YouTube annotations to be a thing of past after January 15, 2019

YouTube watches are familiar with the translucent boxes that you always rush to disable every time they appear in the video. These annotations will finally be disappeared for good from January 15, 2019. The YouTube support page has said, after the mentioned date, all the annotations will be removed. The search engine giant has announced that it will stop showing the existing video annotations that were not so welcome by the regular YouTube viewers.

Moreover, the announcement was made very quietly as it came as an update to the previous statement that Google discontinued the annotations editor as of May 2, 2017. Meanwhile, YouTube users are still happy to use the cards and end screens that adapt much better to different displays and are less obtrusive when they are compared to annotations. There are doubts that many users will not be happy after January 15, 2019. The annotations were introduced in 2008 and quickly gained popularity as the ways to highlight the related videos and direct people to the online stores, make corrections in the videos and everything in between.

The only problem with annotations was that some of the videos had too much of them and would result in a visual clutter. Moreover, that did not help that the use of annotations came down by 70% by the time Google had decided to discontinue the annotations editor. In order to replace annotations YouTube launched two interfaces in 2016: end screens and cards. The cards had showed up as small pop up on the top corner while end screens showed up at the end of videos to highlight a YouTube user’s channel and any links that they want to highlight.

The cards and end screens allowed a cleaner viewing experience but they also generated seven times more clicks across YouTube and worked well on mobile. Annotations do not show up on the mobile YouTube app.

Photo Credits: Google Chrome