A Review of Indulgy – A Former Pinterest Clone Quits

Latest update: August 31, 2022. Page URL indicates original publication date; meanwhile, times change and the updates continue.

Do see the latest updates at the end of this ongoing review. Indulgy's former glory days remain gone, but the site still has some rather strange signs of life.

What is Indulgy?
An attempted Pinterest clone.

Regarding the Original Review and Updates: Excepting for the year 2021 and 2022 updates, the review and earlier updates are now obsolete and only remain for historical purposes.

According to Alexa, indulgy.com traffic seems to be doing well. It is currently ranking as one of the top 20,000 websites globally and one of the top 10,000 sites in the US. The bad news is that traffic seems to be drifting downward, a year ago the stats had them in the top 10,000 sites globally. Not sure what's going on or why the drift downward. Still not bad, considering there are probably over 200,000,000 websites out there in internet land these days. [Side note. Be sure to read the updates. Things currently seem to not be going well.] 

The Original Review

Using Indulgy for Collecting Images and Backlinks

Indulgy is a nice, simple, uncomplicated version of Pinterest. If you like Pinterest, Indulgy can be fun as well.

As with Pinterest, you can include backlinks to the images you post on Indulgy

Visitor traffic is still relatively low at this point, but Indulgy could have some future value as to and for backlinking purposes.

As a low priority project, I've opened an account (the link above) and started posting some images there. We'll see how that goes; I'll report on any results every now and then.

Ongoing User Review Updates

March 2015

For some strange reason, I am intuitively fond of this site. Probably because of the nice, clean interface and ease of use. I'll continue to add images and updates from time to time. I hope the site does well.

Unfortunately, Indulgy does not enable enough text space when displaying the photo to include the title of the article where the image came from (see later update). This pretty much shuts down the prospect of generating a click-thru to your article from Indulgy. Hopefully, Indulgy will change this and emulate Pinterest.

Went back again later in the month. I'm beginning to think Indulgy has become a mess. When right-clicking to post pictures, the box doesn't auto-fill and after filling out the box the picture doesn't show up in my collection. Also, earlier this week, the site locked up my computer.

September 2015

Yep, Indulgy is still pretty useless as to generating traffic to your linked article. As previously indicated, there's no text accompanying the image in the collection to indicate what the image or linked article is about (see later update). Clicking the image will bring up some accompanying text for the visitor, but how many visitors will bother to make that click to find out the details?

February 2016

Dropped by my account. Deleted some obsolete pics. Updated some links in others. Both tasks were intuitive and easy to do.

Added a couple new images. Doing the add link to source page still does not work (direct link to image, not article, is required). Better to install the browser plugin. Then right-click on target image to use it.

Indulgy has much improved since previous visit and is a worthy site.

And I made a worthy discovery. Giving yourself a really short user name will then enable more descriptive text to be included with your image.

After almost a year, I still have zero followers. This is no doubt because I never collected (re-pinned) anyone else's images or followed anyone. So I collected (re-pinned) a few images and followed three people. We will see how it goes...

January 2017

Visited my account for the first time in almost a year. Had to reinstall the plugin, understandable. To find the installed plugin, look in your browser bookmarks lists. Deleted some obsolete images and added some new ones. As far as I can tell, the account has had no visitors. As before, it is probably because of my lack of activity.

Indulgy does have what I consider to be one very serious flaw. It keeps opening new windows as opposed to new tabs. That can very quickly become a real pain in the neck. Oh, well; to each their own.

April 2017

Dropped by the site and my account. They've changed things around. Frankly, that site is now a pain in the neck to navigate. They've also added a shopping section.

Indulgy traffic has been steadily declining over the last year. A year ago it was globally ranked as one of the top 11,000 websites in the world; it's ranking has since dropped to around 21,000. In other words, it is back to where it was two years ago. Basically a two-year bell curve. Prior to the two years ago, it was once before globally ranked at around 10,00. A sine wave or two bell curves in a row? Due to the time lengths involved, the pattern doesn't appear to be seasonal.

Whatever is going on, it doesn't appear to be driving any visitor traffic my way for the articles I've posted there.

The way things are going, the site appears headed for extinction. It certainly wouldn't be the first. Then again, who knows? The site is certainly still salvageable. Maybe the site has a regular 2-year-trend pattern as opposed to the usual one year. Time will tell. Deleted one old image/article and added one new image/article.

October 2017

Well, the pictures do indeed display well and look nice. Deleting a couple of obsolete ones was easy to do; you'll need to refresh the page to see them actually disappear. Modified some outdated descriptions, again was easy to do.

