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YouTube To Discontinue Video Annotations Because They Never Worked On Mobile (theverge.com)
You know those notes found plastered on many YouTube videos, often asking for you to "CLICK TO SUBSCRIBE?" Well, they're called annotations and they're being replaced with what YouTube calls "End Screen and Cards," which are mobile-friendly tools that let content creators poll their audience, link to merchandise, recommend videos, and more. Unlike annotations, they work on mobile and are designed to be less obnoxious to viewers. The Verge reports: YouTube says it made this change primarily because annotations didn't work on mobile and most viewers found them obnoxious and unhelpful. The change takes effect on May 2nd, and existing annotations will continue to show up when using the desktop browser version of YouTube. YouTube annotations have felt increasingly outdated and out of place. The small text boxes were meant as a way to let creators link to other videos, write in little jokes, and add ancillary information to a video much like a hyperlink or footnote of sorts. But over the years, annotation use has drastically fallen off, by 70 percent, YouTube product manager Muli Salem says. In fact, a majority of viewers interact with annotations only to close them, so the boxes don't obstruct the video screen. Many users turn them off altogether. So now YouTube is investing entirely in End Screens and Cards, and making both tools easier to use and faster to implement.
YouTube is moving from something that is annoying but at least only is found on desktops to something equally annoying that is -thank god- cross platform. Try hitting that close button on a 5.5" screen with your thumb.
They also didn't work with Chromecast, but I doubt the new solution does any better. Is it really that hard to design a system that allows for interactivity on devices connected to the Chromecast queue?
WTF does that mean? Are they talking about Android? Why don't they just say so. They work on iOS just fine, some I'm not sure why they are pussy-footing around identifying the broken platform.
They mean Android, not "mobile". Why not just say that?
This summary sounds written by a corporate marketer or something. Why not just throw "synergistic" in there for shits and giggles?
On a phone or when you make your screen or window small, they can (and frequently do) obscure a lot of the image, so people delete them, whereas on a full screen they only impact a small section, so people tend to let them stay.
On the phone, sometimes they make it so you can't even see a lot of the image, and clicking is more problematic (touch) and error prone, so people just delete the whole streamed video.
This is why sales/ad people should never control the end-user interface, but instead tech/marketing people, who understand how things work.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Wasn't there some 'choose your own adventure' game on Youtube, abusing those annotation links?
http://www.adweek.com/digital/...
"Shortly after Youtube announced annotations"
Well, there goes that platform :(
Why aren't you encrypting your e-mail?
How much are they investing? Is it to late to buy in?
You seem to be using a novel definition of "delete" I am unfamiliar with. Might you be meaning. "move on to another video"? Or perhaps you are referring to content creators?
Nope!
Video site shocked when people just want to use it to watch the damn video.
Annotations are 1990's technology that YouTube and browsers still can't get right.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I've seen videos this evening where people point at the channel annotation. Unless youtube is rolling out only to videos freshly uploaded, way to break content )-:
The Dark Room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"You awake to find yourself in a dark room."
I've fond memories of an evening well-spent navigating the many corners of that particular maze. I want to hear more about the war between electricity and steam...
Generally speaking, the first thing that I do when I watch any Youtube video is to turn off annotations and change the speed to 125%. For some slow talkers, I change the speed to 150%. This is to try to get close to the speed that I would have read the same information had the video just be a textual website.
As for the annotations, 99% of them are useless, annoying popups that distract me from the video. I can't imagine that the end screens and cards would be any more relevant.
Incorrect captcha slowed me down =(
(or your equivalent of choice)
Fuck everything about the broken, annoying youtube player and experience, and in fact fuck streaming video in general. I'll wait the couple extra minutes to get a local mp4 file that I can play in VLC with no annotations, ads (not that those are a problem anyway), buffering, or unspecified "errors" randomly "occurring" that force me to refresh the entire page.
Now Google just needs to require manufacturers to add the following feature to Android phones.
Every time the video recorder is turned on and not turned horizontal within 5 seconds, the person holding the phone should receive a small electrical shock. Not a big shock mind you, a small shock that is strong enough to modify the behavior, but small enough that it doesn't drain the battery too much.
I would even be willing to concede that this feature should be disabled when the phone is in power-saving mode.
I'm surprised no one at Google ever managed to get annotations to work on mobiles. Still, they found a workaround to port these "obnoxious and unhelpful" additions to mobile platforms... Sidenote : logged in users can disable notifications display in their youtube settings.
End screens are used at the end of the video to show you other videos you might want to watch. The video is essentially over at this point. The old way of doing this was to embed previews of the videos into your video and then put annotations over them so they become clickable. This was time consuming and there was no way to change what videos were being promoted once the video was uploaded. Now you can create an end screen with just a few clicks and swap out the videos if the need arises. They work, too, which is why people would go to all that trouble before. The click-through-rate on the end screen elements on my channel is around 2.5% overall. That includes the subscribe button that is hardly ever clicked. Some are as high as 10%.
End Cards can be hidden using the following blocker rule:
www.youtube.com##.ytp-ce-element
Its because TVs and Monitors are usually landscape oriented, and they feel the need to have the content take up the whole screen.
I used them to mark time and areas in a video to show a doctor certain movements and behaviors, to help diagnose my parkinsonian disorder. But hey! Cell phones are all that matter, I guess..
didn't they just fix their mobile device to use annotations?
Sure, many were annoying, but what do you do now to indicate corrections?
Annotations should be turned off my default. They can be extremely useful in some cases, there's no sensible reason to throw out a useful feature when it can easily be prevented from annoying anyone just by having it require a click to enable it. Unfortunately, killing useful things because they've gotten a little less popular is google's standard method of operation.
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A lot of times when I watched a video and someone has made a typo or something, or just spoken a factual error and used a YouTube annotation to alert the viewer to the known error, thinking "they should've re-uploaded the video. This annotation is totally reliant on a proprietary YouTube technology."
Aaaand now they have. There are gonna be a bunch of mistakes being un-fixed now.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Until a year or so ago, I assumed those annotations were ads and ignored them.
nobody has an actual end screen edited in so they end up obscuring the last 20 seconds of content.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
On the videos I watch annotations usually serve two useful purpose :
- Linking to other videos in a series, or to videos that explain some point of detail or prerequisite. Ex: this video explains how LIGO discovered gravitational waves. If you are unfamiliar with gravitational waves, watch this video first.
- Fixing mistakes, Ex : trappist-1 is 12 light years away (correction : 12 parsecs).
Can you move them to the end too please.