Week in Review: Affiliates Get the ‘Short’ End of the Stick on YouTube

Another busy week in the partnerships world sees struggles for affiliates, wins for performance marketing, and a noteworthy acquisition.

Affiliates get the ‘short’ end of stick

YouTube Shorts has booted out affiliate marketing, at least for the time being. Unfortunately, the amount of spam links in video descriptions and comments has reached an undesirable level. Thus, YouTube is making links unclickable on Shorts to put an end to the chaos. Starting from August 31st, it will begin to deactivate all clickable links across the platform.

Will this last forever? For affiliate links, it seems like it. YouTube has said that it will bring clickable links back towards the end of September, but these will only link to other content on YouTube. Instead, the platform says creators can paste their links into a new space on their profile, near the subscribe button, as shown in the GIF below. This feature rolls out from August 23rd.