[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there, and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 472 entitled selling products in YouTube videos with WooCommerce. It was published on Thursday, the 18th of June, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and we'll get to the conversation about WooCommerce in a moment. But before we do that, a few bits of housekeeping.
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Okay, what have we got for you today?
Well, today I am chatting with Joern Aaseng, apologies Joern for mispronouncing your name, both just then and in the podcast as well. And we're talking about something truly really interesting. I honestly didn't know this was a thing.
WooCommerce have made it possible for you to sell things directly inside of YouTube videos. So let's imagine for a moment that you have a WooCommerce store and you are selling widgets. In the past, you may have been making promotional content on the YouTube side just to bolster the recognition of your brand.
Well, now you can put little ads inside the video at the exact moment that you wish for that product to be clicked upon. And so anybody watching the video can click directly at the moment they are seeing what it is that you are showing on the screen, and I think this is really powerful.
So Joern is here today from WooCommerce, and he's telling us about how this has been built, why it's been built, what are the key features, who can use it, what's the best way to go about marketing in this manner? And so much more.
Really interesting, something utterly unique, at least for me anyway, and I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Joern Aaseng, I think. Is that good?
[00:02:41] Joern Aaseng: Pretty good.
[00:02:41] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:02:43] Joern Aaseng: Yeah, it's pretty good.
[00:02:43] Nathan Wrigley: All of 10 seconds. Joern's surname means hilly field, which is a really nice, really nice thing. My surname means, as far as I'm aware, absolutely nothing, no idea what my surname means. So that's a nice little fun fact at the beginning.
We're on the podcast today, we're gonna talk about WooCommerce and wait for it. YouTube. What the heck? I didn't realise there was any connection between, WordPress, WooCommerce and YouTube, but it turns out there is. And having watched some promotional videos, this is pretty cool.
so stay tuned for that. But before we get stuck into that, YRN, do you mind just telling us a little bit about yourself, like your background, in tech and WordPress and what it is that you do currently and who you work for, that kind of thing.
[00:03:28] Joern Aaseng: Very nice. Of course. thank you for having me by the way. yeah, my name is, rn, again, it's, a few letters we don't have in the alphabet, over here. I typically go by Joe even at Starbucks. If anything, say something like, Joe, I'm listening. I work here at, WooCommerce or Automatic as the, larger company's called, the, kind of commercial arm, a little bit of WordPress, with wordpress.com, with WooCommerce and their Tumblr.
And, there's a range of companies under there. I've been working here for, it's actually coming up on four years, but it feels much less, a sign of the times, I guess a little bit with the speed of, everything that's happening. and before that actually came from Google.
And so I'm very, qualified to talk Google ads, I worked there for about, eight and a half years, I think, across Ireland, San Francisco, down to LA where I live now with my three kids and wife. And, yeah, I work here in, in partnerships, particularly where, our goal is to work with other companies, to enable partnerships for our merchants to essentially simply use both, so the example would be, payments providers, advertising kind of MySpace, also the shipping areas, the tax areas.
if you are a business, you are very likely to need a lot of these things. And if we do our job we enable it simply for the merchants, a few clicks as possible, quick sign up, maybe even a good deal if, we're doing it really well. and so that's what I do here.
obviously focused on advertising, given my background. plus there's a lot of money in it, so it's exciting.
[00:05:13] Nathan Wrigley: does your, does your background in Google, was that kind of one of the levers that got you into automatic, through the interview process and things? Was that part of your
[00:05:22] Joern Aaseng: They never said so, but I'm, quite confident it was, exactly why. and, and their ads is obviously a big business, especially in e-commerce, and merchants and, there's, it's simple the way we built it, but it's quite complicated in the way that, the product and the feed and the data and the structure and the imagery and the ad creation and all these things need to work out really well.
And for, let's say you're a small merchant, it's actually, there's a lot of work there. and our goal here is to make that simple as
possible.
[00:05:52] Nathan Wrigley: And, you are a Norwegian living in LA and I, so this is a question, I dunno that you have an answer for it May and I, but I just wondered why you lived in LA in terms of the job. I wondered if there was some kind of importance in being in California or benefit from being in California where I live in the uk.
