YouTube account holders can now add annotations to videos they've uploaded, including notes, speech bubbles and highlights. The good news? The site's notoriously immature commenters can't add their own (though there are third party tools for that). The bad news? You can add links, but only to other areas of YouTube such as videos, channels and search results. It's a great way to keep users stuck (or, in Web-marketingspeak, "engaged") on the YouTube site, but it's a bad way to appeal to potential advertisers.

One of the ways that professional content creators have subsidized their online efforts is through product placement, since running ads before, during or after a clip online tends to cramp the style of short-form video. A great way to increase the impact of those product placements is "plinking," a term derived from target shooting adapted to the practice of making areas within a video clickable — so that, for instance, a user could click on a pair of shoes a character is wearing in order to be taken to a page where they can buy them.

No dice if you want to do this in your own YouTube videos, however, even for a fee. And the current in-video advertising system has significantly less flexibility than the new annotation feature. I'm sure YouTube would point to their terms of service, or whine about preserving "customer experience," but for a site that's having trouble making any money, why spend time developing free gimmicks for users when there are such obvious ways to offer those same features to customers who might actually pay for them?

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