YouTube will finally let you hide popups at the end of videos

YouTube says it will now let viewers dismiss the popups and video suggestions that appear at the end of videos with a new "Hide" button. These end screen popups are a standard part of most YouTube videos, but the company says it received community feedback that viewers wanted to dismiss them so they "focus on the content they're watching."

If end screens are bothering you before the video you're watching has finished, you can now tap or click on a new Hide button in the top right corner of YouTube's video player to dismiss them. It's worth noting, though, that the setting only applies to the current video you're watching, so you'll have to tap on the Hide button again for each new video you watch. Even with that small annoyance, giving viewers the option is a positive change. End screens might improve a channel or videos metrics, but when they get in the way of watching, you should be able to hide them.

Alongside this new button, YouTube is also changing an interface element on the desktop version of the video platform. Now you'll no longer see a "Subscribe" button when you hover your mouse over a video's watermark — a feature that was already redundant because of the dedicated Subscribe button under each video.

YouTube claims neither of these changes will prevent video creators from adding things like end screens or watermarks if they want to, and the tweaks themselves only have a minor effect on the views or subscriptions a channel earns. "Giving users the option to hide end screens resulted in a less than 1.5 percent decrease in views from end screens," YouTube claims. Meanwhile, "less than ~0.05 percent of all channel subscriptions come from the hover-to-subscribe functionality on the video watermark," so removing the option isn't much of a loss.