Still no visitor activity that I could see.

What we have here is a plain and very simple site. If all you want to do is organize your pictures into various collections and don't care about having visitors or generating traffic, Indulgy is a useful website.

There is one other use for the site that occurs to me. One could use it as a bookmarks-website, if you don't mind about the scrolling all the time. Just a thought. Come to think of it, you also can't organize, i.e., move the pictures around within each collection. If one does not have that many bookmarks, then Indulgy could be useful in this regard, otherwise going the bookmarks-website route would be the better way to go.

January 2018

Indulgy really is a mess. You can't even trust it.

I clicked the setting icon on one of my images and was pleasantly surprised to find I could supposedly change the URL, which I did indeed need to do. So I changed it.

When I tested it, the change had failed to take. So I edited and tried again. This time I carefully watched. When I clicked save, I saw the URL revert back to the old before the edit box then saved and closed. Tried it a couple more times before giving up.

A glitchy mess and you can't even trust it when it claims to have saved your edit(s).

Personally, I have given up on this site.

June 2018

Dropped by. Checked a few links and they seem to work. Nobody is visiting the page, so didn't bother adding any new links.

January 2019

Checked up on Indulgy so as to post an update here. Still doesn't get traffic; still doesn't generate traffic to linked articles; still a real pain in the neck to navigate.

Tried posting an article link, but Indulgy wouldn't accept it; informed me it had to be directly to a picture. So I right-clicked one of the article pictures, copied its link and pasted that. It allowed me to post the pic; but needless to say, a user clicking the pic just expanded the pic and didn't go to the article. So I tried editing the link; at first it appeared not to work, but then it eventually did.

Indulgy did inform me they have a browser add on; but frankly I didn't want their glitchy code on my machine.

So that about covers it. Indulgy is still limping along, but I still have no enthusiasm for it. Oh, well.

In the interests of fairness, I checked Alexa. The traffic chart shows a gradual decline in ranking over the last year, but there's been a major improvement in the last month or so. So, whatever is going on, Indulgy does seem to suddenly have some sort of new following; I have no idea why or what is going on with that. It will be interesting to see how year 2019 goes.

August 2019

Nothing exciting to report. Deleted an obsolete pic without incident. Tried adding an article link, but still no go; can still only add direct pic links; apparently still need the browser add-on to do otherwise. Alexa has reported a major drop in traffic to Indulgy over the last 90 days; the internet is indeed a tough town. When it comes to picture collections, Pinterest is the 800-pound gorilla and that's just the way it is. I wouldn't be surprised if Indulgy is eventually abandoned. Presumably, the Indulgy browser add-on glitches have bee fixed, but I didn't bother to risk trying it.

As a side note, pretty much all social media has become useless for directing traffic to articles; even Pinterest and Facebook. Those internet days appear to be dead and gone. I perceive both Indulgy and Pinterest as just social and entertainment sites these days; nothing wrong with that.

January 2020

Well, indulgy.com is no longer being indexed by Google; this usually means a site has gone defunct. The site does still show up on some of the other search engines. And one can always type the URL into the browser address box; I did so and a page actually showed up. Unfortunately, it appears to just be a billboard page and the site is indeed dead and gone; no account login or other pages appeared available. Oddly, not even Wikipedia has anything to say about it; usually, Wikipedia has entries about all well-known websites, including sites that have come and gone.

Been an interesting five years. It looks like this ongoing review has now become a historical document.

February 2020

Indulgy.com is indexed by Google again, but it is still just a billboard and still closed for business. Who knows what they are up to; a hiatus, reorg, or permanent closure? Doesn't look good. According to WHOIS, The domain name is set to expire September 6, 2020. Even if the site is permanently dead, they'll probably renew the domain name; after all, it's still worth at least $10.

May 2020

Nothing much new to report. I did notice the social media icons at the bottom of their billboard page appear to be placebos. And Indulgy's telephone number is now stated as "tel:0000000000".

May 2021

The domain name is still being renewed one year at a time. The owner has posted several nice pictures there. There's also some text in a foreign language along with English text. The site kind of gave me the impression that the owner may be planning future enhancements. I don't really know, just my perception.

January 2022

Yep, the site is still basically deader than a door nail as far as using it as a Pinterest clone. The site does still exist as described in the previous update.

August 2022

The site owner is still posting nice pictures all over the place. Many of the pictures then link to the owner's Amazon affiliate account. I was not able to find any information as to the amount of visitor traffic that Indulgy receives these days.

- End of Article -

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