[2603.04383] Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube's Influencer Economy

Computer Science > Computers and Society arXiv:2603.04383 (cs) [Submitted on 4 Mar 2026] Title:Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube's Influencer Economy Authors:Chen Sun, Yash Vekaria, Zubair Shafiq, Rishab Nithyanand View a PDF of the paper titled Turning Trust to Transactions: Tracking Affiliate Marketing and FTC Compliance in YouTube's Influencer Economy, by Chen Sun and 3 other authors View PDF Abstract:YouTube has evolved into a powerful platform that 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 from nearly 540,000 creators, analyzing the prevalence of affiliate marketing on YouTube and the rates of non-compliant behavior. Our findings reveal that affiliate links are widespread, yet dis- closure compliance remains low, with most videos failing to meet FTC standards. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of different stakeho...