YouTube’s new corrections feature lets creators fix the record more easily

Everyone makes mistakes, but if you mess up a fact or flub a line in a YouTube video it can be hard to correct the error. You can edit and re-upload the video, but that means losing all your comments and engagement metrics. You can add a note to the video’s description or pin a comment with the correction, but that might go unnoticed by most viewers.

That’s why YouTube is introducing a new feature named “corrections” that lets creators easily add more obvious corrections. After a video has been uploaded, creators can add corrections that will appear as infocards in the top right-hand corner of a video at the relevant timestamp (but only, it seems, for the first correction in any given video). Viewers can then click on the card to expand the correction notes in the video’s description.

Here’s how that looks in a video:

Image: YouTube

You can see the full instructions for how to add corrections here, and watch a video description of the new feature from YouTube’s Creator Insider channel here.

The feature feels a little ad-hoc, but is still undoubtedly very useful. YouTube shouldn’t force creators to choose between amending the record and allowing their videos to perform the best they can, so any tool that helps them do both is welcome.