  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.
