YouTube will finally allow you to hide the pop-up recommendations that appear at the end of videos. The company announced this new feature on Wednesday. Now, when an end screen appears, you can tap a new “Hide” button in the top-right corner of the video player to remove the pop-ups from the current video you are watching.
Selecting this button will only hide the end screens for the video you are currently watching, not for all videos on the platform. If you change your mind and want to see the end screen again, you can tap a “Show” button to bring it back.
The decision to let users hide end screens is a welcome addition. These pop-ups can sometimes cover the last part of a video, making it difficult to see what is happening.
In another change, the company is removing the Subscribe button that appears when you hover your cursor over a video’s branded watermark. YouTube explains that this is because there is already a Subscribe button directly below the video player, making the hover feature redundant.
YouTube says it is launching these new features in response to user feedback. Many people expressed a desire to minimize distractions on videos so they could focus more easily on the content they are watching.
For creators, YouTube notes that they will still have the option to add end screens to their videos. The company expects these changes to have a minimal impact on creators’ performance and view counts.
For instance, YouTube found in an experiment that giving users the option to hide end screens resulted in a decrease of less than 1.5% in views generated from those end screens. Additionally, the company found that less than 0.05% of all channel subscriptions come from the hover-to-subscribe functionality on the video watermark.