Miss the glory days of YouTube? I sympathize with you. One thing that I hate about YouTube is Ads. But not more than I hate ads. If you’ve used the web version or even on a mobile application, you’ve endured both. YouTube announced today they will be getting rid of both, somewhat.
The new feature will allow creators of videos to inform their viewers about other videos, playlists, websites, and the like. Although the cards look to be more aesthetically pleasing than those annoying pop-up ads, as well as more intrusive, it’s all the same to me. The older version of YouTube had a big text bubble pop up in the middle of videos which ranged from people fundraising, to annoying “click here for more” buttons.
Google explained in their release why cards will be something we all like:
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.
So essentially (at least for right now) it is possible to manually disable them, but I’m sure this feature will not last long. I will admit the interface looks nice, and I appreciate the overall improvement of YouTube, but it’s only a matter of time before we are all spammed with VEVO and Google Plus invites.
Source: YouTube Blog