The National Markets and Competition Commission has just hired a Portuguese company to track covert advertising on social networks. The three fines that he has managed to impose with this newly released surveillance add up, now with the discounts for prompt payment and other mitigating factors, to 2,877.91 euros between Ibai Llanos, Jordi Wild and Nachter. They are just crumbs in the context of how much these people earn. influencers with their activity.
Three reasons. Ibai Llanos, Jordi Wild and Nachter have been sanctioned for different breaches of the General Law of Audiovisual Communication: unidentified advertising, content without protection of minors and irregular promotion of medicines. It cost Ibai Llanos 710 euros, reduced to 568 for advance payment, not to point out that several videos published in The Evening They showed a beverage brand without differentiating it from the editorial content through the optical, acoustic or spatial mechanisms required by the standard.
Jordi Wild has paid 1,543.44 euros, reduced to 1,241.95, to broadcast extreme fighting matches from the Dogfight Wild Tournament on YouTube without age ratings or the minor restriction mechanisms offered by the platform. Nachter has received the highest fine: 1,779.94 euros, reduced to 1,067.96 after acknowledging responsibility, for promoting anti-flu drugs on networks without complying with the requirements that the law imposes on the advertising of medicines. The three are equated due to their special relevance with traditional television providers, by exceeding certain thresholds of income, audience and activity.
The comparison. These are low fines in general terms, but they are even more surprising if we compare them with what a pharmaceutical company pays for similar errors. The Supreme Court confirmed in March 2025 a fine of 90,001 euros to a laboratory that omitted the price of a medicine in a communication addressed only to doctors and pharmacists, not even to the general public. Months earlier, the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid had ratified another fine of 90,000 euros to a pharmaceutical company for advertising in the press a prescription drug.
Nachter promoted over-the-counter flu medicines directly to millions of followers on social networks, without health professionals involved, and has ended up paying eighty-odd times less than those two companies for an infringement aimed at the general public, not health professionals.
New surveillance. On July 14, the CNMC formalized three contracts with the Portuguese company Primetag for 32,800 euros to analyze for twelve months the content published by particularly relevant users of Instagram, TikTok and YouTube in search of unidentified commercial communications. Until now, this surveillance was manual and sporadic. The order arrived weeks after the CNMC required—without sanctioning— to Sofía Suescun, Tamara Gorro, Peldanyos, Samantha Vallejo-Nágera and Lola Lolita for unidentified advertising, after separate complaints from the Association of Communication Users.
The organization opted for the requirement and not the fine in those cases because those publications were prior to the interpretative criteria that the CNMC itself established in June 2025. In the case of Lola Lolita, in addition, it was established for the future that content can be considered advertising even if there is no direct payment. But this surveillance of influencers is not new.
History of a crawl. For example, In 2022 the CNMC proposed equating streamers with televisionone year later Spain approved its own streamer registry and in 2024 a law of influencers that it was said that would only affect 5% of creators. In between, a consumer study detected that 77.75% of the profiles analyzed failed to comply with the obligation to identify their ads. Twitch, the platform where Ibai Llanos concentrates a good part of his audience, It doesn’t even have its own parental control system. beyond the possibility of closing accounts of minors under 13 years of age.
Covert advertising on networks. It is not a new phenomenon nor exclusive to these three cases. There are the aforementioned 77.75% of the reviewed publications that failed to comply with the obligation to indicate advertising content. There were creators with more than ten million followers and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs warned that, under the Unfair Competition Law, fines could exceed 100,000 euros. That came at a time when streamers like Ibai,
More fines. There is room for those fines to increase. For serious infractions committed by large providers, the law contemplates sanctions of up to 5% of annual turnover with a limit of 750,000 euros, far from the 2,877.91 euros of this week’s fines. The Evening of the Year, the event that organizes Ibai Llanos alone Since it broke its partnership with Gerard Piqué, it generated in its fifth edition, in 2025, income over eight million euros: about five million in ticket sales, about three in sponsorships, and around an additional million from subscriptions and advertising on Twitch.
Jordi Wild, for his part, is already billing more than two million euros a year through its production company, with a net profit of around one and a half million and which in 2024 grew by 40% compared to the previous year. That is to say, we can describe these fines as merely symbolic and even dangerous: if they are nothing more than a trifle for those who receive them, they can almost be interpreted as a declaration of unofficial impunity.
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