It’s great to have an ad on Youtube that gets views, but it’s important to consider where your viewers go next. Here an ad for a cruise planning company is followed by suggestions of videos of crashing planes:  

So why is that a problem?

Three things;

• Crashing planes: not very good for the holiday spirit.
• You lose viewers: They’re likely t0 click on a link with a pretty compelling graphic like that. That’s your marketing dollars out of the door.
• No clickable link to the website of the company. They did pay for overlays but they pop up while you’re watching. You can add a clickable link right under your video by simply putting in your URL in the text box.

But wait a minute; you can’t turn those off!

It’s annoying, but you can’t Youtube’s default related videos” function on your Youtube channel. However, there is a hack. You can delay the related videos from playing by tweaking annotation. Bear with me:

• Sign in to your YouTube channel.
• On the top right corner click on your channel’s name, then click Video Manager.
• Select the video you’d like to change, then click “Edit”
Along the top bar above the video player select “Annotations”, the hit thebutton called + Add Annotation.
• Once you clicked that, select “Pause” from the dropdown.
 On the bottom of the page you’ll see a screen that lets you input the length of the pause by inputting time or dragging the red bar: just input a ludicrously long time, and tada: no pesky crashing planes at the end of your holiday video.

Or just use Vimeo; no pop ups, no ads and a lot more control. But that’s another blog post.          

Written by robert · July 07 · Blog