YouTube finally lets you hide recommendations at the end of videos

There is a lot to feel frustrated about in relation to YouTube, but Google has announced a change that helps to squash one of its annoyances.

While in-video ads are becoming increasingly difficult to avoid – short of paying for the privilege – there is now a way to hide “end screens”. These short snippets at the end of the video you have just watched are a form of advertising used by creators to promote their other content.

Even if you are not familiar with end screens by name, you will certainly have encountered them. In a YouTube support article for creators, Google describes them as follows:

End screens can be added to the last 5–20 seconds of a video. You can use them to promote other videos, encourage viewers to subscribe, and more. You can add up to four elements to your end screen for videos with standard 16:9 aspect ratio. Other aspect ratios may have a lower limit.

In what it is describing as a “improving the viewing experience on YouTube”, Google has announced the following change:

We're adding a "Hide" button that allows you to dismiss end screens on videos. If end screens show up when you have finished watching content, you can tap the “Hide” button in the top-right corner of the video player to hide them from the current video you’re watching

If these end screens have irked you, being able to avoid them will come as pleasing news. The news is not perfect however, as the last few words from Google, and the following two points make clear:

• Selecting this button will only hide end screens for the current video you’re watching - not for all videos.
• To bring end screens back, you can tap “Show” after they’re hidden.

For creators who are concerned about the impact of this, Google offers the following reassurance: “You can still add both end screens and watermarks to videos - these updates have no impact on your ability to do so!”.

Improving YouTube

The company also says that it has “closely analyzed the potential impact of the changes we’re introducing and we expect there to be minimal impact to your performance”. The statistics are as follows:

• Giving users the option to hide end screens resulted in a less than 1.5% decrease in views from end screens, based on a global experiment on mobile from March-July 2025
• Less than ~0.05% of all Channel subscriptions come from the hover-to-subscribe functionality on the video watermark, based on a global analysis of internal YouTube data on June 2, 2025

The option to avoid end screens is not the only change that Google is introducing – one of the Subscribe links is also being removed:

Separately, on desktop, we’re removing the Subscribe button that appears when you hover your cursor over a video's branded watermark.

Google explains the thinking behind this by saying:

Since there’s already a Subscribe button directly below the video player, we’re removing this additional Subscribe button to simplify and improve the viewing experience.

Google says that  the changes should help viewers to better concentrate on the videos they actually want to watch. This in turn should help to improve engagement, which is a win for viewers and creators alike.

Image credit: bilalulker / depositphotos