YouTube has partnered with South Korea's largest e-commerce platform company, Coupang Inc., to launch a shopping affiliate program in South Korea to help creators earn more revenue from their content.
The world's largest free online video-sharing platform, owned by Google Inc, said on Wednesday it will begin offering its YouTube Shopping affiliate program to creators in South Korea starting Tuesday.
This new feature allows creators to tag products sold by partner shopping sites or brands in their videos, and earn commission when viewers click on the tag and purchase the tagged product.
This is an additional shopping feature on YouTube Shopping, which is widely used by creators around the world to monetize their content.
To make the new shopping feature available to Korean creators, YouTube has partnered with Coupang and plans to expand partnerships with other companies in the future.
The video-sharing platform operator first offered its shopping affiliate program in the United States in June last year, and South Korea will be the second country where creators can take advantage of the program.
Eligible creators can showcase products from various brands sold by Coupang by tagging them in their videos.
In December last year, YouTube overtook KakaoTalk, South Korea's largest mobile messenger app run by Kakao, to become the most used platform among Koreans.
The surge in popularity can be largely attributed to the launch of YouTube Shorts in July 2021.
YouTube will also be rolling out a special shopping feature later this month that will enable Korean shopping creators to build online stores on YouTube, the first of its kind in the world.
YouTube said it developed the service in collaboration with Cafe24 Corp., a South Korean e-commerce platform that provides sellers with business services such as software needed to set up online stores, as well as marketing and logistics support.
According to YouTube, viewership of shopping-related videos on YouTube will exceed 30 billion hours in 2023, with viewership of videos supporting shopping on YouTube growing by 25%.
Write Lee Ju-hyung deep@hankyung.com
This article was edited by Sookyung Seo.
