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is a news writer focused on creative industries, computing, and internet culture. Jess started her career at TechRadar, covering news and hardware reviews.
YouTube announced a batch of upcoming features during its “Made on” event today, some of which are focused on giving creators new ways to make money on the platform. You can check out more information about upcoming updates for livestreaming and AI features in our other posts, but there are a few other monetization changes coming in the future that could give viewers new ways to find products online and switch up the ads you see linked out by creators.
- An AI tagging feature that can automatically find and tag eligible products mentioned in videos based on images, voiceover, and information input by the video creator will start rolling out to “eligible US creators over the next year,” according to YouTube.
- The ability to link out to a brand’s website on YouTube Shorts will “begin testing later this year and launch broadly next year,” allowing creators to direct viewers to recommended products.
- Support for dynamically inserting brand segments that can be swapped in and out, allowing creators to resell slots to another brand in future instead of having a permanent product ad in long-form videos. YouTube says it will start testing early next year before rolling it out later in 2026.
- An experimental feature will give “top viewers the opportunity to buy exclusive merch” from their favorite creators. This began testing earlier this year, but YouTube doesn’t have any details available about when it’ll be available.
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