Undisclosed Affiliation and Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is an arrangement in which a publisher, reviewer or influencer earns a commission on purchases made through a tracked link or a personalised discount code. The commercial logic is that the payment scales with sales rather than with attention, so the recommender's income depends not on being read but on the audience buying. A discount code arrangement is the same mechanism wearing a friendlier face: the code is a tracking identifier, and the discount is funded out of a margin that anticipates it.

In the United States the governing framework is the Federal Trade Commission's endorsement guidance, substantially revised in 2023, which requires that a material connection between an endorser and a seller be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. Clearly and conspicuously has content: the disclosure must be unavoidable, in the same medium as the endorsement, and not buried behind a link, in a hashtag block, in a video description a viewer must expand, or in small print at the bottom of a page. The Commission has also made clear that endorsers can be liable for unsupported health claims they repeat.

The reason disclosure changes how a reader should weight a recommendation is that the incentive operates on selection as much as on praise. A review whose author is paid on conversion has a reason to review products that convert, to describe uncertainty as resolved, and never to publish the negative piece. That distortion survives complete factual accuracy in every individual sentence.

The mistake is treating a stated disclosure as neutralising the conflict. Disclosure lets a reader discount the claim; it does not make the underlying evidence any stronger. Health claims from a commission-earning source need the same primary sources demanded of any other, and a bare affiliate label supplies none of them.