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Look for "the best headphones" on YouTube and a video of the popular technology brand, Brownlee. YouTuber, which has nearly 9 million subscribers, is likely to be one of the first to appear. Released last November, his video "My Favorite Wireless Headphones | 2018! "Has more than 2.7 million views. In this document, Brownlee describes his favorite pair of Bluetooth headphones and urges users to "get on that wireless train before he leaves the station." Below the video, it includes links to all the products mentioned.
Paris Martineau covers platforms, influence online and social media manipulation for WIRED.
What it fails to mention in the description or in the video itself is that purchases made from these links may also result in small payments to Brownlee itself. Princeton researchers say the links include referral codes that usually refer to such payments.
The Federal Trade Commission guidelines regarding social media approvals require that influencers clearly disclose whether they receive something – money, gifts or anything else – that could affect the way in which users perceive their mention of a company or product. However, few do it. Last year, an analysis done by Princeton researchers on over 500,000 YouTube videos and over 2.1 million Pinterest pins revealed that influencers rarely reveal their links to such marketing links affiliated.
Even advanced users with influence marketing can find it difficult to identify affiliate marketing links. A new browser extension published by some of the same Princeton researchers makes them more obvious.
The extension, named AdIntuition, displays a bright pink banner warning users that "This video contains affiliate links. If you click on the highlighted links, the creator receives a commission. "The extension was released this week for Chrome and Firefox browsers. The researchers indicated that they wanted to apply it to other browsers and platforms, such as mailing lists or blogs. Finding this in applications – even in YouTube – poses additional challenges, said researcher Arunesh Mathur.
For the uninitiated, the links below Brownlee's video seem ordinary. They start with "amazon.to" followed by a backslash and some random characters, suggesting that they are truncated paths leading to one of Amazon's many lists. But once clicked, they redirect the user to an Amazon product URL with an identification tag that, according to the researchers, is used by online retailers to refer to the affiliate marketing partner who has motivated the purchase of the user.
A screenshot of the AdInuition extension in action on one of the best search results on YouTube for "the best headphones".
Paris Martineau via YouTube
Brownlee has not responded to a request for comment. But he is far from the only YouTuber to have failed to disclose a brand partnership. In last year's study, Princeton researchers found that only 10% of YouTube videos reviewed with links to affiliate sites contained written information indicating compensation for an endorsement. Only a small number of these complied with the FTC guidelines. The researchers said that they had not updated the study since then. YouTube has not responded to a request for comment. (WIRED includes affiliate links in some articles.)
One of the researchers, Marshini Chetty, director of the Princeton Human Computer Interaction Laboratory, said the team wanted to find a way to warn users when they were viewing videos containing affiliate marketing. "The browser itself should be able to warn you of deceptive or misleading content such as [whether] the content you see may be an advertisement, "she said. Chetty, Mathur and Michael Swart created AdIntuition to do it.
The extension analyzes the description of YouTube videos visited by a user to determine if it probably contains signs of affiliate marketing partnerships. It compares all the links (and their redirects) to a list of known affiliate marketing URLs and identifiers, and parses the text in search of words, phrases, or phrases. commonly used symbols to direct users to the custom coupon code of an influencer, which usually generates a message. commission when used to make a purchase. For example, if I wrote "Check out all the influencer marketing anecdotes on Wired.com and use WIRED1 with 1% discount on a subscription!" In the description of a YouTube video, the extension would flag the phrase as a possible influence marketing. because of the phrase "check out", according to Swart, the main builder of the extension.
Swart said the team had two main goals when creating AdIntuition. First, users had to be shown that affiliate marketing was a problem. "If you download the extension and watch YouTube videos, it is highly likely that the extension will signal something" that you may not have noticed in the beginning, declares there. The other goal is more academic.
If an AdIntuition user consents, the extension will send a limited amount of anonymized data on YouTube videos viewed by the user to the Princeton team, who will use it for inform subsequent research on the prevalence of affiliate marketing in videos.
If AdIntuition indicates that a video contains affiliate marketing, the extension will collect the date and time of viewing, the type of affiliate marketing content present, the parts of the description of the video set obvious by the extension, the ID of the video and an anonymous user ID associated with the browser that downloaded the extension. If AdIntuition does not display anything, the program only stores the user ID, date and time, and a video of any kind, but no details to identify it. Users can choose not to collect data by unchecking a prominently labeled box labeled "User Data" in the extension settings.
Mathur says that little research has been done on affiliate marketing and that the Princeton team wants more data. "When we put this extension in the hands of users and they use it, we can see how affiliate marketing is used in the wild," says Swart. He suspects that they will find that affiliate marketing is even more prevalent among popular videos; the first study was conducted on a random sample of YouTube videos.
Less than a week after the release of AdIntuition, it is too early to draw conclusions about its effectiveness – but the results of the beta test are promising. Prior to the release of the extension, the researchers conducted a survey of 350 Amazon Mechanical Turkers users. "We found that the group that had AdIntuition had a lot easier to understand than [when affiliate marketing is present], the content of the video was influenced by the relationship between a brand and the creator of the content, "said Swart.
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