Most YouTube Influencers Still Don’t Disclose Sponsored Deals, Study Says

Image credit: Getty via engadget This story originally appeared on Engadget It's been almost a year since the FTC warned social media influencers that they should "clearly and conspicuously [disclose]" if they're being paid for a post or video. The researchers analyzed over 500,000 YouTube videos and over 2.1 million unique Pinterest pins from August to September 2017 for the study. They found that 3,472 videos and 18,237 pins in the bunch had affiliate links, but only 10 and seven percent, respectively, contained written disclosures. The FTC wants influencers to be very clear in their wording: for instance, as Wired said, they can write "I make a small commission every time you purchase through these links." According to lead author Arunesh Mathur, his study doesn't even represent all types of undisclosed affiliate partnerships, since they didn't take coupon codes and other linkless deals into account. That said, the researchers also didn't take into account any disclosure YouTubers mention in the video and those written in languages other than English. Mathur, however, is "fairly confident that only a tiny fraction of content creators disclose affiliate links at places other than the description." Advertising on social media without the proper disclosure has become a huge issue in recent years. It's not the advertisements themselves that are the problem, it's that without the proper label, people won't know whether influencers are simply recommending a product they like or if they're getting paid to praise it. Mathur and his team, for one, believe the answer lies in browsers: they plan to develop an extension that can automatically detect and highlight affiliate marketing campaigns.