Vloggers will soon no longer be allowed to promote products for money in videos

Vloggers will soon no longer be able to promote products in their videos in exchange for money. The Media Authority confirms this to Het Financieele Dagblad. This is the result of the recent amendment to the Media Act. It will likely hit quite a few well-known vloggers.

The new rules mean that vloggers will no longer be able to encourage their audience to buy something and they may not give a product ‘excessive attention’, the FD writes, based on information from the Media Authority. In practice, this would mean that a vlogger, for example, could still be paid to eat a certain product, but that should not be accompanied by multiple praises about how delicious it is.

Covert advertising becomes a criminal offense, which means that a vlogger must indicate at the beginning and the end of the video when a product is shown, even if it is done without promotion. There were already rules in this area, but they were too non-binding. According to the Media Authority, especially young children and pre-vocational secondary school students do not recognize surreptitious advertising and a clear indication of the display of products will increase awareness in this area.

Furthermore, videos intended for children under the age of twelve may no longer contain sponsored products at all. There will also be a number of obligations that now apply to television programs, such as the annual payment of 220 euros in supervisory costs to the Media Authority and that vloggers must be assessed by the Kijkwijzer, which costs more than 400 euros annually. In addition, a distinction must be made in an editorial statute between editorial and commerce.

The Media Authority says it will impose fines for violations, although it is not yet clear how high they will be. It is also not known exactly when the rules will apply, because the regulator still has to determine who exactly will be covered by the new rules. That is decided in the EU. Probably the rules will not apply to lesser known vloggers and hobbyists and they also do not apply to posts on Instagram, for example.

The rules follow from the Media Act, amended on 1 November, implementing the European Audiovisual Media Services Directive. In this amended law, rules for linear media services and on-demand media services have been largely aligned, which means, among other things, making advertising, sponsoring and product placement recognizable.