YouTube intends to run its affiliate scheme for creators in 35 countries before the end of December, more than twice the 15 it had reached by early August, according to a creator briefing the company posted on September 23, 2026, the day of its annual Made on YouTube event.

In Short

YouTube held its yearly product event on September 23, 2026 and posted a long list of new tools for creators, from AI video editing to more ways of making money from products shown in videos. It matters to brands and agencies because several of the changes alter how advertisers find creators, pay them and put ad budgets behind their videos. Most of the features arrive in stages between now and 2027, and what you get depends on the country you are in and the feature in question.

What the briefing contains

The document is a forum post on the YouTube Help Community, signed by JJ of TeamYouTube and marked on the page as written by a Google employee. It describes itself as a creator-specific deep dive into a subset of the more than 30 product changes YouTube presented that day. In its opening, the company said it had "shared our vision for what's next for both creators and viewers across discovery, fandom, creation, and business." The rest is organised under three headings - creation formats, tools to manage and protect a channel, and ways to grow and monetise - followed by a short set of questions and answers on timing.

Four companion posts on the YouTube Official Blog, published at 14:30 UTC the same day, fill in detail that the forum version omits. Neal Mohan, YouTube's chief executive, wrote the overview, in which he put daily uploads at more than 20 million videos. Aparna Pappu, a YouTube vice president, covered creation tools. Amjad Hanif, vice president of creator products, and Travis Katz, general manager and vice president for shopping, covered monetisation. Barbara Macdonald, who leads product management for YouTube Live, covered streaming. Where this article relies on those posts rather than the forum briefing, it says so.

Rollout is staggered. According to the briefing, some updates were due immediately or by the end of September, while experimental features such as live auto-dubbing begin as small pilot programmes. "This phased approach allows us to test, gather your feedback, and make adjustments before wider availability," the post said. It also stated that the tools are "completely optional and built to assist you throughout production and channel management," and promised further deep dives on the same forum over the coming months.

A wider map for affiliate income

The figure with the most direct commercial weight is the country count for the YouTube Shopping affiliate program. According to the briefing, the programme will be present in 35 countries by the close of 2026. The Hanif and Katz post uses the same number.

The trajectory explains why that matters. On March 27, 2026, YouTube tied affiliate eligibility to Partner Program membership and cut the entry floor to as few as 500 subscribers, at which point the programme operated in 12 countries. A partnership with Mercado Libre took it into Mexico and Argentina on June 18, bringing the total to 14. On August 6, the United Kingdom became the 15th market, with Wayfair, Currys, Debenhams, Boots, M&S and Etsy as launch merchants. Reaching 35 by December would more than double the count recorded in August. Neither the forum post nor the blog names the countries that would make up the difference.

The mechanics rest on product tagging: a creator attaches a catalogue item to a video, livestream or Short, the platform renders it with live price and availability, and a completed sale pays a commission set by the retailer. YouTube's companion post adds scale figures that are the company's own and unaudited. More than 1.3 million creators now take part in the affiliate programme, it said, and gross merchandise volume has grown 13 times over two years. It also cited a study of its own finding that shopping tags generate more than twice as many clicks as links placed in a video description, without publishing the method. For comparison, at the 2025 edition of the event YouTube put enrolment at more than 500,000 creators as of July 2025. The two numbers use similar wording, and the March eligibility change sits between them.

Amazon, cross-border tags and Affiliate Campaigns

Three further commerce changes appear in the briefing. The first extends YouTube's Amazon arrangement. On August 27, 2026, YouTube published the news that creators could tag Amazon products in the United States, with commissions locked monthly and paid two AdSense cycles later. The forum post describes the partnership as starting in India and Brazil, with more markets coming this fall. The Hanif and Katz post gives a looser schedule, placing India and Brazil a few weeks out and further countries before the end of the year. The two documents therefore differ on whether the Indian and Brazilian rollouts had begun by September 23 or were still pending.

The second change concerns viewers abroad. According to the briefing, product tags will be localised automatically for international viewers, so that a creator earns commission when a fan in another country buys an item. YouTube's documentation for Amazon tagging in the US already provided for routing international purchases to a matched local merchant or to an Amazon storefront in the viewer's market. The forum post does not say how commission rates are set when the localised merchant differs from the one the creator tagged.

