YouTube has made it easier for consumers to shop products presented by its own creator community. The latest features are said to help creators make more money from shoppable videos.
The company is launching new tools geared toward creators, which will enable them to mass tag their affiliate products throughout their video collection and add timestamps to movies for their tagged products. When taken as a whole, the upgrades will make it easier to market goods through YouTube videos and may even boost revenue for content providers.
YouTube has been steadily rolling out more tools for shopping from its videos for many months, having last year partnered with Shopify to allow merchants to feature their products in videos, expanded livestream shopping features, and added shopping features to YouTube Shorts, among other efforts.
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More methods of connecting customers to the products artists are displaying in their videos with the latest releases are now being experimented with. The buying button can be inserted into videos at appropriate moments, such as when the author is showcasing a favored device or cosmetic item, thanks to the timestamps capability. Those who saw these timestamps clicked on tagged products twice as frequently, according to YouTube’s testing of the feature in the United States last month. However, the capability is limited to long-form content—shorts are not supported.
Moreover, YouTube states that videos must have a minimum length of one minute and a maximum of thirty seconds between timestamps.
The company is also adding new tools to tag affiliate products across the creator’s video library in bulk, based on products added to the video’s description. To use this feature, creators will access the Shopping tab in YouTube Studio to see a list of their videos with products mentioned in the description. From there, they can click the videos they want to tag, make adjustments, then click “Save” to complete the process.
The feature will allow creators to quickly monetize videos from their back catalog that are still seeing high views with little effort, the company notes.
