YouTube Now Lets You Sort Videos by Color for Some Reason

When you start YouTube, what types of videos are you looking for? A deep dive into a brand new video game ? A clip from your favorite movie from 15 years ago? Maybe a cute cartoon about nuclear war ? This is all well and good, but why don’t you look for the right way for your videos – like color?

YouTube now allows you to sort your homepage by color, so only videos with the selected hue will appear on screen. The company also doesn’t give you a color wheel to choose from. Instead we get three colors: red, green and blue. They also don’t really promote this feature. If you don’t see a pop-up advertising this feature, you’ll probably miss it entirely. I first came across it from this tweet :

It’s not obvious how to find these parameters, but it’s not difficult either. To get started, open the YouTube app (this doesn’t work on desktop), then scroll left all the way to the sorting options at the top of the screen. Once you reach the end of this line, you will find three color options: red, blue and green. Click on one and YouTube will update your feed with videos whose thumbnails mostly match the color you selected.

It’s not perfect, and it’s fun to see what videos the algorithm decides to show you. When I choose green, I get videos like this from DankPods because the iPad they use in each video has a green case. When I chose the color red, I got this video from One Bite Pizza Reviews because of the “red” pizza in the thumbnail. When I chose blue I got this video from exurb1a and it was funny because the thumbnail shows a lot of other colors besides blue. (Admittedly, there is more blue than green or red.)

Do I see myself using this feature every day? Probably no. But it’s kind of a fun way to find new videos depending on your current mood. “Man, I really feel like a green video today, you know?”