WIRED

Nicola Chapman Haste, half of the YouTube beauty channel Pixiwoo, looks to the camera, about to film a makeup tutorial. The 28-minute video, broadcast to 2.1 million subscribers in February, is typical for the channel, which is widely considered to be one of the first to turn its creators into major influencers.

As Chapman Haste starts the video, she makes a throwaway comment that some of the makeup products she will use have been sent to her for free. Then, she pauses. “I suppose that means I have to put ‘ad’ on this now,” she thinks out loud for a beat. “I haven’t been paid to use any of them, though.”


In the end, she settles on telling viewers whether each product was a freebie or not as and when she uses them, and sticks #GIFTED in the title of the video.

As internet personalities come under increasing levels of scrutiny – by fans and regulatory bodies alike – for how much influence they wield, more are plumping for transparency. While the focus up until now has mainly been on disclosing paid promotions, such as with the #ad or #sponsored hashtags, influencers are also making more of an effort to say when they were sent a product for free. The #gifted hashtag has emerged as the tool of choice for doing so, with influencers opting to put it in YouTube description boxes and Instagram captions when they’re wearing or talking about a freebie.

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“How someone can actually make money on the internet is an alien concept to most people,” Lucy Moon, a 24-year-old British YouTuber with over 300,000 subscribers, says. In January, Moon made a 12-minute video about YouTubers’ income. She explains that, because the revenue from AdSense, Google’s pre- and mid-roll ad service, fluctuates so much, creators often look to other monetisation options. These include brand deals, merchandise, setting up accounts on fan-funding via platforms like Patreon and Twitch, and using affiliate links (where content producers are rewarded by brands for customers they send their way). “It’s important to be transparent because we have a job that’s very new and hard to understand,” Moon says. “It's just really important to demystify it and share more with our audience, because there are lots of misconceptions.”

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Moon isn’t the only influencer opening up about the business side of social media. American beauty vlogger Jessica Braun made a video about sponsorship for her 500,000 subscribers last November, and Muchelle B, an Australian lifestyle blogger, has an entirely separate channel dedicated to the business side of YouTube.

Last year, British YouTuber Lily Pebbles also made a 40-minute video about how she works with brands. In the video, which has over 100,000 views, Pebbles says that she receives up to five parcels a day of products sent to her by brands – which, she points out, she doesn’t ask for. She explains that, if she does go on to mention these products in a video, she doesn’t say if they were freebies because it’s too confusing to disclose that detail along with all of the disclaimers she already provides to her audience. “For me as a viewer, it’s important to know if someone’s been paid to say something,” Pebbles says in the video. “I would never recommend something if I didn’t like it, whether it was free or if I had paid for it.”

Since Pebbles made her video last year, however, regulators have announced that this stance doesn’t cut it. In January, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published guidelines for influencers on how to label content when they’ve “been paid, incentivised or rewarded to promote a product, brand or service on social media”.

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Following an investigation into whether influencers are in breach of consumer laws, the CMA raised concerns over how influencers label their content. The guidelines, which follow last year’s on labelling ads correctly, focus on whether any money – including in the form of free gifts – has changed hands.


Pebbles now declares when something is a freebie. Since the new guidelines were introduced, the description boxes on her videos include a three-paragraph disclaimer, indicating with a series of symbols which products were free, which were discounted and which were paid for, as well as which links she provides are affiliate links.

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But while the CMA’s guidelines are explicit that influencers need to say when they’ve “been paid, given or loaned things”, there are no templates for what good practice looks like. It’s left to individual creators to determine this and, looking at different channels, interpretations of what constitutes clarity vary wildly. “It's a really difficult thing to pinpoint exactly at what point we need to declare,” Moon says.

Mark Brill, senior lecturer in digital communication and future media at Birmingham City University, welcomes the CMA guidelines. “Influencers have been treading a delicate balance between authenticity and brand sponsorship in its widest form for some years,” Brill says. “Anything that helps with authenticity is ultimately going to be beneficial.”

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He explains, however, that there will be an inevitable regulatory lag: “Individuals will adopt technology at a faster rate than businesses and government can comprehend, so you're always going to be playing catch up.”

Brill predicts that the market will start to regulate itself. “There was an inevitable gold rush as YouTubers and Instagrammers started to realise that there was some revenue available,” he says. “But now, as we're starting to get a more mature market, people are understanding the need to be sensible about it.”

While the CMA’s guidelines focus on the influencers, the role brands play in the transparency conversation is complex. Jenny Quigley-Jones, founder of influencer marketing agency Digital Voices, says that, historically, brands have put pressure on influencers to be vague about the details of a paid deal. Increasingly, not only are influencers themselves pushing back on this, but many are also talking openly on their channels about the inner workings of brand-influencer relationships.

This new breed of transparent influencer, which prizes openness, turns everything audiences have come to expect from the influencer industry on its head. There’s now a clear contrast between influencers who do the minimum – just sticking #gifted in a description box where viewers are unlikely to see it – and those creators who make transparency an active part of their online brand. As Quigley-Jones says, "A lot of the channels that have sprung up in the last two to three years have won from being super-transparent with their audience about how they make money."

Compared to more established YouTubers, it tends to be newer channels which put a premium on transparency. Quigley-Jones says this creates a dialogue in which the creator communicates to their audience that they are the reason the creator can make a living from their content. "The more honest you are, the more transparent you can be about brand deals and you'll still get your audience to watch that content," she says.

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There are also commercial realities that can’t be ignored. Drawing a comparison between Premier League football players or pop stars, Brill says that only a tiny percentage of YouTubers can really hit the big time. “Most people can earn a bit of money from their channels, but ultimately, it's never going to make you a living,” he says. “You inevitably have to get involved in sponsorship.”

Brill says that the issue is ultimately less about regulations and more about what fans themselves are willing to accept. “Audiences are not stupid,” he says. “They can see when there’s a lack of authenticity.”

“People need to believe that influencers are genuine in their recommendations,” he adds. “It's just not possible to have any kind of longevity of career unless it's underpinned by authenticity.”

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