YouTube kills off video annotations in favor of mobile-friendly Cards and End Screens

Things are changing at YouTube. Having previously announced plans to drop 30-second unskippable ads from videos, Google has now also revealed that it will be dropping another annoyance -- the annotations that blight many videos and distract from the actual content. Annotations have generally been used to link to related material, push merchandize and so on, but there has been something of an issue: annotations are not very mobile-friendly. Google says that Cards (which can be displayed at any point during a video) and End Screens (which, funnily enough, appear at the end) provide the same functionality as annotations, work… [Continue Reading]