

"It's the responsibility of the publishers, developers etc., to tell YouTubers that they need to do this disclosure."

It's been several months since Gamasutra investigated the ethics of paying for YouTuber coverage for video games , and the disclosure that is required in these circumstances to meet legal requirements.But while some YouTubers have taken this on-board , many others have actively ignored the advice, or questioned whether they really need to provide the disclosure suggested.Numerous YouTubers have been in touch with Gamasutra in the last few months, both to question exactly what sort of disclosure is required of them, and to provide plenty of examples where big-name YouTubers and YouTube networks are telling their clients to ignore the advice.As a result, Gamasutra decided to get back in touch with the Federal Trade Commission to delve into the specifics of what sort of disclosure is required for video game YouTubers who are taking money from developers, publishers and marketing firms.I spoke with Mary Engle, associate director for Advertising Practices at the FTC, about what both YouTubers and publishers should be considering.: We don't specify the exact words, but the idea would be that they say "This is a paid review," as simple as that. They could use other words to explain that. I don't think we've stated that you need to say the company behind the product.: Ah, I see. No, that's not the case. The idea is that if you're providing an endorsement of a product, it doesn't have to be a review. You don't have to call it a review. It also could be a small mention - it's hardly a review really, but it's an endorsement. If you are paid or compensated, then yes, you should disclose that you are paid.: Yes. That would definitely be the best practice. Theoretically, you might have some sort of disclosure underneath, but there's a good chance consumers won't see that. So the best thing is for it to be in the video itself.: So yeah, in that case, it would need to be in the video, otherwise that's not fair.: Yeah, putting it that way... the reason I hesitate is because it depends on who was embedding it. If an independent third-party decided to embed the video in their website, but they were just doing it on their own, and they had no relationship with the YouTuber - that would not be considered advertising, because it was truly independent. It wasn't sponsored by the advertiser.So there's a possibility of this sort of independent use, but the thing about it is - if that happened, we could no pursue the advertiser and say "You failed to disclose that this person was paid by you." But really, because of that possibility, it would make sense for them to have the disclosure in the video itself, so that it does get passed on, and it stays with it.: We have given guidance about that, and it's come up in other contexts. So far we have felt that our general principles are flexible enough to apply to the different contexts. But we can always think about doing some FAQs to highlight specific scenarios.The basics are that the disclosure has to be in words that the consumer can understand - it can't just be a url or a link, it has to be in a place where consumers will see it. Certainly as a practical matter, the best thing would be to put it in the video itself, and for the person to say it.: It shows it's material to consumers, huh! [laughs] And it's the responsibility of the publishers, developers etc., to tell YouTubers that they need to do this disclosure. It's absolutely their responsibility to have a reasonable monitoring program in place to make sure that they are adequately disclosing. Then of course, the YouTuber is the one who actually has to provide it, because it's within their control. But legally, they're both responsible.: No, Google doesn't really have any responsibility, as a platform. If they're not involved in formatting it, they're just the platform, and they probably wouldn't have any legal responsibility. It could be different if - we've told Google that when it comes to their search engine, they're the ones who format the ads, so they have responsibility there. But my understanding is that Google doesn't control the presentation of the videos.: They can still complain to us, because if we get enough complaints - I mean, we can't investigate every complaint, because we get hundreds and thousands of complaints - but if we get enough complaints, we can do an investigation. If we actually investigate a publisher, we can compel them to tell us and show us what they're doing. Legally they have to. They could theoretically lie to us, but that would be highly risky.So it's still worth complaining to us, even if you feel like you don't have good evidence. If this is as prevalent as you suggest, we can do investigations. We actually have a couple open right now about what is happening with these kinds of reviews. People can file a complaint online at our website.: It's something we're looking at more broadly, because it's not just YouTubers - it's Pinterest, other social media etc, where we're hearing it might be more useful for us to do some more targetted questions and answers. So I can't give you a timeline of when we might do this, but it is something we're getting a lot of questions about and interest in, so I feel like it might be worthwhile to do so.