As TikTok Shops gain popularity, YouTube is expanding its partnership with Shopify to bring even more brands into its YouTube Shopping Affiliates Program, the company announced on Tuesday. The expanded partnership gives creators access to thousands of new brands they can tag in their shopping videos, up from the few hundred they have access to today.
As part of the expansion, all eligible Shopify Plus and Advanced merchants in the U.S. can now sign up for the Shopping Affiliate Program.
The YouTube Shopping Affiliate Programme gives creators a way to earn money through their videos and help their viewers discover new products, and gives brands another way to reach customers and drive sales.
The expanded partnership puts YouTube in a better position to take on TikTok, which is reportedly looking to expand its U.S. business for its TikTok Shop tenfold to $17.5 billion this year. While TikTok is a newcomer to the U.S. e-commerce space compared to YouTube, the company has been onboarding merchants at a relatively fast pace, with TikTok announcing in April that it would have 500,000 U.S. merchants on its TikTok Shop by the end of 2023.
YouTube also announced that it is releasing a new Chrome extension that will allow U.S. creators in its affiliate program to save products while browsing brand and retailer sites, making them easier to find when they're ready to tag them in a video.
The expansion of the affiliate program comes as YouTube has stepped up its e-commerce efforts in recent years as a way to boost revenue amid a digital advertising slowdown, and those efforts appear to be paying off, as YouTube previously said more than 30 billion hours of shopping-related videos were watched on YouTube in 2023, with the platform seeing a 25% increase in watch time for shoppable videos.
Of course, the program is also beneficial for creators who want to earn more through the platform, which is why YouTube recently introduced new shopping features to help creators better promote products and increase their revenue.