VideoRetailer.org - Exploring the Intersection of Video and e-Commerce.

YouTube entering the Video Commerce era

YouTube has unveiled some ambitious plans to further monetize their massive user base by contextually inserting commerce links on their video pages. Amazon and Apple are early partners, with more to follow on the gaming, music and movie distribution verticals. What does this mean for the nascent video commerce space?

1. YouTube is serious about video commerce. Reading off the original blog post “I clicked to buy and I liked it”

Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products — like songs and video games — related to the content they’re watching on the site. We’re getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly-released video game Spore(TM) on videos from Electronic Arts.

This is just the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube. Our vision is to help partners across all industries — from music, to film, to print, to TV — offer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos. And those partners who use our content identification and management system can also enable these links on user-generated content, by using Content ID to claim videos and choose to leave them up on the site.

We can read “this is the beginning of building a broad, viable e-commerce platform for users and partners on YouTube”. This shows that YouTube is committed to this project and hopes to create a new business line that will nicely complement their current ad revenue streams.

2. YouTube is starting with digital products. What next? Partnering with Amazon and Apple makes a ton of sense because these types of products are most directly related to the masses of content you see on YouTube. Think songs, movies, games, software products, and other soft products that are just the perfect fit right now. However, with so many hard products currently been marketed on YouTube (anything from shoes, to musical instruments, to electric cables, to cars, etc), I am convinced YouTube is also thinking longer term about how they can get a piece of the e-commerce action and deliver the equivalent of the eBay stores to their users. In other words, I predict that within the next 3 years YouTube will provide merchant tools for small and medium sized businesses to sell their products online using video.

3. Another big jab at eBay. Google has been slowly gaining on eBay and it’s not a coincidence to see Amazon as one early partner in this initiative. It is all too clear that YouTube and Google are trying to lure merchants from eBay and deliver a compelling package that includes video, and I’m sure a payment system (Google checkout) down the road.

4. A fantastic boost for video commerce. By entering the space so early and with so much commitment, YouTube and Google are validating the video commerce space in a big way. Expect video adoption to accelerate in the retail space and benefit from this new momentum.