YouTube Video Annotations

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~ the eulogy ~

Almost nobody who used annotations knew they were called that. What you knew was the small white box that slid over the corner of the frame near the end of a video, and the reflex of hitting the tiny x before it covered somebody's face. That reflex lasted ten years and it belonged to everyone with a browser, which includes me.

YouTube shipped them in June 2008 and the pitch at the time was interactive storytelling. The tooling was genuinely open. Any uploader could draw a box anywhere on the timeline, type text into it, and point it at another video or at a timestamp. No code and no approval queue.

What made annotations structural rather than decorative is that the box was a link. Before them a video was a closed object you watched and then left. Annotations put a navigable surface on top of the picture, and for ten years YouTube was, briefly and by accident, a hypertext system.

~ the dossier ~

~ what people made with them ~

The obvious use was the subscribe nag, and that is the one everybody remembers because it is the one that annoyed them. The interesting use was navigation. People built choose-your-own-adventure films where every ending was a separate upload, and games spread across hundreds of videos that only made sense if you clicked in the right order.

Barack Paper Scissors ran to fifteen levels across more than a thousand videos. Shout Factory used annotations to layer commentary onto Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes. The Movieclips channel carried them across upward of thirty thousand videos that had been watched eighteen billion times between them.

~ why they could not survive the phone ~

The failure was architectural and it was visible from about 2012 onward. An annotation is a rectangle positioned in the coordinate space of a desktop Flash player. There is no sane way to reproduce that on a four-inch touchscreen or inside a television app, and YouTube's answer was to stop trying.

Cards and end screens arrived as the replacement and they are better products by every measure YouTube cares about. They render on a phone, and the company said they were clicked seven times more often than annotations had been. They are also not a general-purpose overlay. You can put an approved kind of link in an approved place, which is a very different thing from being able to draw on your own video.

~ the fifteenth of january ~

The editor went first. From 2 May 2017 nobody could create a new annotation and only deletion was left, which is the two-year holding pattern that always precedes this kind of ending. At 15:00 UTC on 15 January 2019 every annotation that had ever been published stopped rendering.

Nothing was migrated. There was no export, and no way for a creator to see what their own overlays had said. The videos are all still sitting there and every link that connected them is gone, so thousands of interactive projects now play as raw footage with pauses in them where a choice used to be.

~ the dead layer ~

Working on software teaches you that the metadata layer goes first, because it is the part that costs money to render and produces nothing anyone measures. The video files were the asset. The annotations were an index sitting beside them in a separate store, and when the store was switched off the asset was untouched and unreadable in the only way that mattered.

The ending is better than most. A volunteer effort scraped annotation data for roughly 1.4 billion videos before the deadline and handed it to the Internet Archive, where it still sits. Browser extensions and alternative front ends read from that dump and draw the boxes back onto old videos. The layer YouTube deleted is now a third-party file that a few thousand people keep alive.

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