote. Instead my impressions have dropped by almost a third since the most recent algorithm changes. 

Is Pinterest actively trying to drive away content creators? What recent changes has the platform made that would promote creativity over overtly selling products? (Please don't say story pins, because those don't benefit creators.) Is Pinterest's goal to monetize the platform such that a large chuck of content is paid for via ads? As it is now, on the home feed I feel like 1/10 pins is an ad. Is the goal so that 1/5 things we see is an ad? I don't understand where this platform is going or what it wants to be. Is it a search engine or is it social media?  To be fair, fresh pins (created pins) are given priority over pinning someone else's content. But it seems like Pinterest has a check valve on success, meaning that as soon as a creator starts to see some level of success their content takes a nose dive or the rules change. 

I know that Pinterest grew significantly in 2020. So, I bet the people who run the show think they're on to something but everything they do seems designed to drive away creators at the expense of attracting new ad revenue and new members. Does this platform really want to be the Instagram that doesn't work? Because that's what people in the design community say it is.

People want to give away quality content whether it's entertainment, DIY, recipes, or helpful hints. Why not just be the platform that says thank you and rewards that?

Chris

theburntsunsetnovel 

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5 Replies
theburntsunsetnovel
Loves to help

Here's what I mean by there being a check valve (or throttling) that limits a pin's success. Take a look at the graph of impressions for this pin. The front half of the curve and the plateau looks normal but then the pin nosedives. It's like some sort of freshness factor takes over after a few days. Can you imagine if Amazon throttled a successful product if it wasn't the newest thing? You'd never have top sellers. It seems like the back half of this graph should be relatively similar to the front. But for whatever reason this successful pin is suddenly and severely down graded on the platform.

Screen Shot 2021-04-18 at 8.09.44 AM.png

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tinycraft
Posts regularly

The last few days are displayed as hours! Hover over the graph 🙂

Confused me at first too, I thought all my pins would suddenly perform badly.

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theburntsunsetnovel
Loves to help

That's true for the last squiggle of lines but not the drop. Take a look at the pics below.

 

Screen Shot 2021-04-18 at 9.58.03 AM.png

Screen Shot 2021-04-18 at 9.58.39 AM.png

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tinycraft
Posts regularly

I think this is just how it's displayed

2021-04-18 19_25_25-Pinterest — Mozilla Firefox.png

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theburntsunsetnovel
Loves to help

@tinycraft I'm monitoring the analytics of the pin I showed the graph for. Despite how the last day is spread out, the back end of the bell curve looks too steep. Even your pin graph looks too steep. It seems like a pin should have a slow decline if it had a slow rise. But like you said, maybe that's just how it's displayed. It's a poor way to show a metric, however, changing the scale on the X-axis without indicating that via a scale. As you mentioned, the metric change only shows up as hourly if you hover over that section of the graph. 

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