Creators on YouTube took home twice as much in shopping commissions as they did a year earlier, according to Mary Ellen Coe, the company's chief business officer, in a presentation YouTube published on September 25, 2026 that also put the number of channels signed up to YouTube Shopping above 1.3 million.

In Short

YouTube's business chief said in a video that creators earned twice as much from shopping commissions as a year before, and that more than 1.3 million channels now tag products they talk about. That matters to brands and agencies, because the same talk said YouTube will spend hundreds of millions of dollars over the next couple of years rewarding agencies that bring deals to creators, and will make it easier for brands to pay to boost creator videos. Product tags are also switching to local shops for viewers abroad, so a creator in Los Angeles can earn when someone in London buys. Some of the figures come from automatic captions, do not match YouTube's written posts word for word, and have not been checked by anyone outside the company.

A short segment with new numbers

The video, titled "Brand Deals, YouTube Shopping, & New Ways to Earn - Made On YouTube", was posted to the Creator Insider channel as a joint upload with YouTube Creators on September 25. It runs to under five minutes and carries Coe's remarks from Made on YouTube, the company's annual product event, held in New York two days earlier. By September 27 it had drawn 20,921 views and 64 comments.

Most of the items it covers also appear in a blog post by Amjad Hanif, vice president of creator products, and Travis Katz, general manager and vice president for shopping, published at 14:30 UTC on the day of the event. PPC Land covered that post, a TeamYouTube creator briefing and the rest of the event material on September 24.

The video adds what the written record lacks: a growth rate for commissions paid to creators, a time frame for the agency incentives, a growth figure for brand deals on Shorts, and Germany named among the newest affiliate markets. One caveat applies throughout. The transcript is generated automatically, renders Neal Mohan, YouTube's chief executive, as "Neil", and garbles at least one sentence beyond recovery. Quotations here are used only where its wording is intact.

Commissions and the shopping base

"Over 1.3 million channels are now enrolled in YouTube shopping," Coe said. "It's a big number." She followed it with the figure that the written materials omit: "Creator payouts from commissions have doubled year-over-year."

The model is that of an affiliate: a retailer sets the commission, a creator tags its product in a video, Short or livestream, and money flows only when a viewer clicks through and buys. Coe offered no base, currency, period or total for the growth rate, and the figure has not been independently verified.

The Hanif and Katz post describes the scale differently. It puts the number of creators in the affiliate programme at more than 1.3 million and says GMV through it has grown 13 times over two years. That measure counts the value of goods sold, typically before returns, not money that reaches creators. The wording differs too. YouTube Shopping also lets channels sell their own merchandise, so "enrolled in YouTube shopping" and membership of the affiliate programme may describe overlapping rather than identical populations. YouTube has not reconciled the two.

How fast the base has grown is clearer. At the 2025 edition of the event, YouTube said more than 500,000 creators were signed up globally as of July 2025, with GMV five times higher than a year earlier. Mohan's annual letter of January 21, 2026 still gave the Shopping population as more than 500,000, possibly a restatement of the July number. Then, on March 27, YouTube opened the affiliate programme to every Partner Program channel, including those with as few as 500 subscribers. The count now stands at roughly 2.6 times its July 2025 level.

What the arithmetic suggests

Set side by side, the figures raise a question YouTube does not answer. If GMV rose fivefold in the year to mid-2025 and thirteenfold across two years, growth in the more recent year would be about 2.6 times, assuming the measurement windows line up. Participating channels grew by a similar multiple. Commissions paid to creators, by Coe's account, grew by a factor of two.

Several explanations fit. Many channels joined only after March and have had little time to tag products. Commission rates vary by merchant. Payment also trails the sale, since YouTube's documentation provides for affiliate commissions to be paid through AdSense within 60 to 120 days of purchase. The average paid per participating channel may therefore have been flat, or lower, even as the total rose twofold. Without a disclosed base, there is no way to tell.

Part of the growth may also rest on terms YouTube describes as temporary. When the programme reached Britain in August, the company told creators that all commissions from affiliate merchants currently go to creators, and that rates may fall as it moves to a more sustainable structure. No end date has been published.

UK, Germany and Mexico, with 19 markets unnamed

Coe's account of expansion was brief. "We recently launched the shopping affiliate program in the UK, Germany, and Mexico, putting us on track to be in 35 markets by the end of this year," she said.

Mexico came first. YouTube took the programme into Mexico and Argentina on June 18 through an exclusive partnership with Mercado Libre, bringing the total to 14 countries. Argentina did not feature in Coe's list. The United Kingdom followed on August 6 as the 15th market, with Wayfair, Currys, Debenhams, Boots, M&S and Etsy as its first merchants.

