Google Search traffic is the single biggest source of revenue for YouTube parent Alphabet–and, for the first time in over a decade, it looks like Google’s share of the search market is about to drop below 50%, driven down by things like ChatGPT and TikTok becoming Gen Z’s search engine.
Alphabet made $49.4 billion in revenue from Google Search this past quarter alone, so obviously keeping traffic high is a priority. And one way it’s attempting to do that is with a new YouTube feature: hyperlinked comments.
Originally rolled out as a limited experiment in July 2023, hyperlinked comments are appearing more widely now, and they turn videos’ comment sections into buffets of links to Google Search results.
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In the header image above, you can see a hyperlinked comment that was left in reply to a Linus Tech Tips video about Fallout 76. The commenter replies, “Fallout 76 sponsoring a video in 2024 was not on my bingo card,” and YouTube’s tool automatically hyperlinks both “Fallout 76” and “bingo card.” Anyone who clicks the links will be taken to Google Search results for those terms.
YouTube has said that hyperlinked comments are a way for it to “reduce friction” for users who are trying to learn more about a subject relevant to the content they’re watching. But, as you can see with the Fallout 76 example, not every word or phrase that’s highlighted is actually relevant to the content being discussed. We doubt people watching a video about Fallout 76 are looking to learn more about bingo cards; that was just a turn of phrase from the commenter to indicate they weren’t expecting to see a 76-sponsored video in 2024 when the game debuted in 2018.
There’s also the fact that commenters have no control over whether their replies are turned into hyperlinks, and can’t pick which words or phrases are linked. In the feature’s original Creator Insider announcement video, a member of Team YouTube said users would be able to manually prevent YouTube from using their replies as hyperlinks; but, as 9to5Google points out, there doesn’t seem to be a setting for this yet, so people who don’t want their comments hyperlinked are stuck.
If the feature becomes a permanent thing on YouTube, it’s easy to see how this could benefit Alphabet. Even if some people find hyperlinked comments spammy, it’s likely that with hundreds of millions of comments across YouTube’s smorgasbord of video content, thousands or even millions of users will click on them every day, and generate potentially valuable traffic for Google Search.
Not only will these users be pumping Google Search numbers, but they’ll also presumably be targeted traffic, since (at least in ideal cases) they were already watching YouTube content about a particular topic, and now are being served more information about that topic. And hey, some of those search results could even include more YouTube videos, turning the whole thing into a feedback loop bouncing users from video to Search to video to Search.
It’s not clear how widespread hyperlinked comments are yet, but here at Tubefilter, we’re seeing them under almost every video these days. Check out your local comment section and see if you’ve got ’em, too.
