A $40K fine is a rounding error — the damage done to the influencer market is untold
This week, the ACCC slapped online business Photobook Shop with a $40K fine for not disclosing a number of social media partnerships. Sharyn Smith, founder and CEO of Social Soup, feels that the fine doesn’t begin to make up for a damage done to a growing industry.
Sharyn Smith, Social Soup
Yesterday, the ACCC fined Photobook Shop $39,600 for paying influencers with free products – on 107 separate occasions – and explicitly instructing them to hide it.
The company took it even further, editing an influencer’s review to strip out the honest bits where she described a product as “fiddly” and “confusing”. This is the first time a business has been penalised for this kind of conduct in Australia, and the fact that it took three years of sweeps, guidelines and public warnings before someone actually copped a fine tells you something about how complacent parts of this industry have become.
Now, the dollar figure is almost beside the point. Thirty-nine thousand dollars is a rounding error for most marketing budgets. The real question is how any brand in 2026 could look at the influencer landscape and conclude that deception was a viable strategy. The reason to be transparent has never been regulatory, it’s because transparency is audience-centric. Brands that hide the commercial nature of their influencer partnerships are undermining the only thing that makes those partnerships worth paying for in the first place.
