YouTube Adds Affiliate Links To Its Videos; Amazon and iTunes Downloads

(PaidContent.org)  This story was written by Rafat Ali.

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And what took so long? YouTube has added a no-brainer: affiliate download links from Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) and iTunes for music and other kinds of downloads, from any specific video on its site. For instance, if a user is viewing a video of music artist, then links from Amazon and iTunes will appear on the page for song download (see an example here. Another example is video game download for Spore, by EA).

The Google-owned company is touting this as a larger e-commerce platform play, and will add music, movies, TV shows, concert tickets and other products down the line. For now on the music side this has only been enabled for EMI and Universal Music artists...hard to see why others would resist. Also this only works in U.S. as YouTube content partners who are using its content ID system (for managing and anti-piracy) can also enable these links on user-generated content.

On its own blog, it declares, rather grandly: "Our vision is to help partners across all industriesfrom music, to film, to print, to TVoffer useful and relevant products to a large, yet targeted audience, and generate additional revenue from their content on YouTube beyond the advertising we serve against their videos." Yep, like the advertising part is working swimmingly well till now


By Rafat Ali