YouTube Now Lets You Remove its Logo From Video Player – For Better or For Worse

In a small but significant move this afternoon, Google’s YouTube announced two new features that will make it all the more attractive to serious video publishers: HD preview images and the ability to remove the YouTube logo from the player.

Online video is growing fast and business publishers have a lot of choices for places to host their video. YouTube has scale like no one else – but it’s not been quite as classy as some other options. The ability to remove the YouTube logo by simply adding ?modestbranding=1 after the URL in a player embed code is both generous and wise. All for free!

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Above, an immodest YouTube player and below, a modest one. It’s much nicer without the YouTube logo on it – but removing it also removes the link back to a publisher’s full channel of video content and the ability to subscribe to more videos. That’s a shame. Update: Turns out readers here are sometimes smarter than us authors and note that if you hover over the top of the player, there is a link back to the video on YouTube and the word YouTube in simple text! So it really is modest branding, not absent.

Last week YouTube rolled out the option of publishing videos under a Creative Commons license, another feature widely lauded as pro-user.

Earlier this Spring, YouTube began rolling out a live broadcasting feature called YouTube Live to select partners.

Last month Gartner analyst Andrew Frank wrote that YouTube was playing a notably important supporting role (behind Chrome’s lead) in trying to boost an embattled and sagging Google brand in the cross-hairs of competitors. Maintaining consumer trust is essential to Google’s long-term success, Frank wrote, and I think that making it easy for users to remove YouTube’s branding if they wish is a good example of the kind of move that can help build trust.

Unless the people in question are video publishers who don’t like the new ability for viewers to embed their content off-site and remove the player’s link back to their YouTube channel page. It’s hard to know for sure how this one will work out in the Trust department.