Germany is the addition that PPC Land's September 24 count of 15 did not include. The German rollout began on September 3, according to YouTube's German blog, in a post by Andreas Briese, managing director of YouTube Germany. Ten retailers took part from the start - About You, Bonprix, Home24, Kaufland, MediaMarktSaturn, Otto, Shop-Apotheke, Tchibo, Thalia and XXXLutz - heise online reported. More than 25 million logged-in users in Germany ran shopping-related searches on YouTube in June 2026, according to the company. As in other markets, the purchase is completed in the retailer's shop rather than inside YouTube.

That makes 16 markets on PPC Land's count. Reaching 35 by December 31 would require 19 more in a little over three months, against four added between late March and early September. Neither Coe, the blog post nor the video description names the countries. One commenter under the video, writing from Saudi Arabia, asked for the programme to be switched on there, saying it was not yet available.

Local offers, and an open question on rates

The most concrete product change in the segment concerns viewers abroad. "Until now, if a viewer in London clicked a product tagged, for example, from a video by Nikki LaRose, who's based in LA, they would often run into shipping restrictions, and Nikki wouldn't earn a commission," Coe said. YouTube, she added, was "solving all of that".

"Product tags will automatically update with local offers based on where the viewer is watching, so viewers can shop from everywhere," she said. "And you'll earn from all of those sales."

The change alters the basic arrangement of product tagging, in which a creator selects a specific item from a specific merchant. YouTube's documents disagree on timing. Coe used the future tense, while the video description states that tagged products "now automatically update with localized offers", and Mohan's September 23 blog post also described the switch as already in place. Whether the feature was live on the day of the event cannot be settled from YouTube's own material.

Coe's promise that creators will earn "from all of those sales" also goes further than the written post, which spoke of helping creators earn commissions on global sales. Several points go unaddressed. Which merchant's rate applies when the local offer comes from a retailer the creator never chose? What happens where no local merchant stocks a matching item? And is the creator told which retailer replaced the one originally tagged?

That last point touches disclosure. Amazon, which Coe named as a partner, has been taggable by US creators since late August, and PPC Land noted then that a tag applied by a platform process to an existing video sits awkwardly against disclosure rules that presume the creator knows a commercial relationship exists. A tag that changes merchant according to the viewer's location raises a similar question. The feature did find at least one enthusiast: a commenter under the video welcomed global shopping tags, saying they had requested them for two years.

Brand deals, and a figure without a source

"As Neil stated in 2025 we saw 60% growth in shorts brand deals all on YouTube," the caption reads. Three things are unclear. The missing punctuation leaves open whether 2025 is the year Mohan spoke or the year the growth occurred. The metric is undefined: deals, their value or the creators involved. And the original statement is hard to find. Mohan's January 21 letter and his September 23 blog post contain no such number; it may come from his stage remarks, which were not reviewed. Either way, it is an unverified company figure.

Shorts creators have reasons to look for deal income. From February 1, 2027, channels below 10 million qualified Shorts views lose their share of the Shorts Creator Pool, while brand deals arranged through Creator Partnerships are unaffected.

Coe also described YouTube as "the number one most trusted video platform", without citing a source in the segment. The closest published support is YouTube's own. A playbook sent to advertisers in May cited a Google and Kantar study in which 78% of US viewers agreed that YouTube has the most trusted creators for product recommendations - research commissioned by Google.

On discovery, Coe said YouTube was "sharing rich insights and using signals from your audience" to put creators in front of brands searching for a particular voice, format or topic. That builds on the channel insight sharing that arrived when BrandConnect and the Creator Partnerships Hub merged on March 24.

Pitches and media kits

"Ask Studio will be able to help with custom pitch proposals and tailored media kits, so you can actually focus all your time on closing the deal," Coe said. The video description goes further, promising that creators can "Generate custom pitch proposals and tailored media kits directly inside Ask Studio". The Hanif and Katz post is narrower, describing tips to customise a media kit to a brand's goals. Whether the assistant produces the kit or advises on it is not settled. All three versions are in the future tense, and none gives a date.

Agency money, now with a time frame

The statement most likely to interest agencies came in a single sentence. "In addition, we're investing hundreds of millions of dollars in incentives to agency partners over the next couple years to bring deals directly to you," Coe said.

The written post gave no time frame, a gap PPC Land noted on September 24. The video supplies one of about two years. It still names no total, no recipients, no qualifying criteria and no form of payment, whether cash, media credit or services.

Ad Age's Creator Brief newsletter reported a YouTube statement describing the incentives as a way to cut the operational overhead agencies face on multi-creator campaigns and to reward high-impact direct campaigns with large budgets. Its author suggested, with some hedging, that the goal was to bring agency campaigns to YouTube creators rather than to rival creator marketplaces.

