YouTube Shopping affiliate programme overview and eligibility

YouTube Shopping affiliate programme 🛍️

The YouTube Shopping affiliate programme gives you a way to earn money on YouTube while helping your audience to find products that they love. Through this programme, you can:

Help your fans to shop: When you tag products in your content, fans can quickly scan for helpful information like pricing and keep watching your video while they checkout on the retailer's site.
Get more from your YouTube business: The affiliate programme helps get your great shopping content in front of more brands and viewers across YouTube – increasing your overall earnings potential with YouTube. You'll also earn a competitive commission when fans buy.
Spend more time creating: Since you can tag products, get insights and review earnings in YouTube Studio, you can spend more time creating content that people love and less time managing links.

Note: This programme is currently available for eligible creators of the United States and Korea. If you would like to express interest in joining early or recommend specific brands, please fill in this form. Filling in the form does not guarantee an invitation.

YouTube Shopping affiliate programme

Eligibility requirements

To be invited to the programme, you must meet these minimum eligibility requirements:

Your channel is in the YouTube Partner Programme.
Your channel must have more than 10,000 subscribers.
You are based in the United States and Korea.
Your channel is not a music channel, an Official Artist Channel or associated with music partners. Music partners may include music labels, distributors, publishers or Vevo.
Your channel audience isn't set as Made for Kids and your channel doesn't have a significant number of videos set as Made for Kids.

How to join

Once you have qualified to join the programme, you can sign up in YouTube Studio.

Sign in to YouTube Studio.
From the left menu, select Earn.
Under Programmes, click Join now.
Review and accept the YouTube Shopping affiliate programme Terms of Service.
You're in! You can start tagging products in your content. Make sure that you follow the tagging guidelines.

Affiliate sellers lists

Once you're a part of the programme, you can start tagging products directly in YouTube Studio from the growing list of merchants that are available. Learn how to tag products.

Understand your earnings

Every participating brand and retailer will set their commission rates and attribution window for each product. Commission percentages will be displayed by each product offer. The percentage displayed is what will be paid. Once a viewer clicks on your tagged product and makes a purchase, you'll earn commission. You can use YouTube Analytics to check your YouTube revenue.

Note: Commissions earned will be paid through AdSense for YouTube within 60 to 120 days of the purchase to account for customer returns. If a customer returns the product, commissions will be reversed.

Paid product placements, sponsorships and endorsements

If you include paid product placements, endorsements, sponsorships or other content that requires disclosure to viewers in your videos, you need to follow YouTube's paid product placement policies. Learn how to add paid product placements, sponsorships and endorsements.

Troubleshooting sign-up issues

Common approaches to resolve errors during sign-up

Here are common approaches to resolve errors that you may encounter when signing up:

Your channel may not be eligible. Review the eligibility criteria above to confirm whether your channel meets the requirements.
If your channel is managed by a content owner, you must have the content owner accept the agreement on your behalf.
You may be signed into the wrong YouTube channel. Switch to the channel that you believe to be eligible and try again.

Note: After confirming that your issue does not fall into one of the scenarios above, contact Creator Support for further assistance.

Best practices and resources

Get the most from the affiliate programme

To get the most out of the affiliate programme from day one, we recommend:

Feature sales and promos from popular brands: Check if the product that you want to feature is available for commission and plan your content around sales and promos most relevant to you.

Tag relevant products and use a CTA to drive sales: Tag your content with products featured within your video or Short and use a call to action to let your audience know that they can shop.

Use the bulk tagging feature to tag products across videos: In the Earn section of YouTube Studio, go to the Shopping tab and then Tag products Review the videos with suggested products to tag that were found in the video's description.

To tag certain products, click the product image click TAG next to the relevant products or TAG ALL for all products.
To tag products for one or more videos, select the relevant videos or select all videos TAG.

Get inspiration from brands and creators: Check out affiliate content from YouTube creators for content inspiration.

Creator Starter Pack: A starter pack filled with resources like set up tips, best practices and fun stickers to add to your content.

Affiliate creator playlist: Get inspiration here from other creators by taking a look at their affiliate content on YouTube.

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