YouTube announced this week that they are discontinuing a number of tools that they’ve deemed to be no longer useful. One of the tools that’s set to be cut is YouTube’s in-video notifications.
If you do not already know, in-video notifications are the small black bars that sometimes pop up and display while a video on YouTube is playing to offer external links to viewers. The links usually direct you to streaming sites, like Twitch, YouNow and MLG.
The decision to discontinue in-video notifications came because YouTube found that viewers are more likely to click on links presented by card notifications and end screens than by links from in-video notifications. “Only one in twenty people click on the suggested link,” reads the post. “Even worse, for the small percentage of users who do click on the link, they’re often taken to a live stream that no longer exists. As a result, many fans complain that it feels like spam.”
YouTube killing in-video notifications may be great news to some YouTube users because they can be annoying, but it could cause some problems for content creators who’ve created their videos with in-video notifications in mind. The notifications will not only be discontinued from future use, videos that used it in the past will lose them as well. This means if a YouTuber happened to point to a in-video link in past video, those notifications won’t be there and that YouTuber will just be pointing to empty air.
The in-video notifications will become permanently unavailable on December 14, and there’s probably a good amount of YouTubers who have incorporated those notifications into their video performances dreading that day.
