YouTube Will Be Ending Video Response Feature on September 12th

According to a recent post on the YouTube Creator blog, it appears that you will no longer be able to create a video response to YouTube videos. The video response was originally meant to encourage fan engagement and community interaction, but for years it has been used by spammers to promote their own channel or website. If you cant remember that last time you watched a YouTube video response, you aren’t the only one. As it turns out, only four out of every one million users who see a video response actually click on it. That works out to a click-through rate of .0004%, which is pretty bad. Any video responses you made will still be available and discoverable.

“Video responses are going away. On September 12th well be sunsetting the video response feature, and video responses will no longer be shown below the video player. Video responses are rarely played (the click-through rate on video responses is 0.0004%), so we’re investing in new, more effective engagement features instead.”

Is this a big deal? More than likely not as the YouTube team is reportedly working on enabling video links in comments. Doing this in comments will let creators and viewers interact better and hopefully drive more engagement.