The third is Affiliate Campaigns. According to the briefing, brands will be able to discover creators and send targeted invitations offering flat fees plus exclusive commission rates. The blog describes the same product as letting retailers and brands offer incentives, such as exclusive commission rates or bonuses, when creators feature specific products. A flat fee is the structure of a sponsorship; a commission is the structure of affiliate marketing. The forum wording combines the two in a single invitation, while the blog wording does not mention flat fees at all.

Viewers get a shopping layer as well. The briefing says Ask YouTube, the conversational assistant, will let viewers on mobile, desktop and television ask about products tagged in a creator's video. Brands had already been offered a paid route to the same videos: at Brandcast on May 13, 2026, YouTube presented Affiliate Partnerships Boost, which lets brands amplify creator content their products already appear in.

Brand deals move further into Studio

"YouTube Creator Partnerships is now available across 20 countries, helping brands discover your channel," the briefing said. YouTube merged BrandConnect and the Creator Partnerships Hub into a single product on March 24, 2026, available at that point in the United States, India, Indonesia, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia and Canada.

A count that does not match

The figure of 20 sits awkwardly against earlier documentation. When YouTube confirmed in July that Creator Partnerships had reached Germany, Japan and Singapore, among others, the Help Center page, localised for Germany at the time of review, listed 24 countries and regions. The Hanif and Katz post also says 20. Neither document lists the countries, and neither explains the gap of four. It may reflect a difference in how countries and regions are counted, a change in availability, or an error in one of the sources. YouTube has not said which.

A code for paid media

Two changes in this section touch agency workflows. According to the briefing, Ask Studio will soon help creators draft custom proposals and respond to brand briefs "in seconds." The blog adds that it will build proactive pitches and suggest how to tailor a creator's Media Kit to a brand's goals.

The second is a one-click code. Creators can now share it with brand partners, according to the briefing, so that the brand can view the video's performance and run paid media behind it using creator partnerships boost. That product is a form of paid amplification: an organic creator video, once the creator grants access, becomes an ad asset in the brand's own Google campaigns. In April, Google set out the existing route in detail. An advertiser opens Data Manager in Google Ads, chooses the option to link a creator video, enters the URL and waits for the creator to accept in YouTube Studio, or pastes the URL straight into a Demand Gen asset picker. Creators could already start the process themselves: YouTube's Help Center described a creator-initiated request during upload alongside a brand-initiated request after publication. The code adds a shareable route once a partnership video is live. The briefing does not say whether the existing routes change as a result.

Google has attached its own performance claim to the product. Its internal data for January 2025 to January 2026 found that creator partnerships boost on Demand Gen campaigns delivered an average 20% increase in conversion lift. That figure is vendor-supplied and has not been independently replicated.

Segments and agency money

The monetisation blog lists two items absent from the forum post. YouTube said it is still testing dynamic brand segments, which let a creator insert a sponsor segment into up to 20 long-form videos at once, target it by region and attach a shelf with a call-to-action button. That places a sponsor message inside back-catalogue videos after publication. On September 3, YouTube set out a refreshed disclosure label and automated detection of undeclared branded content, the detection due in the coming months. The Made on YouTube materials do not explain how a paid-promotion declaration applies to a segment added to a video long after it went live.

The same post says YouTube is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to agency partners for high-impact collaborations. It gives no total, no timeframe and no criteria.

Shorts series and posts on the television

Episodes and a series button

The first feature in the briefing is Shorts series. Creators can organise Shorts into shows and upload custom thumbnails for them in YouTube Studio on desktop. Viewers in the Shorts feed see a "watch series" button that takes them into a show feed, where episodes play in order on mobile, desktop and television. The briefing describes the feature as rolling out globally now. Mohan's post frames it around seasons and episodes, and names microdramas as a use case.

The format YouTube is chasing has measurable pull. Data from Adjust and Sensor Tower put ReelShort users in the United States at 35.7 minutes of daily viewing in 2025, against 24.8 minutes for Netflix mobile users. Television is the other half of the pitch: YouTube disclosed in June that Shorts are watched for 2 billion hours a month on TV screens. Custom thumbnails for Shorts are themselves recent. They began rolling out on July 25, 2026, limited to Partner Program channels, confined to desktop and without A/B testing. The briefing does not say whether series thumbnails carry the same Partner Program restriction, or how ads are loaded inside a show feed compared with the ordinary swipe feed.

Image posts in the Shorts feed and on TV

Image posts are moving onto two new surfaces. According to the briefing, viewers browsing on mobile now receive image posts and carousels in the Shorts feed, available on iPhone and Android. On television, the post first says viewers "can now access" a creator's image posts on the channel page, then, in the same paragraph, says posts on living-room screens are rolling out in the coming months on YouTube's television app in select markets. The two statements cannot both describe current availability. The markets are not named.