That part of the world always seems like the mecca for tech and especially at the moment AI and startups and e-commerce and all that. It all seems to be coming from the west coast of the us, California in particular. So really that question isn't really a question. I'm just curious as to if there's a part of that, which is why you are living there.
[00:06:32] Joern Aaseng: I'm just here for the weather, to be honest. no, what I'll say is, I studied in California, it wasn't planned. I just ended up studying California and I didn't know what to expect. This was part of my, my, my university, education in Norway. And I went over and I was just like, do, what do you mean?
They have this weather all year round? and, this is again back in like 2010, it was a very nice place San Francisco back then when I was up there. And so I was, hell, I'm going back. and that's pretty much what led me to where I am. I went through Ireland to work for, a multinational American company.
So I worked a little bit for PayPal and eBay when they were one company back there. And then got into Google, Google took care of the Visas over to San Francisco. I didn't love that, as, as late as 2017 kind of thing. And yeah, moved down to LA 'cause I travelled here a lot for work and the sun, the beaches, the diversity of the, of what LA is, if it's creatives or, I just meet so many different people where I think, in San Francisco people still wear their badge when they go out kind of thing.
I work there, work is my life, and these are my, stock units
[00:07:47] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. Yeah.
[00:07:49] Joern Aaseng: And
[00:07:50] Nathan Wrigley: attached to work even when you're outside. I know Auto Automatic is a widely distributed company, so I did have an intuition that the decision about where you live is probably your own, but it was curious. I just wondered if there was a connection there. Okay, so we'll move on to the main topic and I gotta confess that I had no idea that this was a thing.
So I like everybody, I consume a little bit of YouTube. however, I know that in terms of search engines, it's the second search engine behind Google itself. So that's a curiosity. But also I know that there is an increasingly large set of eyeballs finding itself on YouTube for increasingly large amounts of time each day.
We could debate the, good or the bad of that, but that is the reality. We've all got a mobile phone, we're on our mobile phone a lot, and it's become a really credible way of making people aware of the thing that you have to sell. you've got influencers making videos, you've got people unboxing things and making videos about how a product is launched and what have you.
And so I guess some bright spark at some point in the past thought, wouldn't it be a neat idea if the person watching the video at the moment this product comes about, let's say for example, I dunno, I unbox a the latest iPhone or something like that. Wouldn't it be great if at the moment in the video that the iPhone is finally unboxed a little option to purchase?
That thing came up. yeah, that kind of all adds up. Makes sense. And at that point, I suppose you're, you are looking around thinking, how do we service that payment request? How do we, where does the actual product get shipped from? And so on. And very recently, like three or four weeks ago, I noticed that, YouTube had partnered with, WooCommerce to make this possible.
Now, is this entirely new? Is this binding of your product inventory to possible videos that you might make? And WooCommerce, is that a brand new thing or is there more of a storied history of WooCommerce and YouTube going back.
[00:10:00] Joern Aaseng: yeah. The feature, available from Google, the ability to put products, in a video isn't per se new. what is new here is that we made that integration. Now we've simplified that and, continue to build upon what this plugin, which is called Google for WooCommerce, very simply, what it can do for you.
and no, the feature isn't necessarily like new in the way that you could, it's just made drastically simpler. and, again, trying to take away complexity for merchants in the way, they want to have their products on their YouTube videos. And just making that super simple, connecting the channel, and now the plugin can take care of all that.
And so the merchant doesn't have to do any of that heavy lifting and getting their products feed, exported and, connected to, YouTube and all that. And so it's essentially, one step further in making this plugin everything you need from Google, instead of all these different things, as you sure can imagine.
Sure. Google has so many products and you have your YouTube over there and you have your Gmail over there, and you have your sheets over here, and you have like your Google search console and your Google Business profile and your Google Maps. And trying to Put this together in a package where it's not so overwhelming for merchants.
It's something we do. And YouTube was, something we really needed, like you say, YouTube is, the biggest video platform. And, that's where, people find the products is where they do their research. It's where they learn to tie a tie. And it's important for businesses to be there.
