Not just streaming anymore.
YouTube (Photo: Unsplash)
SHORTS, YouTube's TikTok-like short video product, is about to get a new, albeit not particularly surprising, shopping feature, in which viewers will be able to purchase products while scrolling through shorts videos, the Financial Times reported this week.
As of today, the shopping feature in question is only available to a limited number of select YouTube creators in the US, who can, as part of the pilot, tag products and sell them directly from YouTube. Purchases through Shorts are currently only available to viewers in the United States, India, Brazil, Canada and Australia, but to Worryingly, YouTube says it plans to continue bringing commercial labeling to more creators and countries in the future.
YouTube's official announcement reads: "With the holiday season fast approaching, more and more people are looking for a one-stop shop for their gifts. We've seen online search terms like 'gift guides' and 'gift ideas' peak this time of year, which is why we're happy to make the holidays easy Keep up with YouTube to You, a series of videos, live streams and short videos featuring your favorite creators with recommendations for their gift collections, offers and exclusive product deals to help you close your shopping. Any way you watch YouTube, you'll find interactive ways to uncheck things your."
And here's a live example of how it's going to look:
"We believe YouTube is the best place for creators to build a business, and shopping is part of that," a YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch in an email.
You can sell on YouTube even if you don't have any goods
Another pilot that YouTube is conducting these days in the US is a direct continuation of the shopping feature and actually takes it a few steps further, starting now. '
Nedise
offers, they will still be able to earn commissions by promoting products from other creators or brands. According to YouTube, this pilot is now taking its first steps, but it plans to gradually expand the experiment to more creators over the next year.
get confused now, so let me take a moment to sort out the two different programs offered by YouTube, because what can you do, Hebrew is a difficult language.
This is not the PARTNERS program that was announced a few weeks ago, in which content creators will be entitled to receive 45% of the revenue from advertisements that will be broadcast before or after their short videos.
This program, which was launched in response to the ongoing global decline in spending on sponsored advertising, will be available to creators of shorts starting in 2023, provided, of course, that they meet the requirements of the threshold: 1,000 subscribers and 10 million views of shorts over 90 days.
Like the ads in the classic YouTube videos, it is likely that ads in the shorts will also be hidden when viewers choose to pay for a premium channel.
On the other hand, the affiliate program, which, as mentioned, is being launched today in an experimental format, is intended to create a completely new revenue channel and it does not concern sponsored advertising, which has been YouTube's main source of income until today, and since these are authentic videos from content creators and not advertising in the classic sense of the word, there is no reason hide them even from paying customers.
In this way, YouTube creates for itself a new and attractive revenue stream that does not depend on the whims of advertisers, the demands of viewers, and the fluctuations of the market.
In one word: trading.
In recent years, YouTube has worked to turn its platform into a sales channel with product launches such as push-to-buy ads and the ability to make purchases directly from content creators' live broadcasts.
Given these moves, it's no surprise that it's now also bringing shopping to the short video format, which has shown impressive growth in its two years of existence.
YouTube's shorts have already reached 1.5 billion monthly users, but despite this success, Alphabet's quarterly earnings report, published last month, showed a 1.9% decline in YouTube ad revenue.
It's likely that YouTube sees the new shopping features as a way to expand its revenue streams amid a slumping advertising market.
More in Walla!
How YouTube turned from an esoteric startup into a global media powerhouse that changed the face of history
To the full article
Not only YouTube - Instagram and Tiktok are also trading
If you thought YouTube was the only digital giant betting on direct buying, it's time to mention Tiktok and Meta, who also invested in similar features.
Last week, TikTok began quietly testing the TikTok Shop in the United States.
TikTok Shop allows users to buy products directly from the app.
Before this expansion, the feature was only available in the UK and parts of Southeast Asia.
Earlier this year, the company also began piloting TikTok Shopping in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada in partnership with Shopify.
Meta-owned Instagram also allows creators to share products on its live streams and shopping tab.
Brands running Instagram business pages can turn their profiles into a product catalog and all viewers have to do is scroll through the feed to find and buy products they like.
In this way, you can say hello and not goodbye to social networks as you have known them until today, since the meaning of these features is an almost total takeover by eCommerce of what we once called social media.
In the same breath, it's time to mention that classic ecommerce platforms like Amazon have also started testing this year on a Tiktok-like format designed to do roughly the same thing.
True, this is not new news.
In fact, for years we have been promised that the future of shopping will be done on social media platforms, but if until today marketers and content creators on the networks had to use external links to e-commerce sites, or use hidden advertising tactics in order not to be blocked from the platform, today more and more platforms are switching to a purchase model Directly and no one bothers to hide it anymore.
So now that the media platforms openly state this, you can stop treating them as social networks and call the dog by its real name: commercial networks, or as it is called in the professional parlance: social commerce.
Ditza Keren is a technology reporter and the editor of the channel Walla!
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