YouTube is having their very first live-streaming event on the 22nd of this month in San Francisco. Notable YouTube celebrities will be in attendance as well as mainstream celebs. It’s gaining quite a bit of hype amongst the YouTube community, and will likely be a great success. However, a new method of promoting the event is causing headaches for YouTube marketers all around the world!

In a previous post, I went into detail about how you can use annotations to significantly boost the CTR (click-through rate) of your videos. Your #1 priority should be getting people to your videos, but your #2 priority is to get them to click to your site!

Now, the trouble here is that YouTube decided to place a little advertisement above (what appears to be) every single non-content partner video on YouTube. So, this applies to the general public and most likely every single YouTube marketer.

For those of us that had hundreds of videos up with annotations pointing perfectly at the URL in the description, this is bad news. Now all of our convenient little annotations point at the completely wrong place. I will show you an example:

To make matters worse, not all of the YouTube Live advertisements are the same size. So, even if you wanted to (which I certainly don’t), you wouldn’t be able to go through and edit all of your annotations correctly (because you never know which size ad is going to pop up).

Hopefully this will only last until the event and things will get back to normal. Otherwise, we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board with annotations!

By the way, while I’ve got your attention…I’ve talked a lot about ways to switch up your videos to avoid YouTube detecting them as duplicate content. Another great way to go about that is to use images within your video. The beauty of it is that you can steal those, too! But seriously, throwing in a couple pictures here and there will break up the videos footprint and help its chances of sticking. Obviously relevant images are ideal. Check out Banksy Poster for some cool artwork.