Youtube Annotations Are Not Magic

Toward the end of last year Youtube released a document called the Youtube Creator Playbook. In it is a few pages of advice which you can basically find everywhere else online, but because this one was assembled by Google employees some Partners view it like some kind of holy scripture. 

Before it was publicly released Youtube Partner Support emailed it to a select few Partners, primarily those who attended invite only webinars. I believe the invitations were randomly selected from among Partner channels that were brand new, because I never received an invite on my jfreedan channel (my first and oldest Partner channel), only on my newer TheRPGFanatic and NinjaGKaiser channels. 

Anyway, one of the things they stress in the book and private webinars is to "curate your content". This means to use video annotations to alert someone watching one of your videos to other videos you have made. I actually made a video of my own detailing the process, which I created to show some friends how to do it.

As the title of this blog suggests, annotations have made very little impact on my views. This video itself has like 300 something views. As of this writing most of the videos on my channel have very few views, many less than 1,000.

The fault may lie in that Youtube allows users to permanently disable annotations in their account settings, and also that they can close annotations by clicking on X boxes located on the popups.

ANNOTATIONS ARE SUPER IMPORTANT FOR YOUTUBE SUCCESS!!!11 LET'S MAKE SURE THEY CAN BE DISABLED VERY EASILY!!

When my younger brother watches my videos the first thing he does is click my annotations off, because apparently it is terribly important that he sees what is going on in the very tippy top of the screen where nothing will ever be written or anything interesting ever occur.

I think if I ever met someone who told me he or she had a hand in writing the Youtube Creator Playbook, the very first thing I would ask is why can annotations be disabled if they are so very important for Partners to put on their videos? I suppose the answer might be, "Well if people couldn't do that some users might abuse annotations. They would flood a video with them so viewers can't see the video".

I've heard other Partners defend the decision with that explanation, so that's probably the reason.

But I think only someone who doesn't understand Youtube would say something like that; obviously, if the users cannot see the video they won't share it or watch the whole thing. They will probably not subscribe to that users' channel either. So technically speaking, if someone floods a video with annotations to where the viewer cannot see the video it only hurts the person abusing the annotations.

The rest of us who can use annotations responsibly should not be penalized because other people are stupid.

I really don't have much more to say about this topic.

I'm sure annotations help if you're getting tens of thousands of views to a video, but they make very little difference if you are still struggling to get a lot of views.

Or if, you know, someone set their account to never show them.

Thanks Google.

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