[00:11:27] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And, I think that's increasingly the case. I, remember, I don't know, I'm going back a decade, that sudden realisation that if I needed to figure out almost anything to do with plumbing in my house, to somebody had made a video, like it was already, that whole ship had sailed. okay, you need this really peculiar video about the plumbing that you've got in your bathroom that nobody has a clue about.
Somebody somewhere has done a video. And, so that reach is totally immense. However, from the Woo side, so we're saying all of this, like YouTube is massive. WooCommerce is obviously the biggest e-commerce platform out there of any kind, despite what you might hear elsewhere. That's my understanding.
do people actually make use of this? I know you've just launched it, but do you have metrics to show that people are actually taking this on? Because it sounds like such a neat idea, but have you seen like a throughput of people saying, yeah, okay. Not only is it a neat idea, but we are gonna implement this.
[00:12:30] Joern Aaseng: So most things we integrate at all is because somebody asked for it. like we typically, we, scour the internet essentially, if they're on Reddit, or, any platform saying Hey, why don't you have YouTube? I'd love for it to be YouTube here. we build this.
And that's, that helps inform our roadmap. in this case, it's an entirely additional kind of surface of selling for merchants. And just a commercial piece alone, and the opportunity for merchants was a huge one, for us to do this. we've been very focused on ads so far, like your typical, what we'd call shopping ads, which is the product listing with the picture, the price, the, those like smaller ads.
And so we're trying to also bring more into it. we've seen merchants come through, of course already. Google obviously helpful here as well. We know for a fact that, we have thousands of merchants that have channels, and we know we have a market for it. So it's just about making the connections and making it easy.
And, this makes sense. and like you say, a lot of people start a business from the angle of it being a hobby. And so an example could be, you're, into playing guitar and you just start online. you play guitars on YouTube and you build videos and people start watching, and then, after a while hey, this could be a business.
And so you start maybe selling, a few things related to this. And a lot of them actually started on YouTube, and then the WooCommerce on the rest is following after. So you can come in from both sides of that. and, we're here to just enable commerce really in any way we can, as simply as we
[00:14:08] Nathan Wrigley: I don't know if you've ever had this intuition, but I, have, especially around podcasting, so this is the audio side of things, but I've, definitely noticed it in the small amount of YouTube that I watch. I'm actually fairly habitual. That is to say I'll find, I'll browse around for things that I like, and then when I find a character, it's usually an individual that I like.
I go fairly deep into that and I listen to their stuff over and over again. as they put out their weekly stuff, I consume it because I've, I've figured out I like this person and I like the way they talk. I like their banter and all of that kind of stuff. and I think that's the sort of thing that we used to have in bricks and mortar stores, and, I'm not even talking about in my lifetime, because that quickly got consumed by giant organisations.
I'm thinking more in my parents era where, you'd go to the street corner and you'd have a chat with this person and they would be some sort of confident of yours. I think this is a, an approximation to that in that you begin to trust these people.
[00:15:11] Joern Aaseng: Yeah.
[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: know, you've got somebody who's reviewing, tech on YouTube and you watch 12 videos and you think, do you know what, this is really credible.
they obviously do the work. They've surfaced a load of interesting detail. I love what this person's creating. And so you build up over time this, how to say it, this, weird trust, thing. You obviously, the creator doesn't know most of the audience, but the audience know the creator. And so that does seem like a really credible way of, I either, either starting or certainly maintaining.
And I, again, there's no question there, but I dunno if you've got any insights into that observation, whether or not that's something you agree with or disagree with.
[00:15:54] Joern Aaseng: I fully agree. I think, like you say, it's all chains. It's all big. It's all, like faceless places you go and buy something from a big, corporation somewhere, and then you go on YouTube and you can see somebody, it's the same person every week. They share their opinions, their feelings, they share what they bought favourite and, can justify to you why, it feels yeah.
They're trustworthy, they're authentic. And I think, people have been lacking a little bit of that maybe from, very large brands where, they say one thing, but maybe they'll do something else on the backend where, you know, when you're on YouTube and it's one person and it's their business, they rely on that trust so much for their business.
