YouTube is adding online beauty shopping platforms Nykaa and Purplle as new merchant partners to expand its shopping affiliate service in India during the crucial festive sales season.
The Google-owned video platform is also partnering with Nykaa to launch a programme designed to discover, enable, and accelerate the next generation of India’s beauty and lifestyle content creators.
How has YouTube Shopping performed in India?
This expansion comes a year after the world's largest video platform introduced YouTube Shopping in India in partnership with Walmart-owned e-commerce players Flipkart and Myntra in October 2024.
More than 40 percent of eligible creators in India are enrolled in the YouTube Shopping affiliate programme, with more than 3 million videos tagged with affiliate products, the company said. It added that shopping-related watch time has also grown more than 250 percent on-year, on the platform.
"With this incredible result from the first year, it is no longer just a simple affiliate program. This is strong becoming a foundation for a new shopping ecosystem that's benefiting our creators, participating e-commerce merchants, brands and retailers who are looking for more loyal customers on their ecosystem," YouTube India managing director Gunjan Soni said in a media briefing.
Who are eligible to join the affiliate programme?
Creators in YouTube’s Partner Program with more than 10,000 subscribers can sign up for the affiliate program, allowing them to recommend products in long-form videos, Shorts, and livestreams. They can tag products from Nykaa and Purplle, along with Flipkart and Myntra, in their videos. Creators will have the flexibility to tag products, both in existing and new videos, and pinning them during livestreams.
Creators will earn a commission on each sale, calculated based on the product price excluding delivery fees. For now, 100 percent of the commission goes to creators, with YouTube not taking a cut. The company has plans to add more partners to the affiliate programme in the future.
How is AI changing YouTube Shopping?
YouTube said it has introduced an AI-powered system to automatically display the product tag at the exact moment they are mentioned in a video, in a bid to capture the viewer interest when it is at its peak. Later this year, the company will also begin testing the ability to automatically identify and tag all eligible products mentioned in videos.
"By empowering our creators with new tools, offering new engaging formats to our viewers and deepening and forging new partnerships with top merchants, we are cementing YouTubes role as the leading platform for the next generation of shopping experiences," Soni said.
Gunjan Soni's e-commerce experience
Soni, who took charge of YouTube’s India operations in April, comes with a strong background in online commerce, having served for six years in Singapore as Group CEO of Zalora, a prominent Asian fashion and lifestyle e-commerce retailer.
She also spent three years at Flipkart-owned online fashion platform Myntra, where she held multiple roles, first as Chief Marketing Officer and later as Head of Jabong.
Why is India important for YouTube?
India is YouTube's largest market with over half a billion users, and is seen as a crucial region for the platform's future growth. Over 100 million channels have uploaded content in India over the last year, and more than 15,000 of those channels have over one million subscribers, the company said.
In May, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan had announced an investment of Rs 850 crore over the next two years to further accelerate the growth of India's burgeoning creator economy. He also said that the Google-owned platform has paid over Rs 21,000 crore to Indian creators, artists, and media companies in the last three years.
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