The one thing to know this week

In the 12 months to the end of September, AliExpress links were already in the descriptions of 51,945 long-form YouTube videos on 4,051 channels. In the same year, creators said AliExpress sponsored their video only 164 times.

YouTube signed AliExpress as a global shopping affiliate partner on Tuesday, days after announcing bonuses that brands can pay creators who tag their products. To earn that bonus, a creator has to label the video as paid promotion, so we looked at how many of the channels already linking to AliExpress also sell the spoken reads that carry a brand.

Keep reading to find out

what YouTube now asks of a creator before a brand's bonus pays out

which gadget channel with 1.5 million subscribers keeps its affiliate links and its paid reads in separate videos

why Aura Frames puts most of its YouTube reads into the five weeks before Christmas

how a Tesla reveal did more than 100 times CNET's usual views at the same age

Let's get into it.

This week's deep dive

AliExpress Signs On as YouTube Adds Brand-Paid Affiliate Bonuses

The deal. On Tuesday AliExpress and YouTube announced a global affiliate partnership: creators in the US, Brazil, the UK and Germany can now tag AliExpress products in their videos, Shorts and livestreams through YouTube Shopping and earn a commission when viewers buy. Neither company disclosed the commission rate. AliExpress launched on YouTube Shopping in Korea in March, and the announcement says more countries will follow in phases.

“Content and commerce are converging globally.”

Eric Zhang, Vice President, AliExpress, via Tubefilter

The bigger push. When we covered Amazon joining the same program in August, it was US only and the first everything store YouTube had signed. AliExpress is the second, and it launches in four countries at once. Last week's roundup covered YouTube Shopping reaching France; this deal adds a whole marketplace catalog instead of another country. At Made on YouTube in September, YouTube said it would take its affiliate program to 35 countries by the end of the year. By our count it's in about 16 today, and the UK only joined in July and Germany in September, so two of AliExpress's four launch markets are new to the program themselves.

The bonus rules. On Friday, YouTube's Creator Insider channel announced affiliate campaigns in which brands and retailers fund extra incentives on top of the usual commission. According to YouTube Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie, as quoted by Social Media Today, a creator locks in the bonus by tagging the product in the video, checking the box that says the video includes paid promotion, and keeping it public for at least 30 days. YouTube's own video bills the feature as "Affiliate Campaigns with Flat Fees & Bonuses", though it hasn't explained how the flat fees are set.

What changes for brands. That paid-promotion box is the detail to watch. A bonus that requires YouTube's disclosure label, a product tag and 30 days of public life gives the affiliate lane some of a sponsorship's discipline. For brands that already sponsor creators, it's a lane that runs alongside the reads, and the reads still do the work of carrying the brand.

Zooming Out

Tubefilter set the deal next to YouTube's existing arrangements with Amazon and Rakuten, and noted that Chinese brands like Shein and Temu helped spark some of TikTok Shop's big early sales numbers. YouTube wants that commerce volume inside its own tools, where the tag, the disclosure and now the bonus all run through YouTube. Sponsorships are still negotiated between a brand and a creator, and on plenty of channels the two will sit side by side, as the next section shows.

We compared how YouTube Shopping and TikTok Shop work for creators and brands in this deep dive on creator commerce.

The story behind the numbers

From Our Data

AliExpress Was Already All Over YouTube

So we looked at what AliExpress had on YouTube before Tuesday. ThoughtLeaders' data shows its links in the descriptions of 51,945 long-form videos on 4,051 channels in the 12 months to September, more than 200 of those channels with over a million subscribers. Brazil had the most AliExpress-link videos and the US came second. Almost all of the links are AliExpress's own affiliate redirects and short links. — 51,945

videos with AliExpress links — 4,051

channels — 164

spoken AliExpress reads

The spoken side is tiny. In the same 12 months, creators said on camera that AliExpress sponsored their video only 164 times, and 58 of those reads sat on just two small channels, one reviewing cheap watches and one fixing retro consoles. Temu, by comparison, had its links on 14,686 videos, and 353 of those also carried a spoken sponsor line, roughly eight times AliExpress's rate.

Hacktuber, a US gadget channel with 1.5 million subscribers, shows how this looks on one channel. AliExpress links were in 323 of its 353 long-form uploads over the year, in videos like WHY THIS $1 Aliexpress Find is GENIUS?, and we found no spoken AliExpress sponsor read in any of them. The reads it does sell go to JLCPCB, the circuit-board maker: 22 videos, 20 of them carrying YouTube's paid-promotion label, and not one of the 22 has an AliExpress link. The channel kept its affiliate links and its paid sponsorships in separate videos all year.