And so they're not willing to, mess with it. And I think people can detect that, and they're, we're all desperate for, some expert advice. And, trying to find those people we feel we can trust. And I think, YouTube as a platform where you have a lot of them, whether it's buying something, also fixing something or, learning something new or, and you'll, you trust it 'cause you can also see the numbers.
How many other people are watching these people every week, And so you're a little, not to say a cult or anything, but you're definitely a group of like fans and I think that's a little community in its
[00:17:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And you can really
[00:17:10] Joern Aaseng: people just wanna be part of.
[00:17:11] Nathan Wrigley: can't you? You can really niche down, I dunno, you might follow the guy who just reviews camping equipment all day, every day, or, I don't know, mobile phones or whatever. watches seem to be a thing for some people, and you can just get into this little niche nerd out on what's going on there.
Okay. So I have to make a confession, right? I have YouTube premium, and I don't know if that, I dunno if that inoculates me. That's maybe the wrong word. but I don't know if that prevents me from seeing stuff, because I know, for example, quite a lot of the advertising is stripped out by, YouTube because I pay basically to, to have a different ver variation on YouTube.
The decision was made basically to stop my kids from being, like every eight seconds an ad would, get in the way of their viewing pleasure. So we did that. So why I am saying all of that is I don't really have any exposure to, to these kind of ads surfacing, not ads, these selling opportunities surfacing.
So that's my question really. what do we see as a YouTube consumer? How do our products, surface themselves in a YouTube video? Let's imagine we're on a phone or the desktop, whichever you want to take. Just talk us through from the viewer's point of view, and then we'll get to how do we bind our products to it and all of that kind of stuff.
What do we see? and how does it all work on the front end of YouTube?
[00:18:40] Joern Aaseng: I think, the way you see it, the most typical way I think most have seen it, in the while would be like, you're watching somebody reviewing something maybe, and it's oh, do you wanna, buy something? I'll link it there. click and there'll be a little popup that they can control.
That's the typical kind of, you're tagging a product in the video. and and then there's other things you can do, like you can, make playlists that kind of, connect your products to that in, in nice ways. And so essentially you can just plug your products in anywhere, but you are right.
if you pay for the premium and less ads, the ads are a typical way where, you can connect some of these things, and so you'll see less of it. but it really depends on the channel you go to and how actively they use it, which I still don't think is, become like fully mainstream.
I think, there's a lot of merchants who have a big channel who's not doing this very well, at least. And again, trying to make that simpler is something that we do. But yeah, that's how you'll see it. You'll see it listed, in or around your videos. and if you look around, once you know it's there, you'll start
[00:19:45] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. But it sounds from what you are saying, although the technology has been around for a little while, maybe people haven't implemented it, maybe there's been a really difficult technical barrier to doing that. Okay. So let's,
[00:19:59] Joern Aaseng: and the creative, you, you need the channel, first of all, so you need to be good on that creative front and have videos. if you're a business and you don't have that, you can connect your product, but you don't have great videos. And it's, you need all of it
[00:20:13] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. And I imagine you probably need to, given the way the YouTube algorithm works, I imagine you probably need to spend a little bit of time building that audience before you then start to monetize that in the videos themselves. Okay. So let's imagine
[00:20:27] Joern Aaseng: There are some small requirements, I think, in terms of how many subscribers you should have, and a few other things before you can start doing this. but it's quite low. I think it's around 500 or
[00:20:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Okay. So it's open to anybody that's got a channel, which is, got a small following. Let's say that. All right, so I've got my YouTube channel. Let's say that I'm, somebody and I'm reviewing, let's go with Wristwatches. That was something that we mentioned earlier. I'm reviewing Wristwatches.
I've got a back catalogue of wristwatch videos, and now I decide, okay, wouldn't it be a good idea if, when I mentioned this particular wristwatch, I gave people an opportunity to actually go and rather than pull away from the video, go and Google it somewhere else and end up who the heck knows where that is?
