The Channels Feature Solved My Main Problem With YouTube Recommendations.
YouTube is a true melting pot of everything from music videos and movie trailers to wilderness survival guides and funny animal videos. You could literally spend all day, every day, connected to the app and never get bored of watching anything or diving into the depths of searches.
This is great, but it’s also a problem—many of us use YouTube in different ways and for different purposes at different times, and this can make it difficult to organize and find new content. Just because you spent four hours troubleshooting your car’s engine doesn’t mean you’ll necessarily want to watch a car maintenance video again.
For me, the problem is my love of lo-fi and classical music—hour-long videos without vocals that I play in the background while I work. I watch a lot of them, but only when I need to. However, because my viewing history is so full, whenever I want to watch something else, I only see similar relaxing videos for studying and meditation.
The YouTube Channels feature allows you to exclude specific videos from your recommendations feed.
There are several ways to solve this problem, including using YouTube’s built-in incognito mode—but it’s only available in the mobile apps, not on the desktop site. Alternatively, I could access my mixes through YouTube Music, but they’re harder to find and view there. I could also simply use an incognito browser window—but that would disconnect me from the rest of my account and bring back the ads (which, as a Premium user , I paid to get rid of).
The best life hack I’ve found and now use daily is YouTube channels. Think of them as separate YouTube accounts within your YouTube account—you don’t need a completely different Google account to use them, and you can easily switch between them through the YouTube web interface (and you won’t even lose track of where you’re watching a video).
The Channels feature is one of YouTube’s best and least used features, useful regardless of whether you have a Premium subscription. It lets you isolate not only your viewing history and recommendations, but also comments, likes, uploaded videos, and everything else, allowing you to create different channels for different YouTube experiences.
How to create a YouTube channel
To get started with channels on YouTube on the web, log in, click your profile picture (in the upper right corner), then select “Switch account” > “View all channels .” Click “Create channel,” and you can begin building your new channel: you’ll immediately be prompted to enter a name, nickname, and profile photo.
This feature can be used in several ways. For example, you can create a separate space for uploaded videos that you don’t want linked to your main YouTube account. If your channel is public, you’ll want to think more carefully about the name and profile photo. Personally, I just need a place to listen to background music without interfering with my YouTube experience, so channel details aren’t that important.
At any time on the YouTube website, you can click on your channel avatar (in the upper right corner), then select View Your Channel and Customize Channel to set a description, contact information, and other details.
That’s it. You open your channel and browse YouTube as usual, only now you have a new account with its own subscriptions, playlists, viewing history, subscribers, and recommendations. If you’re a YouTube Premium subscriber, all your benefits remain—and for me, my dedicated channel is the one I turn to when I need to listen to long music collections.
Switching between YouTube channels or deleting them
To switch channels on the web, tap your profile photo (top right), then select “Switch account.” On mobile, go to the “You” tab, then tap the gear icon (top right) and select “Switch or manage account.” To delete a channel you no longer need (and all its data), tap your profile photo, then select “View Your Channel” > “Customize Channel” > “Settings” > “Channel” > “Advanced Settings” > “Delete YouTube Content.”