YouTube has millions of videos similar in spirit to this one:
The video reviews Blue Apron—an online grocery service—describing how it is efficient and cheaper than buying groceries at the store. The description of the video has a link to Blue Apron which gets you a $30 off your first order, a seemingly sweet offer.
The video’s description contains an affiliate link (marked in red).
What you might miss, though, is that the link in question is an “affiliate” link. Clicking on it takes you through five redirects courtesy of Impact—an affiliate marketing company—which tracks the subsequent sale and provide a kickback to the YouTuber, in this case Melea Johnson. YouTubers use affiliate marketing to monetize their channels and support their activities.
This example is not unique to YouTube or affiliate marketing. There are several marketing strategies that YouTubers, Instagrammers, and other content creators on social media (called influencers in marketing-speak) engage in to generate revenue: affiliate marketing, paid product placements, product giveaways, and social media contests.
Endorsement-based marketing is regulated. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission requires that these endorsement-based marketing strategies be disclosed to end-users so they can give appropriate weightage to content creators’ endorsements. In 2017 alone, the FTC sent cease and desist letters to Instagram celebrities who were partnering with brands and reprimanded YouTubers with gaming channels who were endorsing gambling companies—all without appropriate disclosure. The need to ensure content creators disclose will likely become all the more important as advertisers and brands attempt to target consumers on consumers’ existing social networks, and as lack of disclosure causes harm to end-users.
Our research. In a paper that is set to appear at the 2018 IEEE Workshop on Consumer Protection in May, we conducted a study to better understand how content creators on social media disclose their relationships with advertisers to end-users. Specifically, we examined affiliate marketing disclosures—ones that need to accompany affiliate links—-which content creators placed along with their content, both on YouTube and Pinterest.
How we found affiliate links. To study this empirically, we gathered two large datasets consisting of nearly half a million YouTube videos and two million Pinterest pins. We then examined the description of the YouTube videos and the Pinterest pins to look for affiliate links. This was a challenging problem, since there is no comprehensive public repository of affiliate marketing companies and links.
Read the full post at Freedom to Tinker.