Wouldn't it be nice if they ended up on my WooCommerce store? Because I can sell it directly to you, if you like the look of it. So how does that work? How do we, make the connection between our WooCommerce website and YouTube, and I'm guessing this is where the new shiny plugin comes in. do we make the video, I'm guessing we make the video first and figure out which bits of the video we need to timestamp or, I don't even know if timestamping is a thing.
So basically I'm saying, tell us how it works.
[00:21:43] Joern Aaseng: exactly like you say, it lives in the plugin. and the way it works, and not to get into too many details, but if you're an advertiser, you'll know this, that there's something called the Merchant Centre. The Merchant Centre is essentially like that connection to Google where you upload their product.
So the base function of this plugin in some way is that we take the products that you have on WooCommerce and we format it the way that it needs to be format, and we put it into Google in the Merchant Centre. And so this connection with YouTube, again, is essentially taking that feed again that you have in the merchant centre and connect it to your YouTube channel.
And so essentially when you go in and manage your channel, you'll see this, these products pop up and new features and where you can do it. like you mentioned, you can tag it at a time in your video. and I'm sure you've seen this too, but sometimes when you watch a video, depending on the screen that you're on, you can see a little shelf of like shopping products underneath.
That's also a part of this. and you can add a little shopping button, buy now. So there's a few of those like overlay things for your videos where you can add the product. But the core feature here is essentially getting your products with pictures, descriptions, and price availability into YouTube and have that, two-way connection.
So if somebody buys anything, does that impact your inventory? Of course it does. So you need to update those things to your store with WooCommerce. And so these things are what the plugin and just the heavy lifting involved that in the back, all you sees your products are suddenly on YouTube in your channel, and you can start adding them, under your product or videos, in your videos.
And you could also do you can have a store tab on YouTube. This is, typically bigger merchants might go as far as this, you can watch all their videos and then they actually have a store tab where we can see all their products and
[00:23:31] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. yeah. Okay.
[00:23:33] Joern Aaseng: and it's becoming more shoppable, this YouTube and, it's part of the, I guess broader, like we talked about before, this social, shopping, but also the social validation of, the products themselves.
'cause there's so much stuff out there that, is they all look good, they all look great. you want to have somebody say, this one is great, you should buy this one. And I think that's where YouTube and other social platforms really come
[00:23:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and if you think about the example of the watch, so the watch is actually, I think, fits in really well here because looking at it on a website, there's only so much information about that watch that you're actually gonna be able to get across. And a description, what's it made of, what are the materials, how big is it?
And you know what the cost is and what have you. But that three minute video of some person wearing it and then describing it and showing it, you can really go a whole lot further. And then there's that beautiful layer of authenticity. Whereas if you watch a product demo made by, let's say, Rolex, you know that's some sort of fake simulation of what it might be like and what have you, whereas this is.
Hopefully an honest review. You get to see it in the real world. I'm struggling to encapsulate that, but it's that authentic layer. It's that bit of, here's an actual human who I trust demonstrating it. Hopefully not in an icky way. And caveat mTOR. I imagine if you're a YouTube channel owner, there are pitfalls and minefield to tread here, like overdoing it with the amount of product placement.
And you suddenly lose that authenticity because that YouTube channel now is only about plugging products, not about actual reviewing, but I think that's a really interesting layer. Okay. Back to the, plugin in how it works. So you've got your inventory, let's say I've got 50 watches in my YouTube, sorry.
In my WooCommerce inventory, I've got images of them all. I've got descriptions of them all. I've obviously got pricing. Then the plugin will bind that to videos and I can timestamp them and things like that. But do, does this mean therefore that stuff can be dynamic? And what I mean by that is, let's say that the video that I made last year, everything in that video still is true.
The watch is the same, but my price went down by 50%. Can we do, does it do that? So in other words, it's, not writing something permanently into the video. This is more like a layer over the video that you can change on a whim,
[00:26:03] Joern Aaseng: Yes. To the point that, the changes and the updates that you make to your products and the feed. So the feed gets updated, you can set this yourself, if you're really big merchants with thousands and thousands of products, this is, down to hourly where you get the updated price, and so the products are being updated and then just essentially updated in your YouTube channel.
