Online Social Media

Why are related videos now appearing on my YouTube video?

Related videos
Poor relation: related videos are no longer optional

If you have YouTube videos embedded on your website then you may find that – unlike before – they now have related videos appearing on them. Needless to say, YouTube has changed things and it’s causing confusion.

Back in August, YouTube announced the following

The behavior for the rel parameter is changing on or after September 25, 2018. The effect of the change is that you will not be able to disable related videos.

When adding a video to a website, you can specify a number of parameters on the end of the URL to control how the video appeared. One of these is rel, which controls how related videos are shown. Before this change, you could simply add rel=0 to turn off the related videos at the end. For example:

<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/EYs_FckMqow?rel=0"></iframe>

Now, this parameter (which can be set to 0 or 1) does the following:

0 – the player will show related videos that are from the same channel as the video that was just played
1 – the player will show related videos from any channel

And, no, there isn’t an alternative. If you don’t want related videos on your YouTube video then, sadly, you’re out of luck.

But that’s not all. YouTube has now completely deprecated the showinfo parameter. This indicated whether the player should display information such as the video’s title and uploader before the video starts playing. Now, the channel avatar and video title will always display before playback begins, when playback is paused, and when playback ends.

Suck it up, folks.

Now read this: Is it legal to download YouTube videos?

About the author

David Artiss

Works for Automattic Inc., the company behind WordPress.com and Tumblr. Tech geek, international speaker and occasional PC Pro podcaster. Lover of Lego and video games.

Add Comment

Click here to post a comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.