YouTube Video Annotations Will Be Officially Discarded In Early 2019

Indira Datta - Dec 01, 2018

YouTube is officially saying goodbye to video annotations.

The world's largest video website announced that in January next year, the annotation feature will be officially discontinued.

Annotations have been around for almost ten years

This was not unexpected because, in May 2017, YouTube removed the ability to create and edit existing annotations on the video. However, the annotations previously created still exist and remain in place on the video.

Recently, YouTube has officially announced that since January 15, 2019, annotations on existing videos will be deleted and will no longer show up. This obviously does not affect recent videos recently. This decision comes after the world most popular video platform noticed that the number of people seeing marked-up videos has decreased.

YouTube says the video annotations feature is only available on desktop computers, but nowadays more and more people are watching YouTube on mobile devices, and this feature is less commonly used. According to YouTube research, up to 70% of YouTube watch time comes from mobile devices.

It is known that annotation allows video publishers to insert text layers, links, and even pointers into the video. In June 2008, the world largest video websites added this feature to its site for video uploaders. This tool includes a video editor on the side and a list of annotations on the other side.

Then, in March 2015, interactive tags, a small "i" circle icon located at the top right corner of the video, were released. Click on that icon, there will be a small interactive panel displaying the information that the video posters want their viewers to see. This helps video producers to get the information they want to reach viewers while helping viewers get less interrupted.

The departure of footnotes in YouTube videos is clearly a good thing. It reduces distraction while watching videos. Removing this annotation feature cleans up the video viewing experience on the desktop. This is also the removal of the last exclusive feature for the desktop version of YouTube.