Just ahead of India's local festive season, YouTube launched its affiliate program in the country, allowing uploaders to tag products in their videos and then earn referrals through these products. The company is partnering with Flipkart, the e-commerce service owned by Walmart, and Myntra, a leading fashion retailer, to open up their product catalogs to uploaders.
Eligibility for joining the affiliate program includes a channel having a listing in the partner program and having at least 10,000 subscribers on your channel.

In addition to this, YouTube is already accepting some creators in India to sell their own merchandise right through their channels. Now creators could tag products they might talk about in videos, shorts, and livestreams.

Over the past two years, YouTube has rolled out several programs to the United States connected with shopping and affiliate links. It began testing affiliate links in Shorts in 2022 and this year had already launched a feature to let creators tag products in bulk across their video library so they can monetize older videos.

With the intervention of YouTube, Shopify was further expanded in August for helping creators gain access to thousands of more products. It also established new features, including letting creators make shopping collections and a new affiliate hub.

"By making product discovery seamless across every format-from long-form videos and Shorts to live streams-and accessible on any device-mobile, web, and Connected TVs-we're amplifying the impact creators can have and making it easier than ever for them to connect with their audiences," the company said in a blog post.

The company further noted that since the launch of Shorts in India in 2020, users have viewed them over a trillion times. "India has more than 110,000 channels and more than 100,000 subscribers," said the company.

Praanesh Bhuvaneswar of influencer marketing platform Quroz said this was a step forward for creators: "They should totally avoid overselling products.".

"It's evident that entertainment places are going to be stores, and this is a landmark event in the trend for Indian consumers and brands. This is great news for creators – especially of a smaller size – who often get less attention from mainstream brands looking to partner, he told TechCrunch via email.

YouTube also has an active affiliate program for creators in South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam.