YouTube has just announced a new important feature that will help you promote your videos, merchandise, product sales, fundraising projects, and more. The feature is called YouTube cards, and they function similar to annotations. However, the most important difference between cards and annotations is that annotations do not appear on mobile devices.

Most of our channels get 50% (or more) of their views from fans watching videos on mobile devices, so if you want to make sure those viewers see your messaging you should try using YouTube cards instead of annotations. YouTube cards can link to other videos and playlists on your channel, merchandise on supported websites like iTunes, or even your own website (if you’ve verified and linked it with your YouTube channel).

For now, you can use YouTube cards in addition to annotations, but eventually cards will most likely replace annotations altogether – so go ahead and start using cards on your videos. Two important things worth noting: if you use the branding watermark to automatically place your channel’s logo on your YouTube videos, that watermark has now moved from the top right-hand corner of the video window to the bottom right-hand corner (so you may not want to burn any logos into that same area of your videos). Also, videos with cards will not show YouTube’s “featured content” video or playlist.

It may be a good idea to go add a few cards to the most popular videos on your channels to see how they work, and check out this link for more detailed information on exactly how cards work.