# An Empirical Study of Affiliate Marketing Disclosures on YouTube and Pinterest

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.08488 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08488/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 22 Mar 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Closing the Loop: Testing ChatGPT to Generate Model Explanations to Improve Human Labelling of Sponsored Content on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05115/) (2023)
- [Across Platforms and Languages: Dutch Influencers and Legal Disclosures on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12451/) (2024)
- [Evaluating LLM-Generated Legal Explanations for Regulatory Compliance in Social Media Influencer Marketing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08111/) (2025)
- [Dark patterns in e-commerce: a dataset and its baseline evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.06543/) (2022)
- [The Monetisation of Toxicity: Analysing YouTube Content Creators and Controversy-Driven Engagement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00534/) (2024)
- [A Multimodal Analysis of Influencer Content on Twitter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03064/) (2023)
- [Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube's Influencer Economy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04383/) (2026)
- [BetXplain: An Explanation-Annotated Dataset for Detecting Manipulative Betting Advertisements on Social Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27274/) (2026)
- [ChildSafeAds Shared Task 2026: Commercial Content in Child-Facing YouTube Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.19165/) (2026)
- [N"urnberg NLP at ChildSafeAds 2026: Structurally Dissimilar Voter Ensembles under Four Levels of Data Access](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.34986/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While disclosures relating to various forms of Internet advertising are well established and follow specific formats, endorsement marketing disclosures are often open-ended in nature and written by individual publishers. Because such marketing often appears as part of publishers' actual content, ensuring that it is adequately disclosed is critical so that end-users can identify it as such. In this paper, we characterize disclosures relating to affiliate marketing---a type of endorsement based marketing---on two popular social media platforms: YouTube & Pinterest. We find that only roughly one-tenth of affiliate content on both platforms contains disclosures. Based on our findings, we make policy recommendations geared towards various stakeholders in the affiliate marketing industry, highlighting how both social media platforms and affiliate companies can enable better disclosure practices.