YouTube expands Shopping Affiliate programme, adds Nykaa, Purplle as merchants

New Delhi: Video streaming platform YouTube on Friday said it is expanding its Shopping Affiliate programme, which enables creators to tag products in their videos for direct viewer purchases, following a 250 per cent year-on-year rise in shopping-related watch time on the platform.

The expansion onboards new merchants, Nykaa and Purplle, to widen the range of shoppable products, targeting the beauty and lifestyle segments. Creators enrolled in the programme will be able to monetise their content by tagging products from both partners, in addition to Flipkart and Myntra, YouTube said in a statement.

"With shopping-related watch time growing more than 250 per cent year over year, YouTube is scaling the YouTube Shopping affiliate program. This expansion is built on a highly engaged audience base: Over 200 million logged-in users in India had shopping-related searches on YouTube," it said.

The platform is also launching an AI-driven system that automatically shows product tags precisely when they are mentioned in videos to maximise viewer engagement. Later this year, it will begin testing a feature to detect and tag all eligible products referenced in videos automatically.

The company said it will introduce a flexible format allowing creators to insert and replace brand sponsorship segments to maximise earnings. The new Creator Partnerships Hub in Google Ads will help brands find creators and use authentic content in marketing campaigns through Partnership Ads, it said.

Earlier this year, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said the platform plans to invest over Rs 850 crore to accelerate the growth of Indian creators, artists, and media companies. Terming India a "creator nation", he said that over 100 million channels from the country uploaded content onto YouTube in the last year, with more than 15,000 of those channels having over 1 million subscribers.

"In the last three years alone, we've paid more than Rs 21,000 crore to creators, artists, and media companies all across India," Mohan said.