A lot of the decisions that people make about products they want to buy are made after they see the product on YouTube. Content creators are a pretty big part of this sort of thing, and they mostly facilitate these sales through sponsorships and product placements. General ads are also a big player in this sort of thing. YouTube earns a lot of money from these ads, but it seems like the video streaming giant is not settling for just sending sales to other platforms such as Amazon. Rather, Google is trying to experiment with YouTube and see if it can turn it into an ecommerce hub.
The first phase of this is already underway. YouTube has given software to a select group of creators that would allow said creators to tag any products that they might have in their content or videos. This data would then be sent to Google where it would analyzed and shopping tools would be integrated into this whole process so that whenever a user is watching a video and ends up seeing a product that they like, they would easily be able to just buy the product with a single click. Wary of getting into a content creator’s bad books as it so often does, YouTube also plans to give creators control over what products are displayed so that unnecessary product placement does not end up finding its way into their content.
Shopify might play a role in this transformation for YouTube. The video streaming platform might partner up with the ecommerce giant, and the prospect of this collaboration could very well have a serious impact on the world of ecommerce in general. It has the potential to transform the industry by integrating the advertising and outreach process directly with sales, and making it so that the time spent between a consumer seeing something they like and buying it is reduced to the shortest possible amount of time.
Google has been wanting to get into ecommerce for a while now, much like social media giant Facebook as well as underdogs such as Pinterest, but the search engine tech giant has not had all that much success. Using YouTube could potentially be a brilliant move, one that has the potential to topple Amazon’s supremacy in this industry and offer content creators more earning opportunities that they can take advantage of as well.
The first phase of this is already underway. YouTube has given software to a select group of creators that would allow said creators to tag any products that they might have in their content or videos. This data would then be sent to Google where it would analyzed and shopping tools would be integrated into this whole process so that whenever a user is watching a video and ends up seeing a product that they like, they would easily be able to just buy the product with a single click. Wary of getting into a content creator’s bad books as it so often does, YouTube also plans to give creators control over what products are displayed so that unnecessary product placement does not end up finding its way into their content.
Shopify might play a role in this transformation for YouTube. The video streaming platform might partner up with the ecommerce giant, and the prospect of this collaboration could very well have a serious impact on the world of ecommerce in general. It has the potential to transform the industry by integrating the advertising and outreach process directly with sales, and making it so that the time spent between a consumer seeing something they like and buying it is reduced to the shortest possible amount of time.
Google has been wanting to get into ecommerce for a while now, much like social media giant Facebook as well as underdogs such as Pinterest, but the search engine tech giant has not had all that much success. Using YouTube could potentially be a brilliant move, one that has the potential to topple Amazon’s supremacy in this industry and offer content creators more earning opportunities that they can take advantage of as well.
Photo: Smith Collection / Gado / Getty Images
