YouTube Now Monetized With Affiliate Links To Amazon & iTunes

The Google Blog and the Ben’s Brother – Let Me Out music video on YouTube sports these two graphic buttons under the video, both seem to link to the respective sites using an affiliate link, which clearly shows Google is now monetizing YouTube as an affiliate (which they may have been doing before in some […]

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The Google Blog and the Ben’s Brother – Let Me Out music video on YouTube sports these two graphic buttons under the video, both seem to link to the respective sites using an affiliate link, which clearly shows Google is now monetizing YouTube as an affiliate (which they may have been doing before in some other type of way).

Here is a picture of the links:
YouTube Adds Music Links

My first thought was the same as ReadWriteWeb, that Google may be linking future videos that contain pirated music to Amazon and iTunes, thus monetizing pirated music. But right now, it appears Google is only linking these videos to Amazon and iTunes when the publisher of the video is the copyright holder of the video itself.

Google said the claim video method is the easiest way to get those iTunes and Amazon links. I assume the publishers share the revenue with Google, on some level. Google seems to be eager to expand this feature to other videos, possibly through music matching technology, similar to maybe the popular Shazam application. But right now, it is only available to U.S. users and specific publishers.

For more details, check out Techmeme.


About the author

Barry Schwartz
Staff
Barry Schwartz is a technologist and a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics.

In 2019, Barry was awarded the Outstanding Community Services Award from Search Engine Land, in 2018 he was awarded the US Search Awards the "US Search Personality Of The Year," you can learn more over here and in 2023 he was listed as a top 50 most influential PPCer by Marketing O'Clock.

Barry can be followed on X here and you can learn more about Barry Schwartz over here or on his personal site.

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