Starting in early 2019, Google will remove annotations from YouTube videos, even existing ones. Videomakers, however, already have replacement tools
Titles for YouTube video annotations and it’s not just a play on words: Google has in fact announced that “annotations” will disappear for good starting January 15, 2019 and those that already exist will be removed from the videos in which they were included. The announcement is contained in a very short update of an old page of the online support for YouTube annotations.
Thus ends the long history of this YouTube feature that for several years had many admirers but that today, with the increasing use of Big G’s video platform from smartphones, no longer makes sense.
What are YouTube annotations
The annotations were born back in 2008 and are those rectangles that you sometimes see in YouTube videos, but only on desktop because this feature has never been enabled on the mobile app. In those rectangles the creator of the video could insert, using a special editor, text or even links. They were very useful, for example, to make corrections in post-production with respect to what was stated in the video, or to take the user to external sites such as online stores or the video creator’s blog. Back in May 2017, however, Google had removed the editor for annotations, effectively preventing the creation of new ones and suggesting that they be replaced with other features: credits and cards. The old annotations, however, remained visible.
Cards and credits remain
Unlike annotations, cards and credits are visible and usable on smartphones and allow Google to limit their use to specific purposes. The tabs, for example, can be a maximum of 5 in a single video and are only of 5 types: Channel, Donations, Links (available only for channels in the Partner program), Polls, Playlists.
The credits, on the other hand, can last between 5 and 20 seconds and contain a playlist, a request to subscribe to the channel, a link to approved sites (available only for channels in the Partner program) or the promotion of another YouTube channel. In this way, therefore, everything is more functional on mobile, more orderly and, above all, under the control of Google that in case of improper use of the most interesting features (i.e. links to external sites) can “threaten” the expulsion from the content monetization program. According to YouTube, however, despite these limitations, both tabs and credits are also an advantage for creators since they are clicked 7 times more than the old annotations that, on the contrary, very often were closed by the user who considered them invasive and annoying.