Conversational editing, from early 2027

Conversational editing is the furthest-off creation feature. A creator selects photos and videos, starts a first draft from a suggested or custom prompt, and then receives suggestions in a chat window, such as trimming quiet pauses, reordering clips for pacing or adding on-screen text. Manual editing remains available throughout. It will roll out globally on Android and iPhone from early 2027, according to the briefing, in both Shorts and the YouTube Create app.

The Pappu post says the assistant integrates Gemini. It traces the work to Gemini Omni's arrival in Shorts at Google I/O in May, which the company said was used by hundreds of thousands of channels a day in August 2026, and cites a YouTube report finding that 72% of US video posters aged 14 to 44 had used AI to create or edit in the previous year. An earlier automated tool, Edit with AI, assembles raw camera-roll footage into edited Shorts and has operated in 15 countries since November 2025. The new feature differs in being iterative: the draft is revised through dialogue rather than delivered once.

Studio: feedback before publishing, testing after

According to the briefing, "YouTube Studio is evolving into a strategic partner that handles time-consuming production workflows." The updates reach mobile and desktop from now through 2027 and fall into four parts.

Ask Studio will give feedback on the title, structure, script and pacing of a draft before it is published, arriving soon on iPhone and Android. It will also identify older videos that might find a new audience and revamp and test their thumbnails; the Pappu post says this can run in the background. New Insights and Research destinations cover channel performance and surface outlier videos. And a video A/B testing feature will compare different cuts of the same video. The Pappu post specifies up to three cuts, with the aim of finding which opening hook performs best, and describes it as coming soon.

Thumbnails change too. Soon, according to the briefing, creators will be able to upload up to three thumbnails per video, and YouTube will show the best one to different audiences. The blog calls this dynamic thumbnails. It is a departure from the existing test design. When YouTube extended A/B testing from thumbnails to titles in December 2025, a test ran to a single winner decided by watch time, and editing a title or thumbnail mid-test cancelled it. Dynamic thumbnails instead assign different images to different audience segments, which the briefing does not define. For a brand reviewing a sponsored video, the practical effect is that the packaging a given viewer saw may vary.

YouTube's usage figures for testing do not line up neatly. At the 2025 event, the company said thumbnail testing had been used more than 15 million times since 2023. The Pappu post now says creators have run more than 40 million experiments on titles and thumbnails since the feature's official release in 2024. The start year differs by one, and a count of uses may not measure the same thing as a count of experiments.

Moderation and likeness protection

Comments held, not deleted

Personalised comment moderation is opt-in. According to the briefing, it learns from a creator's manual removal history and holds similar incoming comments in the Held tab for review, with a seven-day summary. "Comments are never deleted automatically without your consent, giving you full control to approve or remove them," the post said. It will run as an experiment on desktop in YouTube Studio later this year. The feature adds to AI-powered comment search, which reached Studio on June 26, 2026 with semantic search by topic and a function for finding similar comments.

Voice joins face

The briefing extends likeness detection in two directions. "But likeness is not just the way you look; it's also the way you sound," it said. Later this year, YouTube will integrate speaking voice detection with facial detection, which it says will improve match accuracy and lay the groundwork for broader voice protections. Likeness detection will also move into the YouTube mobile app, so creators can enrol, review matches and act on them from a phone.

The tool has widened steadily. It reached Partner Program creators during 2024 and 2025, extended to a pilot group of government officials, journalists and political candidates on March 10, 2026, and opened to all eligible creators aged 18 and over in May. Enrolment currently requires a government-issued ID and a short selfie video, which serves as the reference sample. The briefing does not say how a voice sample would be enrolled. In August, YouTube added four dispute categories for likeness claims; unlike copyright claims, those offer no revenue-sharing option. The regulatory backdrop has also moved, with Article 50 of the EU AI Act, carrying labelling duties for deepfakes, applicable since August 2, 2026.

One claim in the Pappu post invites scrutiny. It says billions of channels are eligible to sign up for automated deepfake detection. No breakdown accompanies the figure. For scale, YouTube has said its Partner Program counts around 3 million channels.

Live: reactions, showdowns and dubbing

The briefing groups three live-streaming tests. Real-time auto-dubbing will be piloted in English and Spanish early next year. Live showdowns turn fan funding into split-screen co-streams. And Watch With, previously limited to live content, will expand to all eligible videos.

