Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube's Influencer Economy
YouTube has evolved into a powerful platform 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 f...
| Authors | Chen Sun, Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CY |
| Published | 4 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 May 2026 |
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