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

Video Commerce Chronicles #2: YouTube’s Click-To-Buy Updates

Discussing the latest Click-To-Buy announcement from YouTube, and covering three points:

1. More validation for video commerce
2. Link overlays are the future
3. More interesting, how is YouTube going to avoid upsetting retailers that are already uploading product videos but may see their competitors’ ad overlays in YouTube?

Amazon.com’s Video Commerce Widget for Affiliates

With its Video Commerce widget, Amazon leverages the power of video, but this time, outside of its site boundaries. Once again, the Seattle-based eRetailer is showing its leadership in the adoption of new technology, surfing two separate trends: video and social media.

Hello and thank you for your interest in Amazon.com’s new video widget. This is a new and exciting way to generate revenue by adding product links to the videos you already post to your web site or blog. Simply upload your video to Amazon and add the products you would like to showcase. When you’re finished adding products, you receive a small snippet of HTML that you can use to embed your video onto your web page. When people make a purchase through the product links in your video, you’ll earn money through your Amazon’s associates account. It’s that easy. [...]

The resulting widget looks terrific. As the videos are playing, links to the product pages with pricing and rating information pop-up, making it very easy for users to access the product they’re viewing and adding it to the shopping cart.

The text/link overlay approach isn’t new: there are a handful of companies already doing this type of overlay technology for retail sites. But what’s really interesting about this approach is the combination of video and social media:

1) Pushing the envelope on the video commerce side… prior to this new feature, Amazon was already heavily pushing video content onto many of its top categories, whether it’s for the Amazon Kindle, the Wii (see below) or video games. But up until now, the products weren’t featured in the video itself, and the user had to look around to actually click on the product of interest.

2) … Delivering the tools affiliates need… While Linkshare (Flexlinks) and Commission Junction (SmartLinks) offer some options for pushing video to affiliates, these are very limited and require a lot of work on the part of the merchant, which limits the number of merchants which actually offer video content.

3) With a unique community twist! This is my favorite part - and the smartest of all. Rather than providing stock content to the affiliates, which would be perceived as regular video ads, the publisher creates it own content and uploads it to Amazon for the Video Widget. There are many advantages to this approach: first, publishers with existing content (take for example video game reviews) can now directly monetize video content with Amazon in the player, instead of having to place links around the video player like before. Second, it opens up a world of content creating possibilities for the publishers who get a chance to produce unique and differentiated content.

Who said ‘09 was going to be boring!

Below - the Wii product page on Amazon.com, with video taking a large portion of the page.