Endorsements on Social Media: An Empirical Study of Affiliate Marketing Disclosures on YouTube and Pinterest
share
Users are often ill-equipped to identify online advertisements that masquerade as non-advertising content. Because such hidden advertisements can mislead and harm users, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires all advertising content to be adequately disclosed. In this paper, we examined disclosures within affiliate marketing, an endorsement-based advertising strategy used by social media content creators. We asked whether content creators follow the FTC's disclosure guidelines, how they word the disclosures, and whether these disclosure help users identify affiliate marketing content as advertisements. To do so, we first measured the prevalence and identified the types of disclosures in over 500 thousand YouTube videos and 2.1 million Pinterest pins. We then conducted a user study with 1,791 participants to test the efficacy of these disclosures. Our findings reveal that only about 10 affiliate marketing content on both platforms contains any disclosures at all. Further, users fail to understand shorter, non-explanatory disclosures. Based on our findings, we make various design and policy suggestions to help improve disclosure practices on social media.
READ FULL TEXT