YouTube creators will now be able to tag Amazon products directly within livestreams, videos, and shorts.
YouTube has introduced a feature which allows creators to directly tag Amazon products directly inside their content.
When Amazon items are tagged within a video, short, or reel, the audience is able to discover and purchase them through the e-commerce platform – giving influencers and creators a new way to earn revenue.
Neal Mohan, chief executive at YouTube, explained: “Eligible US creators will now be able to tag Amazon products in their shorts, long-form videos and livestreams, making it even easier for viewers to buy the products they love from the creators they trust.”
To earn commissions from tagged Amazon products, creators must meet the following criteria:
- Be enrolled in the YouTube partner programme.
- Be enrolled in the YouTube shopping affiliate programme in the US.
- Be part of the Amazon Influencer Program (AIP) or Amazon Associates Program (AAP) and have an account that is active and in good standing.
- Users will need to link their YouTube channel to their AIP or AAP account.
- Those who are not in the AIP or AAP, can sign up and link their YouTube channel information.
- Those who are already part of the AIP or AAP, can link your YouTube channel via the Amazon storefront portal using the steps below.
Accounts using Amazon tags can use the product picker tool in YouTube studio to add tags or they can take advantage of auto-tag content, which will review recent uploads to automatically identify any eligible Amazon products.
This is a huge opportunity for creators, who will have the capabilities to monetise their content in a new way. This has the potential to change the way that content creators engage with their viewers, and could see a rise in more specific, compartmentalised creators.
Those with niche or specialised audiences will have a much better way to generate revenue from their videos.
For example, a newer or niche creator with a highly engaged audience of 100,000 could end up being more profitable than a wider, less focused audience of one million.
This follows a series of updates YouTube has made to its affiliate programme recently, including updating how it measures views for videos and live streams and splitting affiliate traffic from organic in an attempt to offer “greater consistency” across Google’s ecosystem.
