Eighteen months ago Google removed the annotations editor from YouTube. Today, I logged into the YouTube editor and saw an announcement that Google is going to remove all existing annotations from YouTube videos on January 15th. Google states that viewers don’t like annotations and typically close twelve of them for every one that they do interact with.

What this means for you:
If you never used YouTube annotations, this means nothing to you.
If you used YouTube annotations to make a linked series of videos or a choose-your-own adventure series, all of those links will be broken on January 15th.

Personally, I’m disappointed by this because I always felt that using annotations was a great way to build a choose-your-own-adventure series of videos. Google suggests using end screens and cards as an alternative to annotations, but it’s not quite the same.