Some YouTube creators use end screens to promote their YouTube channel videos. These recommendation panels are shown during the final 20 seconds of a video, and the creators are allowed to include recommended videos, playlists, or subscribe buttons.
Until now, there was no way to remove these overlays. However, YouTube has finally added a feature to hide end screen recommendations when they become annoying.
It’s important to note that YouTube is not removing end screens entirely. Creators can still use them to promote content, but users can now hide them if they want. The new feature does not provide a permanent setting, so you will need to hide recommendations one video at a time.
How to Remove End Screen Recommendations
YouTube announced the new Hide button through a support document. Here’s how it works.
- When end screen recommendations appear, you will see a Hide button in the top-right corner of the video player.
- Tap or click the button, and the end screens will disappear.
- If you want to see the recommendations again, click on the Show button.
With this update, YouTube will also remove the hover-to-subscribe watermark button, which previously allowed users to subscribe by hovering their cursor over a channel watermark.
According to YouTube’s internal testing, allowing users to hide end screens only minimally decreased views on recommended content by less than 1.5% and fewer than 0.05% of subscriptions came from the watermark hover feature. YouTube felt that it would be worth the user experience improvement with minimal impact on the creators.
The support page does not mention the exact release date, but YouTube already tested the Hide button globally between March and July.
