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Comment by wil421 | Hacker News Reader

I tend to agree with you. The other day I was looking for reviews on some boots I was going to buy. Most of the videos I found had the same fake advertisement feel you described. There was probably 4 or 5 videos basically giving a history of the company, why they are so good, and a small bit about the boot. It felt much more like an ad than a boot review.

It took some searching to find an amateur YouTuber in the UK giving a review of the boots. He even had 6 months and a year update. It was a low quality production but the content was so much better. This guy even walked in a creek to show they were waterproof while everyone else sat in their bedroom talking.

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The joy is, the guys with sponsored videos likely got $100s ($1000s?) of dollars to do their shill review. The guy doing the good review maybe made 10 cents off the views of his video.

Any time the financial incentives of a system encourage negative behavior, it is at least a hint that more regulation is needed.

In other media forms, the guy giving the shill would need to say up front "I was paid for this review". On youtube and instagram, I don't think this is the case.

The people pushing the gambling site were offered around $100k for the sponsored video. Lots of money to be made when you have millions of subscribers.

I spoke with a guy at a leather shop in Florence. He said all he had to do was give a few leather jackets to instragam or social media models. They would share his name, keep the nice leather products, and he said he could get 100s of orders.

The models didn’t even ask for payment. I can’t imagine what the Instagram models and YouTube superstars demand.

Other Youtubers have reported being contacted for the Gambling website this thread is based on. Each one reported being offered between 10k and 20k to push this scam.

It's speculated the biggest Youtubers pushing this are being paid up to 6 figures.

Keemstar said he was offered 100000$ but turned it down. Ricegum said in his followup video that he was offered more since he has more subscribers.

Because of you i know who Ricegum is, you owe me.

Very sorry but know you know what kind of individual are popular on the site. Keep that in mind if/when you have kids.

The regulation exists, at least in the US; the FTC has sent notices to dozens of "influencers" on that regard[1]. I don't think they've fined anyone yet, though.

EDIT: I was wrong, they've already charged and settled with two: TmarTn and Syndicate[2].

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/04/ftc-s...

[2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/09/csgo-...

Notices are irrelevant. What relevant is the kind of a wine that wipes out 5-10 years of the money influencer made for a single violation. Get a dozen of those and suddenly every infuencer would make 100% sure he or she is playing within the rules.

TmarTn had a crazy good lawyer on that case. The defense was

1) CSGO Lotto was never a gambling site to begin with because you could play for free simply by emailing support, akin to McDonalds Monopoly [0]

2) It was public knowledge that the owners of the corporation were TmarTn and Syndicate.

[0] www.polygon.com/platform/amp/2017/12/18/16782124/csgo-lotto-lawsuit-gambling-terms-of-use-tmartn

> It was public knowledge that the owners of the corporation were TmarTn and Syndicate.

So was the argument here that they expected children and teenagers who were primarily consuming their content to look up the public ownership records of CSGO Lotto? Since they weren't particularly open about their ownership in the videos that they advertised the site in.

Unironically, it seems so. As disingeneous as it sounds. Pretty horrible people all around.

Regarding #1, okay I actually have to clap and give them a "well done" for that one.

Is there any evidence the FTC is going after the advertisers and platforms (youtube, twitch, etc) themselves? It seems purposefully ineffective to play whack-a-mole with individuals when the driving force is a multi-billion dollar industry built around avoiding disclosure.

It seems they are going after advertisers: https://www.cnet.com/news/warner-bros-settles-with-ftc-for-n...

Regarding the platforms, how are they supposed to know if the uploader got paid to do a video? If it was obvious, we wouldn't need these disclosures in the first place!

How can we increase agreement around what constitutes negative behavior? This is the biggest blocker to effective regulation.

Well we can start with disclosure. If a product was given or money changed hands and it’s not clearly stated on the placement video then if they get caught, massive fines.

I saw a video where a guy did an incredibly thorough review of a product. Just a guy who bought something that didn't have a lot of reviews, so he threw together a video in his garage and backyard.

Eventually it got to the point where he had one of the top videos when you look up the product name on YT. A bit later the company sent him a bunch of their other products and he reviewed them. It's smart for the company to do that, but it makes the subsequent videos feel just a bit tainted.

Can you please share the channel? I also like reddit's r/goodyearwelt for personal anecdotes.

It's stuff like this that makes YouTube valuable for me, despite the crap that gets promoted on the homepage.

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