How to hide the YouTube logo, title and suggested videos

You have put a video on a page you designed carefully, and it has arrived with a red logo in the corner, a title bar across the top, a Watch on YouTube button, and a grid of unrelated videos at the end. This page is an honest account of what you can do about each of those.

Some of it is fixable. Some of it is not, and a lot of advice online is out of date about which is which.

What you cannot remove

These are not difficult. They are impossible, in the sense that the browser will not let any code on your page reach inside the video to change them. The video is served by YouTube and treated as a separate page in a sealed box. Your CSS stops at the edge of that box.

• The YouTube logo in the bottom right of the player.
• The title and channel name that appear across the top when the video is paused or hovered.
• The Watch on YouTube button.
• Ads, if the video has them.

If a tool or a plugin claims to remove any of these, it is either out of date or it is not doing what it says. It is worth knowing this early rather than spending an afternoon on it.

Two settings that used to help and no longer do

modestbranding reduced the logo. YouTube removed it in August 2023 and it now does nothing. It is still in an enormous number of tutorials and a lot of tools still offer it as a working switch.

showinfo hid the title bar. It stopped working in September 2018.

Neither is offered in the builder, because a switch that does nothing is worse than no switch.

What you can remove

Suggested videos, partly. There used to be a setting that removed them entirely. Since September 2018 the best available is to restrict them to the same channel as the video you embedded, which is on by default here. If that channel has nothing else, YouTube shows unrelated videos anyway. Turning it off means you get suggestions from across YouTube, so leaving it on is strictly better, but it is not the off switch people remember.

Annotation overlays, the cards and pop-ups a creator can place over their own video, can be turned off.

The fullscreen button can be removed, which is only worth doing if you are providing your own.

The whole control bar during playback can be hidden. This is the one that opens the real solution, and it comes with a catch worth understanding.

The catch nobody mentions

Hiding YouTube's controls hides them while the video is playing. The moment somebody pauses, or even just moves the mouse over the video, the player draws its own header, its logo, a timestamp and a suggestion grid back over the top.

This is why people try to build a clean player, get most of the way there, and give up: it looks perfect until the first pause. Anything that hides YouTube's bar and stops there has this problem.

The approach that actually works

Two things together, and they are what the builder does by default.

Show a picture until somebody presses play

Before anybody clicks, the page shows the video's thumbnail and a play button you chose: your colour, your icon, your corner radius. There is no YouTube chrome visible because there is no YouTube player loaded yet. For the large majority of visitors who never press play, that is the entire experience of your video, and it looks like your site.

It is also, by a wide margin, the biggest thing you can do for the speed of the page. That is covered inwhy your page got slower after you added a video.

Replace the control bar with your own

Once somebody does press play, the video can be handed a control bar you built: your colours, your icons, your typography, a volume slider, a speed button, your logo in the corner,chapters people can click. YouTube's own controls stay hidden, and an invisible layer over the video stops mouse movement reaching the player, which is what keeps its header from reappearing on hover.

In the builder this is the default. Under Controls you can put the bar beneath the video or floating over it, and change every part of it.

Be clear about what this does and does not achieve. The corner logo is still there during playback. On pause, some YouTube interface can still appear. What you get is a player that looks like part of your site for the whole time most visitors are looking at it, rather than one that never does.

If that is still not clean enough

Two options give you complete control, and both cost something.

Vimeo was built for this. Its player can be stripped down considerably, coloured to match your site, and shown without platform branding on its paid plans. If a clean player matters more to you than YouTube's reach, it is the straightforward answer.

Hosting the file yourself gives you total control, because then there is no other company's player involved at all. It is your video file in your page, and every pixel is yours. You pay for the bandwidth, you handle the file sizes, and you lose YouTube's ability to serve the right quality to a bad connection. For a fifteen second loop this is easy. For a twenty minute talk it is a real undertaking.

One thing to check before a commercial site

YouTube's terms prohibit covering or interfering with the player, and specifically with anything shown during an ad. A control bar underneath the video and a small watermark in a corner are ordinary and widely used. Covering the frame, or hiding advertising, is not. Ten minutes with the actual terms is worth it before this goes on a site that makes money.