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Is there a setting or YouTube option, or maybe even a browser plugin, that allows you to disable video annotations for good?

I want to be able to switch them off permanently.

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1
  • Just to add, the selected answer below does work but only temporarily. It's possibly a bug with YouTube (which I have reported) but it has been an issue for a while so I don't know when/if it will be fixed.
    – DisgruntledGoat
    Nov 7, 2011 at 20:52

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
48

The option is found in the Account Playback settings:

  1. Click your profile picture and then YouTube settings
  2. Click Playback
  3. De-select Show annotations on videos
  4. Click Save
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  • 6
    Here's the link: youtube.com/account_playback
    – Tim Büthe
    Oct 21, 2013 at 21:01
  • 5
    Despite having this box unchecked, YouTube still seems to happily show all the annotations by default. I've had them disabled for years, and some YouTube update in the past year seems to have caused it to be ignored.
    – Jason C
    May 25, 2014 at 7:15
  • 1
    Doesn't work...
    – Physics_maths
    May 25, 2014 at 21:41
  • 1
    It works for me.
    – NoNameProvided
    Sep 11, 2015 at 13:47
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    You should make it clear that this is NOT actually permanent. Annotations ALWAYS get turned back on some time later, no matter how many times you "permanently" turn them off in settings.
    – DisgruntledGoat
    Jun 11, 2016 at 15:36
14

If you're like me and you don't want to help Google collect even more personal information about you by creating an account, you can still disable these annotations using an ad blocking extension that supports Adblock Plus-compatible filters and the following rule :

||youtube.com/annotations_
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5
  • if I could +1 you 1000 times, i would!!
    – hassan789
    May 24, 2015 at 3:48
  • This is the only thing that works for me now
    – Raystafarian
    Jun 6, 2016 at 9:00
  • This works without needing to log in to YouTube, wonderful!
    – Esteis
    Sep 28, 2016 at 11:55
  • For me, the "account playback settings" method worked even on embedded videos on 3rd party websites in Safari, but stopped working on other sites than youtube.com when I switched to Chrome. This took care of that.
    – Andreas
    Sep 27, 2018 at 13:13
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    This might be out of date. Filter lists like "Youtube: Other Annoyances" - easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/yt_annoyances_other.txt - are updated regularly. See for instance the list of filter lists here: github.com/uBlock-LLC/uBlock/wiki/…
    – Joshua Goldberg
    Apr 11, 2020 at 20:32

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