YouTube has worked through agencies in its commerce push before. In June 2025 it named 45 agencies across nine markets to help creators with the Shopping affiliate programme, describing the collaboration as limited in duration. In his January letter, Mohan wrote that YouTube was making it easier for influencer marketing agencies and brands to find and hire creators.

Platform payments to agencies have a long history in media buying. ANA research on influencer programmes found that 31% of marketers said their agency used non-transparent compensation methods for creator services, while 30% did not know. Neither the video nor the blog post says whether YouTube's incentives will be disclosed to the advertisers whose budgets those agencies manage. For a brand, the practical question is whether an agency recommending a YouTube creator over a creator on another platform is also collecting a YouTube incentive for the recommendation.

Coe drew a distinction between ownership and promotion. "One of the most important differences about YouTube is that you own your IP and you choose which brands that you want to partner with," she said. Once a deal is agreed, YouTube is "making it easy for them to spend money to actually boost your content".

The mechanism is paid amplification: a creator's organic video becomes an ad asset in the brand's own campaign once the creator grants access. According to the blog post, a creator can now share that access through a one-click code. The earlier route, which Google set out in April, runs through Data Manager in Google Ads, where an advertiser links a creator video and waits for the creator to accept in YouTube Studio. Google's playbook claims an average 20% increase in conversion lift for boosted creator videos on Demand Gen campaigns, based on its own data from January 2025 to January 2026 - a vendor figure.

Coe then tied boosting to commerce: "if you've tagged products on YouTube Shopping, you can get expanded reach and more affiliate earnings." An affiliate variant, which lets brands amplify creator videos their products already appear in, was presented at Brandcast in May. The advertiser pays for the media, and the merchant then pays commission on the sales that media produces. Where brand and merchant are the same company, it pays twice for one sale.

Ownership of the video, meanwhile, does not settle how long a brand may run it as an ad, or where. Those are contract terms, and the ANA report stressed that rights for paid amplification have to be negotiated before a campaign starts rather than afterwards.

What the pitch leaves out

Coe opened broadly. "YouTube laid the foundation for the original creator economy and it remains the largest in the world, backing creators with the highest ad revenue payouts in the industry," she said. No figure accompanied it; YouTube's latest cumulative total, $100 billion paid to creators, artists and media companies over four years, dates from September 2025.

The balance of power behind those payments is contested. France's competition authority found in February that eight in ten creators it surveyed rated their bargaining power with platforms as weak or very weak. The entry bar is rising too: new applicants for ad revenue sharing will need 8,000 qualified watch hours or 20 million qualified Shorts views from February 1, 2027. Commissions, brand deals and paid boosts - the income Coe spent her segment on - sit outside that gate.

The sums explain the attention: US creator economy ad spend reached $37 billion in 2025 and is projected at $43.9 billion in 2026, according to IAB estimates.

Coe closed on the line that trade reports picked up from the event: "creators are the new global storefront and your viewers are already lined up at the register." The register, for now, still belongs to the retailer. In January, Mohan wrote that viewers would soon be able to buy products creators recommend without leaving the YouTube app. Coe's segment did not return to that.

Beneath the video, most of the 64 comments offered thanks; one complained of Community Guidelines strikes and unanswered emails. The numbers that would let an advertiser test the storefront claim - GMV in dollars, total commissions paid, the size of the agency budget - are the ones the segment left out.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Mary Ellen Coe, YouTube's chief business officer, in a segment published by the Creator Insider channel with YouTube Creators, alongside written material from Amjad Hanif and Travis Katz. The statements affect creators, brands, retailers and the agencies that broker creator deals.

What: Coe said more than 1.3 million channels have signed up to YouTube Shopping, that commissions paid to creators reached twice the level of a year earlier, that Shorts brand deals grew 60% (a figure she attributed to Mohan), and that YouTube will invest hundreds of millions of dollars in agency incentives over the next couple of years. She also described localised product offers for viewers abroad and easier paid boosting of creator videos. None of the figures has been independently verified, and several differ from YouTube's written posts.

When: Coe spoke at Made on YouTube on September 23, 2026; the video was published on September 25, 2026. The affiliate programme is targeted at 35 markets by the end of 2026, and Ask Studio's pitch tools carry no date.

Where: Globally, with the affiliate programme recently extended to Mexico, the United Kingdom and Germany. Localised offers apply to viewers outside a creator's home market.

Why: YouTube is building commerce, brand deals and paid media into its creator tools as entry thresholds for ad revenue are about to rise. For advertisers and agencies, the agency incentives and paid boosts change how creator budgets are routed and who is paid along the way, while the undisclosed bases behind the headline figures leave their size open to question.