Your next customer is going to ask YouTube, not Google

I almost didn't write this one.

Platform announcement recaps are the most boring genre in marketing. There were about forty of them last week, all listing the same features in the same order, and I really didn't want to write the forty-first.

But something from Made on YouTube kept bugging me all weekend. And it wasn't what everyone else led with.

Quick honesty first: I'm a scanner. I go deep on something, get obsessed, then move on to the next thing (master of none, truly). So this is me thinking out loud after a weekend of poking at it, not me handing down the law from some YouTube expert throne.

Ok. Here's what happened.

In early September, Amazon plugged its entire catalog into YouTube's Shopping affiliate program. Then on September 23, YouTube confirmed the affiliate program will be in 35 countries by the end of this year. Both got tons of coverage.

The one that got almost none is called Ask YouTube.

Three things, three weeks, and only the last one kept me up. Save this one for your next planning meeting.

Wait, what is Ask YouTube?

On the surface, boring. It lets someone ask questions about a product while they're watching a video, then keep asking follow-ups without leaving the page. Cool, a chatbot, we've all seen one.

But read the next bit with your brand hat on. When someone searches for reviews of a specific product, YouTube can now hand back a comparison table. Built from product attributes. Sorted by what it reckons that particular person cares about.

Straight from YouTube's announcement. Look at the right-hand panel. That's a product comparison being built out of somebody's review video.

So YouTube is generating comparison tables, and the raw material is creator review videos.

For years, if you wanted to show up when someone was deciding what to buy, you wrote a page and prayed Google ranked it. Now there's a second thing doing that job, and it isn't reading your website at all. It's reading what creators said about you on camera.

No video about you, no place in the table.

Not ranked badly. Just not there. And you'd never know it was happening, because there's no report anywhere for "products the AI didn't mention".

(I keep going back and forth on how much this matters, honestly. Ask me again in six months.)

The numbers are ridiculous

110 MILLION. Per day. I had to read it three times.

People watch around 110 million hours of shopping content on YouTube. Not per year. Per day. YouTube shared that when it announced the Amazon deal, along with its shopping business growing about thirteen times over in two years.

And the number of creators who can earn from recommending stuff just jumped to 35 countries with Amazon's catalog behind it. Someone making videos in Barcelona or São Paulo who couldn't really monetize recommendations last year, can now.

There's a smaller detail buried in the same announcement that I think is sneakily the best bit. Product tags now update themselves to show local offers based on where the viewer is watching from. One video, one creator, and someone in Spain and someone in Brazil each get an offer that actually works where they live. The creator does absolutely nothing.

The paragraph everyone quoted the first half of. The localized product tags bit at the end is what I'd circle. Source: blog.youtube.

So: more creators with a real reason to make review videos, pointed at people already watching 110 million hours a day, feeding a system that turns those videos into buying advice.

Are you in that or not?

What I'd actually do with no budget

The standard advice here is "partner with an influencer agency", which is beautifully useless when your marketing team is you and a freelancer who does four hours a week. So, the version for the rest of us.

Go look yourself up. Search your product name on YouTube. Then your category plus "review". Then your closest competitor. If creators are reviewing your category and somehow not you, that gap is both your problem and your cheapest fix. And if somebody already reviewed you and you never noticed, congrats, you have a relationship you haven't used 😅

Sort out the affiliate setup. These creators are getting paid on commission more than flat fees now, which is good news when you're small, because you pay for results. Just make sure your products are actually available through whichever affiliate partners serve your market, at a rate that isn't insulting. Someone choosing between two similar products will pick the one that pays them. Obviously.

Affiliate Boost is worth a look (but it's not new). Half the coverage last week called this a fresh announcement. It isn't, it came out of YouTube's Brandcast back in May. The mechanic: a creator switches it on in YouTube Studio, brands can then run ads using that creator's video, and the creator earns commission on the sales. Which I like for small brands, because you can put money behind a review that already exists and already works, instead of paying for a new one and hoping.

Email people smaller than feels right. The creator with 15,000 subscribers in one very specific niche is who's making this content. They're also the one who'll write back.

Give them facts, not a script. Scripts make videos worse and decent creators will say no anyway. But if the real advantage of your product is that it lasts twice as long as the cheap one, and no creator has ever said that sentence out loud on camera, then this whole system has no idea. Hand people the fact. Let them say it however they want.

I'll be honest, I'm a bit suspicious of my own excitement here, because "AI is changing product discovery" is exactly the sentence I roll my eyes at when someone else writes it. Custom Feeds are US-only for now. Plenty of announced features quietly die.

But the direction feels right. Platforms have spent two years moving discovery away from who you follow and toward what you're into, and this is that same move pointed at shopping. The brands that do well won't be the ones with the biggest budgets. They'll be the ones who worked out early that being talked about by the right fifteen people IS the distribution strategy, and started emailing those fifteen people while it was still cheap.

That bit you can start this week.

Now over to you.

Have you ever actually checked whether creators are reviewing your category without you? What did you find? And is anyone already using Affiliate Boost, because I'd love to know whether it's any good in practice.

Rosa x

p.s. I went looking for the original source on every number in here, which is how I found out the Affiliate Boost thing was five months old. Half of last week's coverage just copied each other. Always click through, lads.