Did You Know Tickets Can Be Attached to YouTube Videos?

What does this mean for creators?

Happy Erev Super Bowl,

Popping in to share a video that came across my YouTube homepage today:

As the token legally-blind-musician-with-albinism in your life, I’m always gonna be a sucker for a blond guy in shades covering a Stevie Wonder song.

However, what really compelled me to share this video with all of you was the “Event Tickets” widget, listed directly below the video’s description:

I find it interesting that the highlighted event is a concert five months from now, in a city I’ve never heard of, but here are some snippets from a comprehensive Google Support thread that answers the immediate FAQs that I suspect many of you have about this “Event Tickets” feature. Bolding done by me:

Concert tickets on YouTube

Once enabled, viewers who watch official music content from your YouTube channel will find links to tickets for available event dates on video pages. We’ll display the event that is geographically closest to you, and other event dates.

Ticketing features are not shown to fans watching from mobile browsers or from living room devices.

Channel Eligibility

To be considered for ticketing features, you must:

• Have a YouTube Official Artist Channel

• Have a music attraction ID with any of the supported ticketers (listed below)

• Have upcoming concerts in any of the supported countries where viewers of your videos can see the ticketing shelf (listed below)

Supported ticketers

• AXS, Eventbrite, SeeTickets, Ticketmaster, DICE¹

Supported countries

Viewers located in the following countries/regions are able to view ticketing features:

• Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United Kingdom, United States²

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This… seems like it should be a way bigger deal??

Apparently this feature has existed since 2017, but I feel like it is hardly ever used.

In fact, I just Googled “top artists on tour in 2025”, and found that none of the YouTube channels for Coldplay, Bruno Mars, Ed Sheeran, Billie Eilish, nor Green Day are incorporating this feature at the moment.

The only one that was?

Katy Perry:

Being targeted with an August 11th date at MSG makes me question why the Allen Stone concert in Indiana was advertised to me in the first place.

At first I thought it might be tracking my IP address incorrectly, because of my VPN or something. But the Katy Perry date suggests otherwise.

And so if the closest performance in both geography and date was an August show in Indiana (where he wasn’t even the main attraction, but opening for Chris Stapleton), why bother showing that to someone in New York City?

My other immediate thought is, why is this feature only available for musicians?

Why isn’t this an option for Denver Nuggets games under Nikola Jokic highlights?

Or for every touring comedian with a video podcast?

To my mind, a ticketed event is a ticketed event.

Especially when the hosts/venues use the same ticketing platforms as the musicians.

I think every single comedian in the world would vote “Yes” to have this option underneath all their sets, specials, and clips on YouTube.

Worth calling out that this feature only exists on desktop browsing.

For instance, below is how that same Allen Stone video appears on my iPhone:

Instead of Stone’s upcoming tour dates, I’m invited to install FanDuel onto my phone.

My guess is that a company like FanDuel thinks about conversion rates in the way I do, understands the value of meeting their hypothetical audience where they are, and exclusively advertises their mobile app to people watching videos on a mobile device.

Why YouTube thinks that only its Desktop users would be interested in buying event tickets, as opposed to its mobile app or Smart TV users, I have no idea.

I can conceptualize why this widget would be too complicated to embed into a Smart TV app, but I have a suspicion that if event dates were only made available to their mobile app users, rather than Desktop users, they’d generate substantially more sales.

From what I know about YouTube, the vast majority of videos on the platform are watched on every other device type except for Desktop (e.g., mobile and Smart TV).

Contrast this with TikTok, who grants artists the option to embed a Ticketmaster widget onto their videos, which are displayed nearly exclusively on mobile devices.

Or Facebook, who lets users drop clickable URLs in video captions.

Instagram, meanwhile, still requires artists funnel their audience to their "link in bio".

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The most popular ways to advertise comedy shows on social media right now are:

1. tacky End Screen cards

2. mid-clip plugs for random cities (with no guarantee that anyone watching said clip has the means / proximity to attend any of the promoted dates), and

3. paid spend³

Of course, the method with the highest conversion rate for selling tickets is via a mailing list.

We’ve covered this before, but guaranteeing the delivery of a message to the exact people who have explicitly opted in to receive such communications is why comedians like Daniel Kitson and Stewart Lee sell out their Edinburgh Fringe runs several months in advance, without any other advertisements or social media presence.

But it’s truly baffling how, with a few lines of code, some software engineer at each major social media platform could make the process of buying tickets to live events significantly easier for everyone involved – from the artist, to the promoter, to the fan.

These platforms have built trillion-dollar ad networks that seamlessly enable its users to download a gambling app. How the hell haven’t they figure out how to sell a comedy show ticket to someone already laughing at that comedian’s joke?

1. Worth noting that Google “may add new ticketers to partner with in the future”.

2. AKA, The Whole White World.

3. More on this, next time.