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Interesting Takeaways from YouTube Influencer Study

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Interesting Takeaways from YouTube Influencer Study

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When Brook Schaaf sent me the link to this paper, he said he thought that I might like to “nerd out on” it, and he was right! It’s times like this when I most value the years I spent in law school having to summarize thousands of pages of case law…

Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube’s Influencer Economy (Vol. 20 No. 1: Proceedings of the Twentieth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media)

You could probably use AI to “read’ the paper for you, but I’ve pulled out some of the things that I found most interesting for our industry.

Background

Researched and written by 4 students from the University of Iowa and UC Davis, the study looked at 2 million YouTube videos over a timespan of 10 years (2015-2024) and produced by 540,000 creators. Their methodology was VERY in-depth to identify “textual affiliate links” in the video descriptions and YouTube’s “shopping shelf.” They also evaluated the FTC Disclosure standards and broke them down into the required key components of Clarity of Compensation and Clarity of Relationship.

Their overall finding: “Affiliate links are common, but disclosures are rare.”

My Key Takeaways

In addition to the actual data, the full paper had some very interesting points:

  • 45.52% of videos included any form of disclosure, while only 12.20% of the videos provided disclosures that the researchers deemed to meet the FTC Guidelines for clarity of both compensation and relationship.
  • Affiliate marketing GREW over time. The percentage of videos with affiliate links grew from 5.3% to 8.5% for the timeframes of 2015-2018 to 2018-2024.
  • Channels with under 100K subscribers doubled their affiliate video rate from 3.22% to 6.38%. Channels with 100K-1M subscribers grew from 8.66% of videos containing affiliate links to 12.73%.
  • Compliant disclosure increased from 5.5% to 14.5% across all channels. Channels with 1M+ subscribers had the least increase in disclosure compliance.
  • The categories of videos most likely to have affiliate links were “Howto & Style” and “Sci & Tech.”
  • Amazon Affiliate Program links appeared in 51.8% of all affiliate videos and 56.7% of affiliate channels.
  • The availability of built-in disclosure tools for YouTube Shopping led to higher disclosure rates.

Their Conclusion

Because the primary focus of the study was on disclosure and how it has been impacted over time, their main takeaways were around the “alarmingly low” compliance rates and ways to improve them. These included platform-integrated disclosure tools as well as regulators and affiliate networks collaborating more to support monitoring and enforcement.

Limitations of the Study

These are NOT complaints about the study in any way but rather a caution for how we in affiliate marketing use it.

The study itself points out that the data was based on links in the videos. We know that affiliate marketing can be clickless and include tracking such as vanity codes, dedicated landing pages, or HDYHAU surveys. These were not included for measuring the overall percentage of videos including affiliate monetization. It wouldn’t have impacted their disclosure analysis necessarily, but it does indicate that the percentage of YouTube videos being monetized through affiliate marketing is likely higher than they found.

In addition, the data for the survey came from 2015-2024. While I doubt that disclosures have gone up much in the last 18 months, affiliate marketing has definitely grown a lot in that time.

Most importantly, there is no real algorithm to determine what is compliant under the FTC Guidelines because the Guidelines are vague enough to allow for interpretation. Affiliate marketers will continue to debate the merits of this reality.

Overall, it was interesting to see a study like this being done at the college level. Thanks to Chen Sun, Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, and Rishab Nithyanand!

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Tricia Meyer

Tricia Meyer is an attorney and affiliate marketer. She is the founder and owner of Helping Moms Connect as well as the current Executive Director of the Performance Marketing Association. She is the co-owner and primary white wine drinker of the Wine Club Group.
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