YouTube Plans To End Annotations In Favor Of Cards And End Screens

Google has announced its plan to end the ability for YouTube video creators to use annotations, in favor of Cards and End screens. Video creators use Annotations to advertise their other videos, highlight corrections or for any other number of alerts and announcements.

Google has decided to scrap the YouTube Annotations Editor from May 2, 2017. The company says, they have brought many improvement to Cards and End Screens and is pushing video creators to keep their fans engaged using Cards and End screens.

Now, Cards allows you to link to videos within a playlist and End Screens gained the ability to import End Screens from other videos and use smart elements.

From Google,

As adoption of End Screens and Cards has grown, the use of annotations has decreased by over 70 percent. For this reason, the time has come to discontinue Annotations Editor. Effective starting May 2, you’ll no longer be able to add new or edit existing annotations, only delete them. Existing annotations will continue to show when using a desktop computer. We wanted to give you advanced notice so you can adjust.

• End Screens and Cards work on mobile: Annotations Editor launched in 2008, before the world went mobile. With 60 percent of YouTube’s watchtime now on mobile, why go through the work of creating annotations that won’t even reach the majority of your audience? End Screens and Cards work on mobile and desktop, giving you more bang for your buck.
• End Screens and Cards are more engaging for your viewers: End Screens and Cards generate seven times more clicks across YouTube than annotations. In fact, viewers generally don’t love annotations, and on average they close 12 annotations before they click on one of them. And more and more viewers turn off annotations altogether.
• End Screens are easier to create: You told us that adding annotations at the end of your videos is hard. With End Screens that process is now much quicker and easier – in fact, up to ten times quicker. You can now import End Screens from other videos or use dynamic overlays to save yourself even more time.

Source