Breaking: YouTube influencers rarely disclose marketing relationships

 SMTV Desk 2018-12-16 16:53:43  Youtube, Affiliate marketing,
Breaking: YouTube influencers rarely disclose marketing relationships

New Delhi, December 16: Here is the latest news that, Social media influencers on platforms like YouTube and Pinterest rarely alert their viewers about receiving payments for featuring products on their online pages or channels, a study has found.

According to the details, Researchers from Princeton University in the US focused on affiliate marketing, in which companies pay a commission to social media figures for driving sales.




Content creators who produce videos, photos and commentary are rewarded when their followers purchase products after clicking on affiliate marketing links included in their social media posts.

Researchers from Princeton University`s Department of Computer Science extracted affiliate marketing links from randomly drawn samples of about 500,000 YouTube videos and 2.1 million Pinterest pins. The officials found 3,472 YouTube videos and 18,237 Pinterest pins with affiliate links from 33 marketing companies.

The researchers found the links by identifying characteristic patterns in the URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that marketers use to track readers` clicks.

In view of these findings, the researchers proposed that regulators should take broader legal action against affiliate marketing companies for failures to disclose, and recommend that social media platforms make it easier for content creators to disclose marketing relationships in a standardised way.



The lead author of the study, Arunesh Mathur, a computer science graduate student, and his colleagues are also developing a web browser extension that would automatically flag some types of paid content, Princeton University said in a statement.