 I don't want to panic you and I really don't want this to come off as click bait but this is really weird. Did YouTube just completely end affiliate marketing on the YouTube platform? I saw this today. It was a really tiny announcement on a video on the Creator Insider channel, which is where YouTube tends to make announcements to creators. It's 15 seconds long and about two minutes into their newsflash video that came out today. And finally, we're expanding on an experiment that detects products in your content or related products. Now, we've experimented with this in the past and what it does is allow viewers to decide what to watch next and what to do next. That's all. That is all it said, but look at the screen grab. Can you see it? What it looks like is that under the video, YouTube or Google will serve adverts, direct shopping adverts to the products that appear in the video and it looks like those adverts. They kind of look like the adverts on the Google Shopping tab. So does this mean that YouTube is completely wiping out making money on YouTube by using affiliate marketing? Isn't this like really massive? I mean, people make like six figure sums a year from Amazon Associates. Is this a whole industry on YouTube that's being wiped out? And is it me? Or is there so much to pull apart in this 15 second clip, especially if you make money from affiliate marketing? Let's take another look at the screen grab. It looks like this feature is called Watch and Shop. And sorry, it looks so blurry. This is how it looks on the official YouTube video. And from this, it looks like to me that Google will offer ads underneath our videos to the products that it can see in our videos. We already know that things like Google Cloud Vision can completely interpret images and YouTube analyzes our videos frame by frame for all of this metadata. So the idea is if it detects a product, it can directly take the viewer to a place to buy the product straight from our videos. So here's the problem and why I think this is absolutely huge. If you and I make money from affiliate marketing, here's how it works at the moment. I make a video where I talk about the microphone, like say this microphone here, and I make that video last about six minutes. Then down in the description, there are these links here that link to the products. In this case, they link to Amazon. And if you click on the links there and buy the product or other products, I make a commission on that link. But look at this. And I know it's blurry, I'm sorry, but this lovely visual box will now automatically appear to whisk your purchase after you've done all that work. The buyer is whisked away and can buy it straight from that Google ad. So does this mean that Google earns all the money from that sale? And I know I'm racing ahead, but there are probably a few other things we need to pull apart from this 15 second clip. The first thing is that we're in 2021 and this is an experiment. And finally, we're expanding on an experiment. So it might very well come and go, but I've got a feeling that if it makes money for YouTube, it's not going to go. I think it's just going to come and not go. The second thing is that it's currently only going to be in the United States. This is going to apply to US viewers only for now. So that's interesting for non US affiliate marketing YouTubers like me. By the way, this is how much I earn from Amazon affiliate marketing. I made a whole video about how much I make in a month. The link is in the description and on screen now. It is a really tough place to make money. I guess the biggest takeaway from the announcement is this. So now we've experimented with this in the past, and what it does is allow viewers to decide what to watch next and what to do next. Yeah, the viewers, as you know, YouTube will always decide what is best for the viewer, not the creator or the affiliate marketer. But the viewers, it's always been this way. By the way, hello, I'm Neil Mossy. I'm a development producer helping high achieving creators and performers just like you to get ideas out into the world here on YouTube to make people happier. I'm wondering, could this be absolutely devastating for someone who earns money from unboxing or reviewing products? But as a viewer and YouTube is all about the viewer experience, this could be absolutely fantastic because currently it's a really ugly experience wading through links like this. Instead of really nice, shiny, if a bit blurry picture, probably a bit better than this one, a bit less blurry. But you get the gist, right? But for YouTube, this could be great because we'll now have stores competing for that space underneath our videos instead of all that traffic going to to one online store. Now, you've probably had exactly the same thoughts, the same coaching thought that I've had, which is, what if YouTube were to actually share that revenue? It gets from the sales of products underneath creators videos with the YouTube creator. And so I left that question or suggestion or just out and out begging in the comments of that creator inside a video. But then I found out that there was this article from Bloomberg in October 2020. This article explains that it's an experiment and claims that the YouTube person said creators will have control over the products that are displayed. Kitching, I don't know if I've got the right sound effect for that. That's better. The link to that article is in the description below. But let's take a look at the clip one more time. And finally, we're expanding on an experiment that detects products in your content. So what do you think? Leave a comment below. Is what you can see here, I'm treading in all sorts, is what you can see here going to affect you financially? Do you think? And on screen now is a link to that video, which could either be really exciting news or absolutely devastating. So on the other side, I've put another video just to cheer you up. Thanks for watching.