You wouldn't necessarily adjust any of your product metrics in YouTube. the products you have there are available, this plugin enables that for all of your products. So you go to WooCommerce, you manage your products and everything there, and the plugin will take care of making sure those changes, cascade in through all of the, surfaces on Google, where you also are.
And that's how that works essentially, making it easy for you to adjust your product data one place, and then the changes will be reflected everywhere. And so the plugin and the merchant centre in this case will take care of that for you.
[00:26:57] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know how I suspect the answer's gonna be? No, because although you have worked with Google, a lot of this stuff is very much secret source. It's their whole business running, the, if we could all figure out what Google were doing, none of us would be doing much if I'm sitting on the beach all day.
I imagine. But, I'm wondering if Google are increasingly taking product placement videos and surfacing them because they, they take that as a signal. that's interesting. Maybe our users enjoy that. Obviously they get a little bit of a cut out of that. So the, question there really is do you know how Google treats videos with this layer of data behind it?
Maybe differently than just a video, the exact same video, but with no data layer behind it?
[00:27:47] Joern Aaseng: I don't think we know. And I think even when I worked there, they wouldn't tell, it's like that kind of secret
[00:27:52] Nathan Wrigley: expected answer. Yeah.
[00:27:53] Joern Aaseng: the secret sauce. but, what, I will say is that they care about the quality of the channel. And, that kind of comes first. And I think YouTube, one of the reasons it is so good and great is that they actually have quite strong, the policies and the quality for the videos and the quality of your content for your content to be shown is quite high.
and so they kinda, there's a little guardrail here in terms of you need a certain level of base quality here before, in terms of subscribers in this case, but some other things as well to just make this eligible as a feature for you. And so then it enriches the ones that have done that job of proving and, committing and, making good content.
And that's the way it works. we've, got no data points or any kind of insight saying that adding products will essentially make your content more favourable in terms of being found on YouTube or views or anything. but, users like this, there's a lot of people saying, ah, ads here and the product's there, but, we all click and buy it.
And we do appreciate it even though there's a few people that are tired of us.
[00:29:02] Nathan Wrigley: do you know what, if you gave me, so I obviously have opted myself out of this by paying for YouTube premium, but if you were to give me a choice between a video, an authentic video with a, like this optional data layer over the top where I could buy the thing or some random injection of just meaningless adverts that I definitely don't want to watch, I would rather this because at least I know that the creator is getting paid.
It's probably not interrupting the video. There's no okay, let's go off and make a cup of tea whilst this 40 seconds of video that you know about something we don't care about happens. The video is basically the same video, but you've got this layer, you know that Google are getting paid their cut, you know that the creator's getting paid their cut and you're not gonna watch the inauthentic stuff.
Anyway, so this, seems like a rather intelligent way of going about it. I'm really drawn to this. I'm gonna keep my eyes out for it. okay, so when I was watching YouTube years and years ago, there was basically YouTube people uploaded videos of any kind. And now you fast forward to the year 2026, it seems like YouTube is, how to describe it, like fragmented, let's go with that word.
You've got long form video. The old fashioned, it's basically, it's a rectangle. it's like landscape. And that video could be three minutes long or it could be seven hours long, who knows? But now we've also got these kind of attention grabbing, YouTube shorts. You've got these sort of shopping channels, you've got people doing live stuff.
I dunno how this fits into all of that bit as well, like these different formats. does it work with only the old format landscape, long form video, or can it go into all of these new forms as well?
[00:30:47] Joern Aaseng: I'm pretty sure it works well with your typical kind of live thing. that's always been like the live shopping, the unboxing and, the live kind of thing. it's primarily around the long form content, but I think, it's also a bit early days for shorts, to be honest. I think shorts came out as a little bit of a response to how well Instagram and maybe more so TikTok was, were doing, and so they kinda, ran in with that.
And, I think really the experience here depends on where you're watching it. So let's say I watch on my big TV in the living room, and I have every other, it's, videos. There's live streams and there's shorts all in the, one big interface. If you're on your phone, you're gonna be, seeing more of the shorter form, the vertical, the short, those kind of things.
