Tom Scott
6 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2021–2024
31:48 · 9.2M views · Feb 15, 2021
Tom Scott examines why YouTubers must declare paid endorsements while TV, film and other media face no such rule, comparing regulations in the UK and US.
HN cites it as a clear explainer on sponsorship and ad disclosure rules and their inconsistency across media.
10 comments from Hacker News
> not enough context, maybe > Probably some corporate compliance drones and underfunded government stooges. Youtube alone has 720,000 hours of fresh video content per day Tiktok must have less number of hours but more Videos per day. Add Instagram, facebook, Twitter and it's impossible for anyone to verify this manually so in the end how is the platform supposed to decide what to show and what not where the "not enough context, maybe" is the most common answer? > Is product placement in movie an ad? > yes, clearly not so clearly even in this case. see this video , a very nice recap of what an ad is.
There's only so much money you can make off of banner ads and at a certain point native advertisements are way more lucrative. I wonder how they get around disclosure requirements but I guess it's probably because the articles are never directly funded but there's some other form of compensation in the backend. Tom Scott made an interesting video about internet advertising regulations a while back. [1] [1]: this video
FWIW the UK also has fairly strict laws about this (possibly stricter than Germany). Tom Scott once did a good video about this: this video German streamers also ran into a separate issue with German broadcasting regulations when they tried to run a 24/7 streaming format. Turns out you need a broadcasting license for continuous scheduled programming like that.
A bit unrelated, but if you want a overview of sponsorships in different media platforms across different countries (mostly Britain and US though), I suggest watching Tom Scott's excellent video: this video . (Note that the video is ~30 minutes long. It's unfortunately that complicated, even when only talking rules mainly in two countries.)
> Influencers are actually some of the only advertisers who aren’t well regulated in Europe, When was the last time you saw product placements being clearly labeled in TV shows/movies? For most people, the answer is "never". Just because we are used to it doesn't mean it's fair. Tom Scott explains it much better than I can: this video