The little text boxes that often pop up on top of YouTube videos are called annotations. Google has confirmed that it will be removing all annotations from YouTube videos on January 15th, 2019. This follows the earlier decision to discontinue the annotations editor back in May 2017.
The annotations editor was discounted for YouTube in May 2017. The company said at that time that it had made this decision because the feature’s use had dropped by 70 percent. Therefore, it didn’t really make any sense to keep it around when it wasn’t being used.
When the annotations editor was discontinued, users couldn’t make and add any new annotations to their videos on the world’s most popular online video streaming website. Google has now confirmed on its support site that it would be removing all existing annotations from videos on January 15th, 2019.
This may cause a few problems for content creators on YouTube. They used annotations to make additions to a video like correcting a mistake or adding a link as it was really the only way to add new content to a YouTube video once it was posted.
Google will remove those annotations on January 15th and the videos would be left without those corrections. The company wants creators to rely more on end screens and cards for this purpose because they work on mobile devices by default, not to mention that they look good as well.
Filed in . Read more about Google and YouTube. Source: support.google