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YouTube Expanding Merchandise Partnerships

Five companies, including Crowdmade and Fanjoy, will now join Teespring.

YouTube is no longer dipping its toe in the promotional products industry – it’s diving headfirst.

Last year, the San Bruno, CA-based company began allowing creators to sell branded merchandise directly to fans through a partnership with Teespring, a web-based custom merchandise platform. Now the company is adding five new merchandising partners: Crowdmade, DFTBA, Fanjoy, Represent and Otter Media’s Rooster Teeth.

Neal Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, outlined the updates in a keynote Thursday at VidCon US, the premiere digital video convention, Variety reported. In early 2018, creator revenue from merchandise (as well as YouTube’s Super Chat and Channel Memberships features) was nearly zero, Mohan said. Today, several thousand channels have more than doubled their total YouTube revenue from those tools, in addition to advertising, Mohan said. For example, the creator of Lucas the Spider made more than $1 million in profit in about three weeks after selling a plush version of Lucas through the YouTube/Teespring service.

Of course, YouTube also profits by helping its users make more money. The video giant keeps 30% of membership fees, Variety reported, so it stands to generate more revenue from higher-priced channel subscription tiers. It also takes a cut of Super Chat and merchandise sales.

Creators with more than 10,000 fans can sell branded merchandise directly through their channel on the popular video sharing website. As part of the service, branded items appear in a shelf below participating creators’ videos. To buy, a fan simply clicks on a product image in the shelf and is re-directed to Teespring, where they purchase the item. According to Teespring, Merch Shelves has been a success, driving 30% more click-throughs than other traffic sources. In November 2018, Teespring expanded its YouTube integration from just the U.S. to include the European Union, too.

YouTube’s merch expansion announcement comes nearly a month after Teespring announced another partnership with Amazon subsidiary Twitch, a popular live streaming platform that focuses particularly on video game streaming. After nearly going under in 2016, Teespring estimates that it will hit $1 billion in lifetime sales in 2019.