If you're on a laptop, slightly different again. And so I, think, the viewer experience really depends on where you're watching it a little bit. and, and from a product perspective, it's definitely more towards the informational videos. like your typical YouTube video, the shorts are too short in many ways for you to click and buy in the same time.
And that's where we are right now. but again, again, the shorts are relatively new products. I'm sure they have huge plans on how shopping and the shorts are gonna play together.
[00:31:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And honestly, it feels like the, I know we talk about this sort of stuff in terms of its, it, being good, but also it being bad. But there is a, an absolute epidemic of YouTube consumption. whether or not you think that's a good thing or a bad thing, it is a thing. People are getting their entertainment no longer from the, regular tv.
I don't know if you, I don't know what, your habits are like, but when I was a kid, basically everybody watched the same TV show because there was only this tiny amount of, of TV shows available, and there was no, there's no TV on demand. You just watched what was provided and you'd go to school the next day and everybody would talk about that.
One show. And, for my kids who are, not particularly old, this is a really different reality. they watch what the heck they want to watch when they want to watch it, for how long they want to watch it and flip to something. And, it's all ubiquitous. and this, they really are looking to niche down, they're into Minecraft, they just wanna watch endless amounts of Minecraft or whatever the thing that they're into is.
And it does seem that if you are, selling into those, if you've got a Minecraft product company or you are making, I don't know, updates to Minecraft or whatever the heck Minecraft can do, it would be a bit silly not to be looking for YouTube content, basically.
[00:33:22] Joern Aaseng: Exactly. Exactly. YouTube is just a number one video platform. simple as that in many cases, especially within gaming and, some of those, kind of niche areas, there's a really nothing like it. And so it's a gold mine if you do it the right way. get your products, you can get in front of the audience in a way that, TV just couldn't compete with.
I also think one thing is premium versus no premium, but even if you have ads, the ad pressure on YouTube videos compared to watching tv, which is like in some countries all the way up to 27 minutes per hour is ads. that's half your time. And so it's, absolutely insane.
And and, America as well, if I watch cable and there's a movie on, I know the movie is 90 minutes, but it's three hours long, the entire thing. 'cause I'm watching so many ads and I think people have just realised you don't have to, and and at the same time, like attention span has declined a little bit, whatever you wanna say about that.
YouTube is prime for that in terms of they give you five minute videos, eight minutes, 20 minutes instead of these oh, it's an hour long show with half of it's gonna be ads. nobody's got the patience for that. And so I think we're going in this direction. of course streaming has also fuel this and I don't have cable tv, I just have YouTube and streaming channels
[00:34:41] Nathan Wrigley: yeah. Me
[00:34:41] Joern Aaseng: and whatever. kids know YouTube, that's what they say, turn on YouTube and they know the three buttons and he's just three to click and get into PAW Patrol. And they can manage that. And I think, it's just the way it's gonna be. I don't know why, watching ads that you don't wanna watch.
I think it's a huge problem. And I think TV is, not doing great at that. They're getting better, it's hard to target at scale when you don't, it's not you choosing the product. The product is just what the programme says is on YouTube is more like, Hey, you clicked that video 'cause you wanted to watch that video.
So you are attentive, you are there and you are open to it. And I think that's where you just can't compete. and that's why YouTube works so well.
[00:35:23] Nathan Wrigley: my intuition with this is the people who succeed, and I could, I hope I'm right, but I, could be completely wrong, are the people who maintain that level of authenticity, who, if a thing is rubbish, will still continue to say, this is rubbish, but here's a link anyway, it's up to you if you wanna buy it, but here's the really good one, and here's the link for that one.
what I'm saying is that I, think there's a real, there is a future for that, and I think it stands in opposition for blanket advertising on just regular TV networks and over consumption, like you said, 27 minutes in an hour for ads. I would far rather be exposed to this and know that this person was legitimate.
And if you can maintain that legitimacy, we already know, some of these YouTubers go on to have really incredible careers if you do it right. And maintaining that, I'm doing air quotes is basically, I think, the way to succeed. Is it gonna be a quick win? Probably not. I would imagine.
Unless you get very lucky, you're gonna have to be in this for the long haul.
