Youtube has now officially announced a new feature for video creators, christened ‘End Screens’. And as the name suggests, this special feature allows creators to add a slew of videos towards the end of their videos, to keep users watching more of their content.
In even simpler terms, End Screens is a new mobile-friendly tool that lets you engage viewers right as your video finishes and encourages them to watch more on their devices. This feature will simply put thumbnails at the end of the videos which could be used to pop up a few options like “Subscribe” or link to other videos.
How do they work? In the last 5-20 seconds of their videos, creators can now choose to show hard-to-miss thumbnail overlays that prompt viewers to, subscribe to their channel, watch their other videos, visit collaborators’ channels, and more. But hey, wasn’t ‘Annotations’ on desktop doing the same ? Yes it was, but End Screens are going to make that task a whole lot easier.
Youtube’s Product Manager Muli Salem explains,
Currently, many creators use Annotations, a desktop-only tool that allows you to add clickable links to your videos, to manually create end screens. This will no longer be necessary, as the new End Screens are not only easier to create, but also allow you to reach more viewers on desktop and mobile.
After testing End Screens with a number of creators, we’ve incorporated feedback to make the tool work even better. We couldn’t be happier to make it available to every creator on YouTube.
These end screens are an addition after Youtube more recently, came up with cards. The only difference between the two, is the fact that cards can be displayed during the video playback while end screens come, at anytime between 5-20 seconds of the end of the video.
At the end of video, these endscreens come up, hovering upon which, users will see an expanded card with more information about the content in the end screen thumbnail. These end screens could be skipped if the video is playing in the background. Youtube further adds that these screens could be put at any position on the screen, depending upon the kind of device user is using.
As for creators, all sorts of performance analytics are available in the creators studio. Creators can keep a comprehensive check on how many viewers are interacting with the end screens and watching videos on them.
Youtube on its part, is obviously introducing this to get more viewers on its mobile app. While Youtube once had an almost pure domination in the video domain, it has lately been challenged intensely by Facebook, which is continuing to stress upon videos. Facebook receives billions of views already, despite the company not pushing videos as a standalone product as of now.
