YouTube Cards Will Replace Pop-ups

Have you ever noticed that when you check out a video on YouTube, there are more than the occasional pop-ups, which suddenly appear, wanting you to subscribe to the channel, or maybe look at another video from that channel. In this day and age, pop-ups are not people’s favourite form of communication. The guys over at YouTube have been paying attention and are doing something about the issue.

As of this week, the streaming video service have announced Cards to replace pop-ups, or ‘annotations’ as YouTube like to call them.

The Cards are going to come in six different styles: Merchandise, Fundraising, Video, Playlist, Associated Website and Fan Funding. It is obvious from the names of the styles that they each have their own look and feel that is based upon what the video creator is trying to accomplish.

YouTube’s overseer, Google, have put it this way; Cards are “like an evolution of annotations”.  So it looks like they are trying to market the new idea as an evolutionary step, rather than a replacement product. Google’s blog gives us the following info:

“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.”

The new Cards format should be much cleaner for viewing on mobile devices, and definitely adopts Google’s ‘everything in card format’ visual presentation. It will likely prove a welcome move away from the annotations we see on the desktop, too.

If you haven’t checked out some video content in a while, why not head over to YouTube and check out the new Cards?

[Image marketingland]

SOURCE: Slash Gear