YouTube, Coupang offer Shopping affiliate program in Korea

YouTube has started offering its Shopping affiliate program in South Korea in partnership with the country’s No. 1 e-commerce platform company Coupang Inc. to enable its creators to earn more from their content.

The world’s biggest free online video-sharing platform owned by Google LLC. announced on Wednesday that a day before, it started offering Korean creators the YouTube Shopping affiliate program.

The new feature allows creators to tag products offered on affiliated shopping sites or brands in their videos and earn commissions if viewers click the tags and buy the tagged products.

This is an additional shopping feature to YouTube Shopping, which has been widely used by creators worldwide to make profits from their content.

To enable Korean creators to use the new shopping feature, YouTube has joined hands with Coupang, and it plans to expand its partnership with others later.

The video-sharing platform operator first offered the Shopping affiliate program in the US in June last year, and Korea is the second country where creators can use the program.

Eligible creators can introduce various brands’ products sold by Coupang by tagging them in their videos.

YouTube became the most used platform by Koreans after beating KakaoTalk, Korea’s top mobile messenger app operated by Kakao Corp., in December last year.

Its growing popularity was largely attributed to the launch of YouTube Shorts in July 2021.

YouTube also plans to offer a special shopping feature that allows Korean shopping creators to build their online storefront on YouTube later this month, in what would be the world’s first of its kind.  

YouTube said it has developed the servicel with Cafe24 Corp., a Korean e-commerce platform providing merchants software and business services such as marketing and logistics support to start their online stores.

YouTube said people watched over 30 billion hours of shopping-related videos on YouTube in 2023, and there was a 25% increase in watch time for videos that help people shop on YouTube.

Write to Ju-Hyun Lee at deep@hankyung.com
Sookyung Seo edited this article.