If you’re an avid YouTube watcher, you might have noticed that there’s a section of videos in the sidebar of your account called watch queue (if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s how to turn it on). It looks like this: This page shows all of the videos in your queue, which are videos you want to watch after you finish the one you’re currently watching.
YouTube lets you add videos to your watch queue so that they’ll be queued up and ready to watch as soon as you get the chance. This can lead to your watch queue getting quite long, however, and having dozens of videos saved up can be frustrating when you just want to browse around and see what else YouTube has to offer. Fortunately, YouTube makes it easy to clear out your watch queue so you can start fresh with your next browsing session or YouTube binge. Here’s how it’s done!
How to Clear Watch History
The current version of Google Chrome makes it easy for users to clear their YouTube watch history. Simply go into settings, click Privacy, and then click on Watch History under Privacy and security. From here you can choose which videos should be included or excluded from your watch history. It’s important to note that clearing watched videos from Google’s records will only affect your browsing through Chrome; it will not affect whether or not they show up on other devices you may use. You can do so manually by going directly into History and simply deleting individual pages or all at once with a delete all button at the bottom of every page in History. With these two tools, managing your data is a breeze! If you’re still worried about privacy after following these steps, there are a few things to keep in mind. If you don’t want your search results showing up on YouTube but would like them to appear elsewhere (for example, if you’d like to find something new but don’t want it associated with your profile), head over to Google Web History and select only search results as opposed to all products. Additionally, while watching a video won’t necessarily result in ads being targeted toward you, any information gathered will be associated with your account until deleted—so even if you decide against watching something today, remember that it could still come back around later.
How to Delete Subscriptions
First, click on your account icon in top right corner of YouTube. Click subscriptions and then click on an individual channel that you want to stop seeing videos from. You should see a red unsubscribe button. Click it and you are done. Repeat these steps for every channel you want to unsubscribe from. Note that deleting playlists is slightly different than deleting subscriptions: If a playlist has at least one video, it will not disappear entirely even if you unsubscribe; instead, only new videos added by subscribed channels will not show up. To completely delete a playlist, make sure there are no videos in it and then unsubscribe from its creator. Then, go to your Subscriptions page again and find the playlist you just deleted; click on Unsubscribed next to its name. This will take you back to your Playlists page where you can confirm that it’s gone. Once again, make sure there are no other playlists with videos before confirming deletion as they won’t be deleted either way (you’ll just be removing them from your watch list). To delete a single video rather than an entire subscription or playlist, simply hover over its thumbnail image with your cursor until a … pops up (this feature works similarly across all platforms). Click … and select Delete Video > Confirm Delete.
Other Tips & Tricks
When a new video is uploaded, it automatically starts playing and gets added to your watch list. Over time, you can easily end up with hundreds of videos in your list without even realizing it. And unless you like wasting time watching random videos on repeat (who does?), you may want to take a few minutes at some point in order to clean things up. Luckily for you, there’s an easy way to clear out that backlog! Here’s how: 1) Click My Videos from YouTube’s main menu. This will bring you to your personal homepage where all of your recent activity is displayed. From here, click Watch Later. This will bring you to another page where all of your watch-list items are listed chronologically by date added. 2) To remove one or more videos from your list, simply hover over its thumbnail image until you see a checkmark appear on each side. Then click Remove Checked. 3) Once you’ve checked off everything you want removed, scroll down to the bottom of that page and hit Delete Selected Watch Later Items. That’s it! Your watch-list backlog should now be whittled down considerably—and if not, just keep repeating these steps until it is.
Conclusion
You’ve probably noticed that as you add videos to your playlists, they accumulate and begin queuing up. Maybe you’ve thought: man, that’s so inconvenient, I wish there was a way I could easily clear my YouTube watch list! Well, now there is. Simply click on the red X icon in the top right hand corner of your screen while on any page. When you do so, you will see a drop-down menu with an option called Empty Playlist. Select it and confirm (there’s no going back!) to start over from scratch! If you want to change something else about how your channel appears, head over to My Channel > Design. There are lots of ways to customize how things look—you can even upload your own custom header image if you’d like! Hope that helps! If not, let us know in the comments below and we’ll try our best to help out. 🙂 Thanks for watching (and reading)! Happy vlogging!
