YouTube have announced they’re killing annotations on videos. Instead, creators will have to use cards which are structured clickable links that appears at the end of your video, rather than the wild west that was annotations, many of which were miss-used by authors.
They can inform your viewers about other videos, merch, playlists, websites and more. They look as beautiful as your videos, are available anytime during the video and yes, they finally work on mobile.
Right now, you can choose from six types of cards: Merchandise, Fundraising, Video, Playlist, Associated Website and Fan Funding. You’ll find a new “Cards” tab in your Video Editor to create and edit them at any time.
Annotations Editor launched in 2008, since then, the world has increasingly moved to consuming content on mobile devices. A massive 60% of YouTube’s watchtime is now on mobile.There could be big wins for you as a content creator, with YouTube claiming End Screens and Cards generate 7x more clicks across YouTube than annotations.
The most damming piece of data comes around the fact that on average viewers close 12 annotations before they click on one of them.
The time has come for annotations to go away, so if you’re creating new content, it’s a great idea to start moving now.
Here’s a tutorial video on how to use Cards on YouTube.
This tutorial shows you how to add end screens to the last 5-20 seconds of your videos.
