YouTube launches ‘end screens’ feature to increase viewership for all creators, available now

After opening up early testing for a handful of creators over the past couple of months, YouTube has today opened up a new feature for all content creators ─ “end screens.”

This new feature is specially designed to encourage viewers to continue watching content from that creator and subscribe to their channel.

To do that, end screens can appear during the last 20 seconds of a video (as little as 5 seconds) and can show up to four elements. Creators can promote their own videos or encourage users to subscribe to their channels, or they can point viewers to other videos, channels, websites, or crowdfunding campaigns. Unlike the previously used annotations, end screens work on most YouTube platforms, most importantly on mobile apps and the mobile web.

How do they work? In the last 5-20 seconds of your videos, you can now choose to show hard-to-miss thumbnail overlays that prompt viewers to watch your other videos, subscribe to your channel, visit collaborators’ channels, and more. 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.

Creators will also be able to view analytics on these end screens through standard YouTube analytics and the YouTube Creator Studio application. As mentioned, the feature is available now for all creators.