YouTube this month plans to launch its first official shopping
channel for live commerce, in South Korea.
The move to create the first official channel, first reported by the Yonhap news agency on Wednesday, will operate in the Korean language and will
begin as a 90-day project.
Initially, it will provide a live-commerce platform to companies and plans to livestream shopping content from about 30 brands, the media agency reported, citing
people familiar with the project.
YouTube, as well as Google continually experiment with a variety of features.
"YouTube is committed to building an engaging, informative and
entertaining shopping experience for all users, including in Korea,” a YouTube Korea official told Yonhap News Agency, without providing details. “To do this, we may experiment with a
variety of YouTube Shopping features from time to time as we continue to work hard to optimize and deliver the best experience for our users."
YouTube announced a new direct response shoppable ad format for YouTube video ads in 2020, by adding browsable
product images beneath the ad to drive traffic directly to brands’ product pages.
Alphabet, Google’s and YouTube’s parent company, in its 2022 annual report explained that
consumers shop more than a billion times a day across the company’s platforms.
During Alphabet's fourth quarter 2022 earnings call, Philipp Schindler, chief business officer at Google,
said services on YouTube will become more "shoppable," as part of efforts to foster revenue streams for content creators and advertisers, the Yonhap News Agency reported.