By Erika Icon

YNOT EUROPE – Pinterest seems to be all the rage these days. The whole idea is to “pin” your favorite images to personal, categorized virtual boards so you can share interesting items with friends. Sadly, Pinterest isn’t very friendly to the adult market. The site’s Pin Etiquette section prohibits posting “indecent images.”

It’s ill-advised to upload hardcore images to Pinterest, but savvy users may be able to work around the site’s smut prohibition by classifying their simple nudity with fitness, erotica, boudoir, sexy and other stealth labels. A recent poll revealed many of the site’s members consider nudity art; consequently, one clever Pinterest board is titled “Art or Porn?” It asks viewers to decide where boundaries should be set.

Unfortunately, in a move evidently meant to placate advertisers, Pinterest has begun cracking down on flesh. Fortunately, enterprising others have leapt in to fill the void by creating adults-only Pinterest clones.

PinPorn, one of the earliest clones, sometimes is called “Pinterest with naked chicks.” The least flashy of the adult pinboards, PinPorn’s photos range from softcore to hardcore, including animated gifs, and the content ranges from awful to artistic. Thanks to its owners snapping up the domain name Pornterest.com and aliasing it to PinPorn, the site receives quite a bit of typo traffic.

Snatchly allows users to snatch, save and share porn from popular streaming sites like YouPorn, RedTube, Spankwire and many others. A handy Snatch It button makes grabbing and pinning images and videos easy. The site is popular despite being overrun with annoying pop-up and -under full-page ads: Within two months of launch, Snatchly signed up 15,000 users.

Sex.com, which has been labeled the most expensive domain name in the world, has found new life as a Pinterest clone, as well. Once the subject of a massive lawsuit, a manhunt and criminal prosecution, the site suffered several incarnations as a variety of things but never seemed to find an audience. Life as a porn pinboard seems to suit it, though: Mainstream pundits seem to think Sex.com could give Pinterest and Tumblr some stiff competition, since it combines elements of both. Particularly nice is a light box feature that allows viewers to cycle through large images quickly.

Pinsex.com, the newest player in the space, differentiates its services by going beyond pictures and videos to turn the pin system into a more dynamic social networking platform for fans, studios, porn stars, amateurs and escorts. Users can share ideas and desires as well as their favorite content.

Porn is a visual medium, so adult pinboards seem made to the market’s order. How they may affect tube-site traffic remains to be seen, as does whether the porn pinboards will contribute to content piracy. All three boards provide DMCA takedown notice links, and all three encourage users to pin directly from the URL where they found the image or video (so clicking on the pinned item takes viewers to the source site). They also allow user uploads, though.

In any case, it may be worth content owners’ time to learn to use the boards. By attaching good keywords to videos and images that link back to their pay sites, site owners may be able to pocket some cash.

Next: how to use adult pinboards as part of a marketing plan for products, services and websites.