YouTube is a melting pot for everything from music videos and movie trailers to wilderness survival tutorials and funny animal clips. You can quite literally spend all day, plugging into the app every day and never run out of things to see or rabbit holes to go down.
That’s great, but it’s also a problem—many of us use YouTube in different ways and for different purposes at different times, and that can make it difficult to organize and find new content. Just because you’ve spent four hours troubleshooting a car engine doesn’t mean you’ll ever want to watch a vehicle maintenance video again.
For me, the point is my love of lo-fi and classical music mixes—sound-free videos that go on for hours, which I put on in the background while I work. I see them a lot, but only when I need them. Yet with so many in my viewing history, whenever I want to actively watch other kinds of things, all I get is a screen full of the same chill-out videos for study and meditation.
Maybe you don’t want all your views to count towards all your recommendations.
Credit: Lifehacker
YouTube channels allow you to exclude certain videos from your recommendation feed
There are a few ways around this problem, including using YouTube’s built-in incognito mode—but it’s only available in the mobile apps, not the desktop site. Alternatively, I can get my mixes through YouTube Music, but it’s harder to find and scroll through. And I could just use an incognito browser window—but that would cut me off from the rest of my account and bring back the ads (which, As a premium userI paid to get rid of).
The best hack I’ve found, and one I use daily, is YouTube channels. Think of this as a separate YouTube account within your YouTube account—you don’t need an entirely separate Google Account to use it, and you can easily switch between them from the YouTube web interface (you won’t even lose your place in the video you’re currently watching when you do).
Channels are one of YouTube’s best and most underrated features and are useful whether you subscribe to Premium or not. It not only holds your watch history and recommendations, but also your comments, likes, uploads and everything else, and you can set up different channels for all the different ways you use YouTube.
How to set up YouTube channels
To get started with Channels on the web version of YouTube, log in, click your profile avatar (top right), then select Switch account > View all channels. Click Create a channel And you can start giving your new channel some identity: right away, you’ll be asked to give your channel a name, a handle, and a profile picture.
What do you think so far?
You can use this feature in a few different ways. For example, you can create a separate space for uploads that you don’t want to connect to your main YouTube account. If the channel will be public, you’ll want to put more thought into the name and profile picture. Personally, I just need space to listen to background music without it dominating the rest of my YouTube experience, so channel details don’t matter much.
At any time on YouTube on the web, you can click your channel avatar (top right). Watch your channel And Customize the channel To set a description, contact information and other details.
Your new channel will need a name and a handle.
Credit: Lifehacker
That’s really what it’s for. You open your channel and browse YouTube normally, only now you’ve got a new identity with its own subscriptions, playlists, watch history, followers and recommendations. If you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber, all your benefits carry over—and for me, my separate channel is the one I use whenever I need to listen to some long music mixes.
Switching between or removing YouTube channels
To switch channels on the web, click your profile picture (top right), then Switch accounts. On mobile, go to you tab, then tap the cog icon (top right) and Switch or manage accounts. To remove a channel (and all its details) you no longer need, then click your profile picture View your channel > Customize channel > Settings > Channel > Advanced settings > Remove YouTube content.
