Zebeth Media Solutions

YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts begins testing shopping features and affiliate marketing • ZebethMedia

YouTube is adding shopping features to Shorts, its TikTok-like short-form video product, the company confirmed to ZebethMedia on Tuesday. The new shopping features allow users to purchase products as they scroll through Shorts. The news was first reported by the Financial Times. The company is starting to introduce shopping features on YouTube Shorts with eligible creators in the United States who are currently piloting the ability to tag products from their own stores. Viewers in the United States, India, Brazil, Canada and Australia can see the tags and shop through the Shorts. YouTube says it plans to continue to bring tagging to more creators and countries in the future. YouTube is experimenting with an affiliate program in the United States that allows creators to earn commission through purchases of recommended products in their Shorts. The company says the test is still in its early days and that it plans to gradually expand the experiment to more creators next year. “We firmly believe YouTube is the best place for creators to build a business and shopping is a piece of that,” a spokesperson for YouTube told ZebethMedia in an email. The news comes a few weeks after YouTube announced that creators will take a 45 percent share of ad revenue starting next year. In early 2023, creators will be able to apply to the company’s Partner Program if they meet a new Shorts-specific threshold of 1,000 subscribers and 10 million Shorts views over 90 days, after which they will earn 45% of ad revenue from their videos. YouTube’s Shorts has topped 1.5 billion monthly users, but despite this success, YouTube’s quarterly ad revenue declined 1.9% year over year and missed expectations, per Alphabet’s quarterly earnings report released last month. YouTube likely sees the new shopping features as a way for it to broaden its revenue streams amid a slumping advertising market. Over the past few years, YouTube has been working to transform its platform into more of a shopping destination with product launches like shoppable ads and the ability to shop directly from livestreams hosted by creators. Given these moves, it makes sense for YouTube to bring shopping to Shorts too. YouTube isn’t the only digital giant to bet on the future of shopping, as TikTok and Meta have also invested in the space. Last week, TikTok quietly began testing TikTok Shop in the United States. TikTok Shop allows users to buy products directly through the app. Prior to this expansion, the feature was only available in the United Kingdom 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 allows creators to share products in livestreams and in its shopping tab, which lets users scroll through recommended products and make purchases. Brands are also able to make their profiles shoppable through product catalogs.

YouTube redesign gives long-form videos, Shorts and Live videos their own tabs on channel pages • ZebethMedia

YouTube is rolling out a change impacting how videos appear on its platform. The company today announced a redesign that now splits video content into three different tabs on all channel pages — one for YouTube’s traditional long-form content, another for YouTube Shorts only, and a third for Live videos, including past, current and upcoming live streams. The changes will allow users to more easily access the types of YouTube videos they want to watch — a move YouTube says it made based on user feedback. In an announcement, the company said it heard from viewers they wanted to be able to navigate to the kinds of content they were most interested in when exploring a creator’s channel page, leading to this makeover. The update also means that Shorts content and Live streams will no longer be found in the main Videos tab on the channel page — something that could appeal to longtime YouTube viewers who haven’t appreciated the infiltration of YouTube’s short-form content into their favorite channel’s video feed in recent months. However, for those who do like watching Shorts, the redesign gives YouTube a way to direct them to more short-form videos. Now, when users are watching Shorts videos in the Shorts feed in the main YouTube app, then navigate to the creator’s channel, they’ll be sent directly into this new Shorts tab to watch even more Shorts content. This could help YouTube boost its views for Shorts as those users will no longer be immediately lost to the creator’s long-form content, as before. Initial feedback from users on Twitter responding to YouTube’s post about the changes has been positive, as users are expressing their appreciation for giving each type of content its own separate category. The redesign follows another major update to YouTube this month which introduced, at long last, YouTube handles in the @username format. These usernames will now allow creators to identify their channel and interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more. YouTube says the tabbed redesign is rolling out starting today and will be available to all users across all devices in the weeks ahead.  

YouTube to broadly support the @username format with launch of YouTube handles • ZebethMedia

YouTube is making it easier for creators to direct viewers to their channels. The company today announced “handles,” a new way for creators to identify their channel with an @username format in order to interact with their viewers across YouTube Shorts, channel pages, in video descriptions, in comments and more. These handles will be made available to everyone on YouTube — you don’t need to be a creator of a certain size or subscriber count to claim your own unique @handle, YouTube says. Handles and @usernames are common across social media, including on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram and others. But YouTube had only offered limited support for the format — allowing creators to mention channels in video titles and descriptions with the @ symbol, or mention other users in YouTube Live chats, for example. But the @username option was not available in other areas and discussions. Instead, you’d have to reply to another YouTube user’s comment in order to tag them. With YouTube’s expansion into TikTok’s territory with YouTube Shorts, however, the company now wants to more closely mimic the way the ByteDance-owned video app encourages users to engage in back-and-forth discussions through their short videos and in the resulting discussions and video responses that come about. To work, that requires the use of @usernames — or @handles as YouTube calls them. YouTube says the new handles will appear on both channel pages and Shorts, making them “instantly and consistently recognizable” across the platform. After handles are fully launched, users will be able to @mention others in the comments, community posts, video descriptions and elsewhere. While these handles won’t replace the channel name itself, they will be unique across YouTube, allowing creators to establish a distinct presence for themselves on the platform. Support for handles will begin to roll out gradually, starting later next week. To protect creators from having their channel name staked by someone else in what’s sure to be one of the biggest username landgrabs on the internet, YouTube notes that channels that already have a personalized URL will see that becoming their default handle unless they choose to change it. The company also indicated that the timing of the rollout of handles has been designed in a way to ensure that established creators will gain access to the feature first, as YouTube plans to utilize factors — like the creator’s overall YouTube presence, subscriber count and whether the channel is active or inactive — when determining when to offer a creator the ability to set up their own handle. After a handle is established, YouTube will additionally create a matching URL in the format of youtube.com/@handle, which would allow the creator to market their handle elsewhere on the web or in other media. And if the channel already had a personalized URL it was using for a similar purpose, they won’t need to update their links — that URL will automatically redirect to the new handle-based URL instead. Everyone on YouTube will be able to grab a handle for themselves at some point. YouTube says creators should look for a notification to arrive over the next month.

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