[00:36:34] Joern Aaseng: it's a tough
[00:36:35] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah. but now you've got WooCommerce in your back pocket, free open source software that you can use. Tell me, is this plugin free open source? I imagine it's open source, but are, we able to download aspects of this for free or is this a paid for?
[00:36:51] Joern Aaseng: it's all free. it's all free, of course. not the ads that you can buy through it. they're not free. but, the whole idea is to bring, the best of Google that we can, to connect it to your store right in front of your fingertips. you can run ads and, this started with just the simplest of shopping ads and it was called something else back then, smart shopping or something like that.
And then you had, p max performance Max and AI and everything, connected. So it's becoming much more simple. And, in the same time as we launched a YouTube feature, we al also launched the AI assets. So we are using AI essentially to, build assets for you, take the best pictures and Google knows what performs well in, in this scenario as well.
and these things have always been like those kind of things that are challenging for merchants, but you also don't know what good looks like. And so having Google and AI to tell you that and show you, Hey, this is gonna be working better than that, let's test it, has, it's enormously helpful.
and especially around assets, and assets and video assets have been probably the biggest challenge for merchants, and especially SMBs to get onto any video advertising is a good video ad. And so AI is actually really helping with that. but again, you need to kind of balance this with the authenticity, like you say, people notice.
and so you know this together, like obviously YouTube and video is, can be a core part of your business on WooCommerce.
[00:38:20] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it's, it. This is not gonna be a gravy train unless you put in some solid hard work and be authentic and probably be fairly, what's the word? Timely. I imagine if you produce one video and then wait six months for the next one, that's not gonna work out so well. I imagine that, having a schedule and sticking to it and those kind of things, the boring work of having a blog, that kind of stuff, there's gonna be a lot of that.
But, but Google for WooCommerce, seems like a really neat way of making a few extra quid in some cases, or maybe making a, an actual, living out of the videos that you make. there's a couple of posts that I'm gonna link to in the show notes. So if any of this has peaked your curiosity, obviously you can Google, for WooCommerce, that's, there's a sentence that's not easy to say.
but also, one that might be of relevance to you, was a blog post not that long ago, 30th of April. It was written, YouTube Shopping is live for WooCommerce. Here's how to make the most of it. And there's a little article on the WooCommerce blog, that you can check out as well. And if you, wanna give me any links before we, finally say Azure at the end of this call, I'll put those in the show notes as well.
So go check it out. I think I've got everything I want from this episode. I think we've fully understood what the product is and how it might work. It's over to you, dear listener. Go and have a download it and play. If you've got a work on my shop and you've got an intuition that you wanna make, YouTube videos, there's a match made in heaven just
[00:39:53] Joern Aaseng: Yes. Got, it's got 900,000 instals. And it's, quite big in the, space. And so it, it does not that, necessarily the YouTube part, it's a huge play. It's a huge part. We're seeing, record return on ad spend for users in there. if you wanna make some money with your WooCommerce store, connect to the plugin autopilot from
[00:40:15] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. I should say that the stuff that we talked about today, the YouTube is just a tiny, teeny, teeny part of what, Google for WooCommerce can do. But nevertheless, go and check it out and you can find out some of the other bits and pieces that it does as well. with that said, we'll knock it on the head, as we say in the uk.
That was fascinating. Thank you so much for chatting to me today. Appreciate it.
[00:40:36] Joern Aaseng: Of course. Thank you for having me.
[00:40:38] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, there we go. That's all we've got time for this week. I hope that you enjoyed it. If you did, head to wpbuilds.com, search for episode number 472, and leave us a comment there.
Like I said, at the top of the show, wpbuilds.com/subscribe to keep in touch. Forward slash advertise, if you want to find out about getting your products or services injected into the audio of this podcast. Or you can just email me [email protected].
We will be back next week. Before that though, we'll also be back on Monday for the This Week in WordPress show. I'm sure you've heard me banging on about that many, many times before. Join us. It's a lot of fun. It's on Monday, 2:00 PM UK time.
Other than that, we'll see you next week. I'm gonna fade in some cheesy music. Say stay safe. You have a good week. Bye-bye for now.
