Updated December 16, 2020
One of the most popular posts on this blog for the last five years (!) was about how to remove related videos from the end of an embedded YouTube video. It consistently brought in tens of thousands of visits a year. That is, until recently, when traffic to that post started to dip significantly.
I figured the post was starting to show its age (5 Internet years is equivalent to 1,253 human years so…), but then I came across a new feature in YouTube that explains it:
You can now choose whether to display related videos on an embedded YouTube video by unselecting a checkbox in the YouTube user interface!
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{{{BUZZ}}}
Nope. That doesn’t work now either. That sentence above was written in January 2018, and sadly that workaround didn’t last very long.
As of this update, on December 16, 2020, the only way to really turn off related videos at the end of your YouTube video embed, is to use the Embed Plus for Youtube plugin. Or ditch YouTube entirely since this business is starting to get annoying. Other options for hosting your video are DailyMotion, Vimeo and Wistia.
The good news is that if you are still using “?rel=0” at the end of the video URL in the vain hope of turning off related videos, all is not lost. As of this latest update, it will ensure that users are sent on to videos from your channel. Which is a lot better than being sent to a “related video” from the competition!
Feel free to read on, but the rest of this blog post is pretty much outdated now.
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Visit the page of the YouTube video you would like to embed. For our purposes, I’m going to go with this gorgeous cover of Imagine Dragon’s song “Believer” by Koolulam.
- Click on the Share button under the video:
- Click on the Embed link at the bottom of the Share pop-up box:
- Now you will see a box with a few pieces of information: the embed code that you can copy paste into your web page; and a number of checkboxes with options (scroll down to see them, it’s no so clear that theyr’e there), one of which is…”Show suggested videos when the video finishes.” Unselect that box.
- When you check and uncheck boxes it modifies the embed code that appears at the top of the box. Once you are satisfied with the results, copy the embed code wherever you want and voilà! No more related videos on your embedded YouTube video.
Here are the results (and I highly recommend listening to this cover. It’s an orchestra of humans. Watch to see what I mean):
Thank you YouTube for listening to the people and adding this feature!