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YouTube continues to innovate. A few days after announcing the launch of a new feature allowing users to view content directly from Twitter, the platform has officially launched its “Detected Product Lists”. In a blog post dated 22 March, the social media platform announced the implementation of an intelligent system that would detect products featured in a video and list them.
In its post, in which the platform explains that it is “experimenting with a new feature that displays a list of products detected in certain videos, as well as related products,” it also specifies that this feature “will appear between recommended videos for people scrolling below the video player. As shown in the mock-up below, users may be able to view a list of products featured in the video, automatically detected by YouTube. This would provide them with additional information about the products in question, as well as related content.
Mockup of what the “List of detected products” might look like. Source: Searchengineleand
Although this feature is currently only available in beta for certain North American users, YouTube will be keen to analyse the initial results. In their post, representatives from the social media platform stated that the aim was to “help people explore more videos and information about these products on YouTube.” ” In short, thanks to this intelligent system, the platform should push its users towards other channels and content featuring products that are relatively similar to those mentioned in the video they are watching. At first glance, this appears to be an enhancement of the content recommendation tool already in place. However, in addition to encouraging its users to stay on the platform to watch more and more videos, YouTube also seems to be opening up to a particularly lucrative market.
For many years now, YouTube, like Instagram, has been a platform conducive to product placement. However, while content creators have become accustomed to negotiating with brands to increase their visibility, social media does not currently derive any direct benefit from these commercial operations. With its newly announced list of detected products, we can assume that YouTube also plans to facilitate the purchase of these products through external links that would redirect its users to shops selling the items detected by its software. According to 9to5google.com, tests involving a similar feature, aimed at sharing links to online shops offering automatically detected products, had already been carried out on a very small scale during 2020.
The announcement of lists of detected products, with the aim of “helping people explore more videos and information about these products on YouTube”, could therefore be a subtle way of starting to exploit this branch of e-commerce, which is potentially very lucrative for the platform.
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Pierre Blarre