Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube's Influencer Economy
2026-03-04 • Computers and Society
Computers and SocietyCryptography and SecurityInformation RetrievalMachine LearningSocial and Information Networks
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied how often YouTube creators use affiliate marketing, which means promoting products to make money, and whether they properly tell viewers about it as rules say they should. They looked at 2 million videos over 10 years and found affiliate links are common, but most creators do not clearly disclose their relationships following official guidelines. The authors also found that YouTube's built-in tools help improve disclosure somewhat. They suggest that regulators and companies working with creators should team up with YouTube to make disclosures more common and trustworthy.
YouTubeaffiliate marketingdisclosureFederal Trade Commission (FTC)influencer economyregulationstransparencyNLP (Natural Language Processing)platform complianceaffiliate links
Authors
Chen Sun, Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Rishab Nithyanand
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.