YouTube Adds "Click-to-Buy" Links to Videos

Instant gratification. You see something and you can buy it right away. This is one feature of MySpace Music, where you can buy songs from Amazon MP3, and YouTube has added the same sort of feature, which it calls Click-to-Buy.

As Google announced on the official YouTube blog:

Click-to-buy links are non-obtrusive retail links, placed on the watch page beneath the video with the other community features. Just as YouTube users can share, favorite, comment on, and respond to videos quickly and easily, now users can click-to-buy products -- like songs, books, and movies -- related to the content they're watching on the site. We're getting started by embedding iTunes and Amazon.com links on videos from companies like EMI Music, and providing Amazon.com product links to the newly released video game Spore on videos from Electronic Arts.

You can see from the above image how it looks. You can buy from either Amazon MP3 or iTunes, and yep, you can buy Spore if you find the right video (click the above Coldplay example of a music "offer" to see that type of deal).

It does look like right now the videos with links are limited to EMI; makes sense since that was the only label listed in the press release. For now, also, these links are only available to YouTube users in the U.S. However, from their blog post it's clear that Google plans to expand the feature to other content partners, as well as the international YouTube community.

They're pretty unobtrusive links, as you can see. Perhaps too much so. When I first heard of this I expected them to use something akin to what they tried earlier. Keep it this subtle and I actually won't be annoyed by it.