Why it matters

AliExpress arrives on YouTube Shopping with thousands of channels already linking to it, while only a few dozen read an AliExpress sponsorship on camera all year. For any brand selling into the same gadget, watch and hobby audiences, that gap is the opening: these creators already make shopping videos about products like yours, and almost none of them has been booked by the marketplace they link to. Hacktuber shows they're open to it. It runs AliExpress links on almost every upload and still sells paid reads to JLCPCB.

Links Roundup

Quick hits from across the web

Disney signed Dude Perfect to a company-wide partnership tied to Super Bowl LXI, Star Wars' 50th anniversary and Avengers: Doomsday, so brands that sponsor one of YouTube's biggest sports-comedy channels should expect to share its calendar with Disney next year.

Netflix now expects about $2.7 billion in ad revenue this year instead of $3 billion, and its shareholder letter blames a slower rollout of some ad tools, though co-CEO Greg Peters said on the earnings call that the ad business is still growing more than 80% this year.

Spotify opened paid memberships to podcasters in 34 markets, with creators keeping 90%, and since "fewer ads" is one of the perks hosts can offer, a sponsor's read may soon skip a show's most devoted listeners.

Billion Dollar Boy made its first acquisition, buying the LinkedIn-focused B2B creator agency Creator Authority, a sign that enterprise marketing budgets are starting to reach creators too.

A Wondery survey of 3,000 US podcast fans found that half assume a host didn't really like a brand that shows up once and never again, which is the case for booking in runs that podcast sellers will be quoting all quarter.

Partner message Before you book a channel, check who has been there before you: the free ThoughtLeaders Chrome extension shows the brands that have run sponsored reads on a YouTube channel, and when, right on the channel page.

Creator on the Rise · add to your watch list

Real Civil Engineer

2.9M subscribers • Building and engineering games

Real Civil Engineer builds factories, cities and railways in strategy and simulation games and talks them through like an engineer, with a new video almost every day. Its October 4 upload, This game nearly broke me..., passed 2.9 million views in two weeks, more than 8 times the channel's typical view count at the same age. MANSCAPED has sponsored it in seven separate stretches since 2021, most recently this month, and game publishers like Tinybuild Games and Paradox Interactive keep coming back.

88%

Male

United States

34.3%

United Kingdom

10.8%

Germany

6.3%

Canada

4.3%

Subscribers

2.9M +25% in 2 yrs

Median age

25-34

Projected views at day 30 — 295K

Partner with the channel →

Advertiser Spotlight

Brand Strategies Worth Stealing

Aura Frames Books Two Gift Seasons a Year

Aura Frames sells digital photo frames, which makes it a gift brand, and it buys YouTube like one. Over the past 12 months its sponsorship was read out on camera in 1,137 long-form videos across 294 channels, and 830 of those reads landed in the five weeks before Christmas. A second, smaller flight ran in the three weeks before Mother's Day. Outside those two windows the reads almost stop.

You'd expect a gift brand to sit on lifestyle and home channels. Aura's reads ran on comedy shows, podcasts and car channels: Smosh Pit, SmoshCast, Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast and Cleetus McFarland. It bought wide rather than deep: the ten channels with the most reads carry about a quarter of them, and most of the channels have fewer than 500,000 subscribers. Last year's holiday flight was nearly five times the one a year earlier.

The biggest placements are on Smosh Pit's Reddit stories episodes: two in December, past 4.2 million and 3.2 million views, and one in May, past 3.1 million, where the host pitches the frame for Mother's Day: "So, instead of flowers, go with Aura Frames." Cleetus McFarland opened a December video past 1.4 million with the read at the very first second. Around four in ten read videos carry a link made for that creator, and the holiday discount stepped down from $45 off in late November to $35 in December; the spring offer was $25.

Over two years, Aura came back to 217 of the 574 channels it had time to return to, at least 70 days after its first read there. That's 38%, and it counts only those later comebacks, never several reads inside one flight. Last year's flight was so much bigger than the one before that many of these channels are too fresh to be proven, so Aura isn't yet what we call a guide brand. The steal: let your customers' buying calendar decide when you spend, then spread each flight across many mid-size channels outside your own category.

Guide brands worth studying

Cozy Earth. The bedding and loungewear brand ran spoken reads on 173 channels in the last 12 months, steady all year rather than in flights, with creator-specific codes and links, and over two years it came back to 20% of the channels it had time to return to (77 of 385) at least 70 days later.

BOMBAS. The sock and apparel brand ran spoken reads on 175 channels in the last 12 months, with creator-specific codes and bombas.com links, and over two years it came back to 25% of the channels it had time to return to (92 of 362) at least 70 days later.

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