Posted by Jed Lewison on Sun Oct 12, 2008 at 4:22 PM Pacific

Will Annotations Be The End of YouTube's Dominance?

This post has nothing to do with the campaign, at least not directly; it does, however, concern YouTube, which has played a powerful role in the campaign.

You may be aware of a new YouTube feature called "annotations." You may not have yet seen an annotation, but if you have, they are those little gray overlays on YouTube videos, typically urging you to visit a website, to subscribe to the channel of whoever posted video, or just to another watch video.

In  my view, these annotations are just about the video equivalent of the <BLINK> tag. I say just about because when used sparingly, they can serve a valuable purpose. But almost every time that I've seen them used, they have been overdone, and really do kill the video experience.

In addition to being garish, annotations also present another problem: bait-n-switch. For example (hyopethically speaking), if I'm a blogger and I embed a YouTube video, the person who posted that video can decide to add annotations after I embed the video; those annotations might drive traffic away from my blog, or they might contain messages that I don't want to see on my blog.

In other words, once you embed the video, the video can change; the implication of this is that you are going to be reluctant to embed videos from unknown providers. (I know that I already am.) When you know what you're going to get, there's no such reluctance; but when you don't know what you're going to get, there is such reluctance.

I suppose YouTube could get around this problem by offering embedders a way to turn off annotations. This strikes me as a mandatory feature, in fact. But it is sort of odd that YouTube would release a new feature -- annotations -- which most embedders are going to want to disable.

I'm going to go out on a limb and predict that one of two things will happen:

1. YouTube will publicize a mechanism to allow embedders to turn off annotations (I'm sure there is a hack to do it now), in which case annotations will prove to be a useless detour.
2. YouTube won't allow  (or publicize, if there is a mechanism now) embedders to turn off annotations, in which case over time, only high-profile, trusted channels will be broadly embedded, striking a dagger in the heart of YouTube's democratic ethos.

Who knows...I might be overthinking this. But I do get the sense that Google and YouTube have underthought the implications of annotations. In general, I will say that they are fairly closed off; even as a highly trafficked channel, I've never had any interaction with them. Probably they would be well served by staying in closer touch with their user base, because as they should well know, things can change almost overnight on the Internet.