YouTube is a great medium for everything from music videos and movie trailers to wilderness survival tutorials and funny animal clips. You can literally spend all day, plugged into the app every day and never run out of things to watch, or run out of rabbit holes to go down.
That’s great, but it’s also a problem—many of us use YouTube in different ways at different times and for different purposes, 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 vehicle maintenance videos again.
For me, the issue is my love of lo-fi and classical music mixes – vocal-free videos that go on for hours, which I keep on in the background while I work. I watch a lot of them, but I only watch them when I need to. Yet because I have so many in my viewing history, whenever I want to actively watch other kinds of things, all I get is a screen full of equally entertaining videos for study and meditation.
Perhaps you don’t want all of your views to count toward all of your recommendations.
Credit: Lifehacker
YouTube channels let you exclude certain videos from your recommendation feed
There are a few ways to work around this issue, 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 hard to find and scroll through them there. 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 user, I paid to get rid of).
The best hack I found, and which I now use daily, is YouTube channels. Think of these as separate YouTube accounts within your YouTube account—you don’t need a completely separate Google Account to use them, 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 so).
Channels are one of the best and most popular features of YouTube, and it’s useful whether you’re subscribed to Premium or not. This locks in not only your watching 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 a youtube channel
To start a channel 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 an identity: Right away, you’ll be asked to give your channel a name, handle, and 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 connected 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 a place to listen to background music without it overtaking the rest of my YouTube experience, so the channel description doesn’t matter that much.
At any time on YouTube on the web, you can click on your channel avatar (top right) view your channel And customize channel To set description, contact information and other details.
Your new channel will need a name and a handle.
Credit: Lifehacker
That’s really all there is to it. You open your channel and browse YouTube as normal, 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 are carried over – and for me, my separate channel is the one I use whenever I need to listen to some longer music mixes.
Switching between or deleting YouTube channels
To switch channels on the web, click your profile picture (top right) transfer account. On mobile, go to You tab, then tap the cog icon (top right) and Change or manage account. To delete a channel you no longer need (and all its details), then click on your profile picture View your channel > Customize channel > Settings > Channel > Advanced settings > Delete YouTube content.
