A New Law Meets a Popular Format

On the 29th of June 2026, the Parliament of North Macedonia adopted a new Law on Games of Chance and Entertainment Games, which directly changed how giveaways can be run in the country. In short, the Law aims to protect consumers by requiring giveaway organizers to obtain a permit and pay a fee.

As giveaways were a frequent sight in North Macedonia, used to promote either the organizers themselves or a special event, the Law was bound to affect the wider social media environment around them. Pikasa Analytics looked at how many giveaway posts were shared on social media, in Macedonian and Albanian, from the beginning of the year to the end of September, comparing just over six months before the Law took effect on the 14th of July, with the eleven weeks after it.

Giveaways Collapsed the Week the Law Took Effect

The posts we collected hold two distinct kinds of promotion. Giveaways are free to enter, meaning people take part by liking, commenting or tagging someone under the post. Prize games require a buy-in, such as a purchase or a deposit. This report focuses on giveaways, because they show the Law's effect most clearly, and the clearest sign of that effect is the contrast between the two periods. From the beginning of the year until the Law took effect on the 14th of July, there were 898 giveaway posts with 1.18 million engagements, or about 32.6 posts and 42,900 engagements per week.

Once the Law was in force, both the totals and the weekly averages went into freefall: 37 posts and 24,305 engagements in total, or 3.2 posts and 2,127 engagements per week. To put this into perspective, the weekly number of posts fell by 90%, and engagement with them fell by a dizzying 95%. The drop was also abrupt. Activity did not wind down after the Law was adopted. It all but stopped in the very week it took effect.

Prize games reacted very differently: they fell by only 23% and were back at their earlier pace by September. The Law, in other words, removed one format, not promotional prize draws as a whole.

Companies Posted the Most, Influencers Drew the Crowd

Unsurprisingly, most giveaways were organized by companies. This category covers businesses of all kinds: banks, private healthcare providers, food and beverage producers, petrochemical and pharmaceutical companies, cinemas, car dealerships, shopping malls and so on. The other categories are Organizations (NGOs and CSOs, sports clubs, informal and special-interest groups or pages); Institutions (ministries, government bodies and foreign embassies); Media (public and private outlets, online and traditional, and media figures in general); and Influencers (popular social media personalities, vloggers, podcasters and celebrities).

Companies dominated by sheer volume, with 71% of the posts explicitly labeled as giveaways before the Law took effect. Influencers, however, drew by far the most engagement per post: 2,735 on average, compared with 1,268 for companies. With only 9% of the posts, they generated 19% of the engagement. They are also the group that all but disappeared: 38 influencers ran giveaways before the Law and only one did so after it, while the number of companies fell from 151 to 14.

Instagram and Facebook Fell Together

If companies led in volume and influencers in engagement, the next question is where the giveaways were held, and where audiences engaged with them the most.

Instagram and Facebook dominate on every metric. Together they account for 96% of all posts and 98% of the engagement. Instagram in particular is where the engagement happens: 45 of the 50 most-engaged posts were published there. When the same giveaway was posted on both platforms, which happened in 165 cases, the Instagram post drew more engagement than its Facebook twin 69% of the time, and 2.8 times as much in total.

However dominant the two platforms were, neither was spared once the Law came into force. Posting fell at almost the same rate on Instagram (-91%) and Facebook (-89%), so activity did not move from one platform to the other. The smaller platforms fared no better, as TikTok and LinkedIn were each left with a single giveaway post, and YouTube with none.

Engagement per post fell too, by about half. Instagram's average dropped from 1,701.1 to 967.7 and Facebook's from 780.6 to 328.9, as the few giveaways that remain are smaller ones. TikTok, small but highly engaging before the Law (1,071.5 per post), all but vanished, while LinkedIn and YouTube stayed marginal throughout. It should be noted, though, that the "after" figures for TikTok and LinkedIn each rest on a single post, and YouTube had none, so the -99% figure in the table is fragile and the sample is too small to support firm conclusions.

Why It Matters

Giveaways were one of the easiest ways to win attention on social media in North Macedonia, and a single national law switched most of them off within a week. The effect went beyond the organizers. Of all prize promotions we collected, posts labeled as giveaways were 57% of the sample but drew 93% of its engagement, so the audience's habit of commenting, tagging and sharing largely disappeared with them. That audience did not move to another platform or format; prize games continued, but they draw a fraction of the response. The case shows how quickly local regulation can change the way social media is used.