Amazon officially joined the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program, allowing creators in the U.S. to tag Amazon products in their videos and earn a commission on sales. Previously, creators had to drop Amazon Associates links in the descriptions of their videos and hope that viewers used them, but now the links appear embedded directly on top of the videos themselves through a shopping panel or overlay, so they’re hard to miss.
The partnership also includes an auto-tagging feature that, if enabled, will scan a creator’s videos for product-related content and automatically add affiliate links to relevant products, which is pretty cool. Additionally, while only U.S. creators are eligible to join right now, YouTube will automatically link to the same or similar products on a trusted local marketplace so that the creators can earn on those sales too.
Creators must be enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program, the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program in the U.S., as well as part of the Amazon Influencer Program or Amazon Associates Program, and then link their accounts together.
Are all Amazon products available for linking?
Not quite. YouTube said it will provide creators with a curated catalog of highly requested and trending products that they can tag in their videos, and that they can request to add products that aren’t available by reaching out to YouTube Support. (YouTube has support?) That’s unfortunate, as it sounds like it prohibits smaller or startup Amazon sellers from having their products automatically included in the selection.
Why didn’t this happen years ago?
It should have. Though to be fair, the YouTube Shopping Affiliate Program only launched in 2022 as an invite-only program. Plus, Amazon already had millions of creators pushing products in the descriptions of their videos, so it’s not like they were missing out completely.
However, I’ve got one guess why it’s happening now: TikTok. Suddenly the enemy of my enemy is my friend. TikTok is taking search share from Google, particularly among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, while simultaneously driving sales and creator commissions through its integrated marketplace and affiliate program.
TikTok’s got the best of all worlds — social media, search, and commerce. Neither YouTube nor Amazon has all three on its own, but the partnership brings all three together. It’s a match made in heaven. Most of all, it’s good for YouTube creators, so for that reason, I support the partnership.
Despite the newfound friendship, the data hostility between the two companies is evident through the partnership. YouTube disclosed that creators will only be able to see their overall daily earnings within YouTube Studio, and not a breakdown of specific products or videos in their analytics, which suggests that Amazon isn’t providing that data to YouTube. I’m not yet sure if creators will be able to see the breakdown in their Amazon dashboards.
