YouTube finally lets you hide annoying end-screen pop-ups
It could give viewers a distraction-free way to finish YouTube videos.
If you’ve ever tried to watch the last 10 seconds of a YouTube video only to have the screen carpet-bombed with “watch this next!” pop-ups, relief is finally here. YouTube says it's adding a “hide” button for end screens, letting you dismiss recommendations so you can actually see how a video ends.
There’s one catch, though, the hide option only applies to the video you’re currently watching. If you want to remove end screens on another video, you’ll need to tap the button again. Even so, it’s a welcome fix for one of the platform’s most annoying quirks.
At the same time, YouTube is also removing the “subscribe” hover button that appeared when you moused over a channel watermark on desktop. The company says the move simplifies the interface since the large red Subscribe button beneath every video already does the job.
Oyinebiladou Omemu
Neither change is expected to have a big impact on creators. In testing, giving viewers the ability to hide end screens only reduced view-through rates by about 1.5%. And the hover-to-subscribe feature accounted for less than 0.05% of total subscriptions across the platform. YouTube is betting that the cleaner experience will outweigh those small hits.
Taken together, these tweaks point to a broader shift in how YouTube is trying to shape the viewing experience of its ~2.5 billion users.
In recent years, the company has stripped away the public dislike counter, tested longer unskippable ads, experimented with AI-generated video summaries, and retooled the homepage to feel more like TikTok’s “For You” feed than the old subscriber grid. These aren’t isolated updates and are likely all part of a larger push to control not just what you watch, but how you watch it.
Overall, the pattern we're seeing here is that YouTube is no longer just the place where videos live but is also an active curator of attention, constantly fine-tuning friction points, deciding how much control to give, or take away, from viewers, and optimizing every second to feed its wider ecosystem of ads, Shorts, and subscriptions.
So yes, hiding end screens may feel like a small win for viewers. But it’s also a glimpse into YouTube’s next phase; where even the tiniest UX change has the power to shape how billions of people experience video online.
Louis Eriakha
