YouTube has always been a marketing channel. And it’s evolved in that department over the years with a developing set of standards to build organic content and engagement. That includes everything from how-to videos to leaning into video content in order to raise one’s overall SEO game.
Beyond those creator-facing behaviors, YouTube itself has met marketers halfway by formalizing several ways to boost one’s exposure, direct sales, and a range of other brand goals. That includes things like paid amplification for videos, as well as calls to action to send users to a landing page or online store.
The latter is one component of YouTube Shopping. Like TikTok Shop and Instagram’s related efforts – a la social commerce – YouTube Shopping integrates buttons, tagging systems, and other elements to facilitate ecommerce. And the gross merchandise value that it drives has grown 5x year-over-year.
YouTube pushed this broader effort forward at yesterday’s Made-On event. The rapid-fire announcements and updates involved several creator-facing updates to YouTube Studio, including lots of generative AI as you can imagine. But what stood out most to us was marketing and commerce tools.
eCommerce Staple
To save time for Localogy readers, we’ve plucked out and summarized the e-commerce-related announcements from YouTube’s event. Here they are in no particular order…
– Dynamic in-video ads: YouTube creators who monetize their videos with sponsored segments can now manage them more dynamically. Rather than produce a video (think: video podcast) that has a fixed sponsored segment somewhere in the middle (the standard approach), they can swap content in and out of those slots. This will let them sell to other brands in the future and apply new sponsored segments to older videos.
– Automated product tagging: A new AI-powered tagging feature can find and tag products in a given video. These tags then appear to users as clickable calls to action to learn more about a product. Beyond explicit calls to action, these tags represent a foundation for better search and SEO, and for YouTube to send searchers to deep links within a given video. Creators benefit from the ensuing traffic while YouTube benefits from a more precise taxonomy of products in YouTube Shopping (more on that in a bit).
– Links in Shorts: A new call to action will roll out that lets creators embed links to their (or their sponsors’) websites in YouTube Shorts. This will help the growing Shorts format get up to speed on actionable commerce, and let YouTube track it for monetization and attribution purposes.
– VIPs Only: An experimental feature will give “top viewers the opportunity to buy exclusive merch” from creators. This will let brands create VIP programs to entice their users to engage more, and reward their super fans. This feature will apply more to brands than SMBs, but the latter could run with it.
Content & Context
Altogether, these moves address several pain points for YouTube creators, who include SMBs. One in particular that stands out is the ability to have dynamic sponsored slots for videos. We have experienced the pains of producing videos that have sponsored sections that are frozen in place forever.
As background, YouTube allows and encourages creators to monetize their videos through sponsorship. And when they do so, creators keep 100% of the revenue. YouTube also splits revenue with creators when it inserts interstitial ads in a given video. The dynamic sponsorship update applies to the former.
As for AI-tagging, this move is less about what it does today and more about what it signals for the future. As noted, this could create a more precise taxonomy of products. Once YouTube has that, it can index products within videos, as done on other social commerce engines like TikTok and Instagram.
Of course, the key term is index. We’re talking about Google after all. Video is harder to index than text. But Google/YouTube can have a better understanding of the content and context of every second of its vast video libraries, it can better connect buyer and seller in relevant – and monetizable – ways.
Header image credit: Christian Wiediger on Unsplash
