Don’t be surprised if your favorite YouTuber suddenly starts pushing a lot more Amazon products.
Amazon and YouTube recently partnered to make it easier than ever for content creators to hawk Amazon products in their videos and get a cut of the sales after Amazon officially joined YouTube’s Shopping Affiliate Program last week. The partnership lets eligible U.S. YouTube creators tag Amazon products directly in their videos, Shorts and livestreams, while earning a commission on purchases.
YouTube Shopping Vice President Travis Katz told Bloomberg on Tuesday that the move is part of Alphabet’s broader strategic bet on e-commerce. He compared the effort to the company’s previous investments in areas like podcasting and living room viewing, which have worked out pretty well for YouTube.
Last year, YouTube said more than 1 billion people watch podcast content on the platform every month. By October, viewers were watching more than 700 million hours of podcasts on living-room devices in a single month.
YouTube has also become a TV giant. Nielsen reported that YouTube accounted for 13.8% of all U.S. TV watch-time in both May and June, compared with 19.8% for broadcast and 19.5% for cable in June.
Now, YouTube is setting its sights on shopping, and its partnership with the e-commerce giant is one way it plans to get there.
“Video has completely changed the way people shop,” Katz told Bloomberg. “In the old days, we used to browse store windows. Today, people browse videos.”
YouTube launched its affiliate program in the U.S. in 2024 and has since expanded it internationally, including to India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina. The program allows creators to tag products from third-party retailers directly in their content instead of relying on affiliate links in video descriptions or comments.
And the business is booming.
Katz told Bloomberg that YouTube Shopping’s gross merchandise volume, the total value of products sold through the program, grew 13-fold globally between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2026. People are also watching 110 million hours of shopping-related videos on YouTube every day.
More than 1 million creators now participate in YouTube Shopping, according to Bloomberg. Other major retailers in the program include Walmart, Sephora and Home Depot.
Meanwhile, YouTube isn’t the only video platform getting into the shopping game. TikTok, which struck its own Amazon partnership in 2024, and Whatnot have helped fuel the growing trend of livestream shopping, where creators try to sell products during their streams — think QVC for Gen Z.
But YouTube seems to think it still has an edge in the space.
“We’re the second-largest search engine in the world, so people are using YouTube for research in a way that they don’t use other platforms, and being part of the Google universe, we can leverage things like Gemini to build interesting experiences,” Katz told Bloomberg.
Amazon and YouTube did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
