How publishers pull YouTube viewers to shop on their sites, with Architectural Digest’s Amy Astley

“It’s a much, much deeper, richer experience for the user to go to our site. It’s more fully shopped-out there, and it’s more visual. We can put photos of all the items,” said Amy Astley, global editorial director at Architectural Digest, on the latest Digiday Podcast episode.

The strategy shift has coincided with the publication doubling its commerce revenue in the past two years. And it’s not like the previous approach of embedding affiliate links on-platform in the YouTube videos’ descriptions wasn’t working. But having a place on AD’s own site for people to shop the products featured in the “Open Door” videos seems to be working even more.

“We saw a four-times increase in the revenue from ‘Open Door’ from shopping it out on the site,” said Astley, noting that AD highlights the link to the site in a pinned comment atop the videos’ comments feed on YouTube.

Now AD is prepping another major update to its commerce strategy. In March, the publication plans to relaunch the AD Shopping commerce property that it launched in January 2024 and is home to the “Open Door” product showcases as well as shopping selections hand-picked by AD’s own team, including Astley.

“The main overhaul that we look for this year is a lot more leaning into our staff picks, leaning more into the editors and to the designers, and integrating all the shopping content more fully across everything that we do,” said Astley.

Here are a few highlights from the conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity.

AD’s new commerce approach in 2025

We’ll tap into our our AD 100 designers, our AD PRO Directory designers and our own team here and really pump that up even more. We’re working on moving into the home-scent category, which isn’t a place that we’ve ever played in before. I’m excited to move into scent in April.

AD’s commerce operation

We have six people on our team. In 2021 when we started experimenting with commerce, we had like a half-head that we shared somewhere else in the company. We’re happily staffed at six now, which is bigger than last year. We have producers; we have e-commerce writers; we have one strategic person who really understands the whole lay of the land.

Commerce on Instagram

We’ve mainly experimented with [commerce] in Instagram Stories. And we haven’t run into resistance from readers or any particular issues with linking to it. I think it could be even more sophisticated than it currently is. If the shopping experience [on Instagram], someday you didn’t have to go off-site, [that] would be incredible. That would be sort of a dream.

Commerce on Pinterest

You’d expect to see AD popping on Pinterest boards because it’s such a visual brand, and it’s actually a good referral source. 

This article has been updated to reflect that Architectural Digest is owned by Condé Nast. A previous version incorrectly stated that Hearst owns the publication.