The Macdonald post supplies the numbers and the economics. In August 2026, more than 600 million logged-in viewers watched live content each day on average, archives included, according to YouTube, and more than 40% of live watch time comes from viewers outside a creator's home country. Watch With began as a pilot for premium tentpole streams and was tested between creators' livestreams earlier this year; the expansion to eligible long-form videos starts rolling out later this year. On revenue, the post is explicit. Reacting creators keep the live ad revenue and fan funding they earn, while the original creator receives attribution, added view credit in YouTube Studio and control over which videos can be reacted to. The blog does not define view credit, a gap that matters now that YouTube counts a view from the first frame across all formats since August 24.

Showdowns arrive in 2027, according to the blog. Viewers push a creator's on-screen score with chats, gifts and Super Chats, which ties the format directly to paid fan interaction. Live creator matchmaking, which pairs streamers with similar creators they may not know, is due in early 2027.

Live dubbing extends a system already in wide use. YouTube said in May that auto dubbing supported 27 languages and reached more than 6 million viewers a day watching at least 10 minutes of dubbed content, based on December 2025 data. The recorded version has drawn complaints, including in 2025 over the absence of a global viewer opt-out. The live pilot starts with two languages.

Why the marketing community is watching

The spending base explains the attention. IAB put US creator advertising spend at $44 billion for 2026, against $13.9 billion in 2021, figures that are trade association projections rather than audited totals. Much of the September 23 material concerns the plumbing through which that money moves: who can be discovered, who can be paid by commission, and how a brand gets permission to spend media against a creator's video.

The eligibility structure matters as much as the features. From February 1, 2027, new applicants for ad revenue sharing will need 8,000 qualified watch hours or 20 million qualified Shorts views, double the previous bars. The entry requirements for fan funding, Creator Partnerships and YouTube Shopping stay at 500 subscribers with 3,000 watch hours or 3 million Shorts views. Most of the monetisation tools in the briefing sit on the side of that divide where access has not tightened. Does that shift smaller channels towards commerce and sponsorship income rather than a share of ad revenue? The documents do not frame it that way, but the eligibility rules place most of the new earning tools within reach of channels that will not meet the 2027 bars.

The replies under the forum post show where creator attention lay. The five threads visible in the captured page consist mostly of thanks and individual support requests: two asked when a channel would be monetised, one asked why a channel was receiving no views, and one sought a further review of a channel terminated on May 20, 2026. None engaged with the commerce or brand tools.

The comparison with 2025 is also instructive. At that year's event, on September 16, YouTube cited $100 billion paid to creators over four years and 3 million Partner Program channels. The 2026 creator briefing contains no updated payout figure.

Asked in its own FAQ whether a complete list of the updates exists, the briefing answers with a single "Yes!" and a link to the Made on YouTube site. Dates for most of the items above remain, in YouTube's words, "later this year," "soon" or 2027.

Timeline

Summary

Who: YouTube, through a creator briefing signed by JJ of TeamYouTube on the YouTube Help Community forum, with companion posts by chief executive Neal Mohan, vice president Aparna Pappu, vice president of creator products Amjad Hanif, shopping general manager Travis Katz and YouTube Live product lead Barbara Macdonald. The changes affect creators, brands, agencies and retailers that sell through creator content.

What: More than 30 product changes presented at Made on YouTube 2026, including an affiliate programme targeted at 35 countries, Amazon tagging in India and Brazil, Affiliate Campaigns, Creator Partnerships in 20 countries, a one-click code for creator partnerships boost, Shorts series, image posts in the Shorts feed, Ask Studio feedback, video A/B testing, dynamic thumbnails, opt-in comment moderation, voice-based likeness detection and live-streaming tests.

When: The briefing and blog posts were published on September 23, 2026. Some features were live that day; others follow later in 2026, in early 2027 or during 2027.

Where: Rollouts vary. Shorts series is global; image posts in the Shorts feed are on iPhone and Android; television posts reach select markets; Creator Partnerships covers 20 countries by YouTube's current count; live dubbing starts in English and Spanish.

Why: YouTube is building commerce, sponsorship and paid amplification into the tools creators already use, at a time when the entry thresholds for ad revenue sharing are about to double. For marketers, the changes alter how creators are discovered, how they are paid and how media spend reaches their videos, while several source figures, including the Creator Partnerships country count, do not match earlier documentation.