YouTube to clutter up videos with new interactive cards

16 Mar 2015

YouTube has come up with a new way of fouling up your videos as well as annotations with new interactive cards, which will be a marketer’s dream but a viewer’s nightmare.

Until now if you’ve tried to watch a video chock-full of annotations you needed sniper-like accuracy just to click on the ‘X’ to see what you’re looking at.

Now the new interactive cards will take up even more real estate.

“You can think of cards like an evolution of annotations,” said YouTube product manager Muli Salem.

“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.”

Yes, you read that correctly – evolved annotations are coming to mobile, so there’s no getting away from them.

Annotations are dead, long live annotations!

“Because cards work across mobile and desktop and give you more flexibility to share what you want, our goal is to have these eventually replace annotations.

“But this will happen only once they can do everything annotations can do today, and more.

“Until then, we’re looking forward to your feedback on cards, including what you want them to do for you in the future,” Salem said.

John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com