Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube's Influencer Economy

2026-03-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the widespread failure of YouTube creators to disclose affiliate marketing relationships, a practice that undermines consumer trust and violates Federal Trade Commission (FTC) disclosure requirements. Leveraging web measurement and natural language processing techniques, this work presents the first large-scale quantitative analysis of affiliate marketing practices across two million YouTube videos over a ten-year period. The findings reveal that while affiliate links are pervasive, disclosure rates remain critically low, with the majority of content failing to meet regulatory standards. Notably, the introduction of standardized disclosure mechanisms by the platform significantly improved compliance. These results provide empirical evidence supporting coordinated governance among platforms, regulators, and affiliates, and underscore the pivotal role of standardized tools in enhancing transparency in digital advertising ecosystems.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Misinformation & Fake News
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web
• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Topic discovery and tracking
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Trust and reliance of crowd workers and data experts on GenAI
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web

Abstract

YouTube has evolved into a powerful platform that where creators monetize their influence through affiliate marketing, raising concerns about transparency and ethics, especially when creators fail to disclose their affiliate relationships. Although regulatory agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have issued guidelines to address these issues, non-compliance and consumer harm persist, and the extent of these problems remains unclear. In this paper, we introduce tools, developed with insights from recent advances in Web measurement and NLP research, to examine the state of the affiliate marketing ecosystem on YouTube. We apply these tools to a 10-year dataset of 2 million videos from nearly 540,000 creators, analyzing the prevalence of affiliate marketing on YouTube and the rates of non-compliant behavior. Our findings reveal that affiliate links are widespread, yet dis- closure compliance remains low, with most videos failing to meet FTC standards. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of different stakeholders in improving disclosure behavior. Our study suggests that the platform is highly associated with improved compliance through standardized disclosure features. We recommend that regulators and affiliate partners collaborate with platforms to enhance transparency, accountability, and trust in the influencer economy.

Problem

• affiliate marketing
• FTC compliance
• disclosure
• influencer economy
• transparency

Innovation

• affiliate marketing
• FTC compliance
• Web measurement
• NLP
• influencer economy