Your YouTube account can get filled with suggestions and ads, many based on your previous searches or stuff you’ve watched and searched in the past. If you want to change that, here’s a step-by-step way around it.
Table of Contents
For a cleaner homepage
Is your YouTube account connected to the home television, and it means all sorts of videos you wouldn’t normally watch, like nursery rhymes for kids, or music you don’t enjoy gets mixed up with your actual preferences?
However, Google has a way to work around this. If you turn your watch history off and “have no significant prior watch history,” all that mess will disappear, and your homepage will only show the search bar and the Shorts, Subscriptions, and Library buttons.
How to do it? Here’s a step-by-step guide:
How to pause your YouTube history
You can do this both on the application, and the website on your desktop. The process is nearly identical.
Step 1: Open the YouTube application, and click on your profile image in the bottom right corner.
Step 2: Select the settings icon on the top right conner of the page. From the menu, select ‘Your data in YouTube’.
Step 3: Scroll down to ‘Watch History’. You’ll probably see a checked circle indicating it is on. Click on the arrow.
Step 4: You’ll now be on the ‘Activity controls’ page. Scroll down to History and select ‘Turn off’. You’ll get a pop-up warning you that by turning off your YouTube history, you won’t get the personalized recommendations, etc. It also notes that you are not deleting any of your past data.
Step 5: Once you accept all pop-up warnings, you can select Pause.
If you want to start up your history again, just follow the same path as above and select Turn on.
How to delete your YouTube history
To really clean up your YouTube page, you also need to delete your past history. If not, you’ll still get recommendations based on what you watched before pausing your watch history. Here’s how:
Step 1: Open the application, and click on your profile image in the bottom right corner.
Step 2: Select the settings icon on the top right conner of the page. From the menu, select ‘Manage all history’.
Step 3: Here, look for the Delete link and select it. You have a choice between Delete today, Delete custom range, or Delete all time. Assuming you want to completely clean up your YouTube history, select the last.
Step 4: You’ll get a pop-up confirming that you want to delete your history. Select Delete.
And that’s it!
If you still do not see much of a change in your recommendations, that’s normal. According to Google, the changes are being rolled out over the next few months, so it may be a while before you see a change in your YouTube homepage.
Stay updated on all of the latest news by subscribing to the ITP Live newsletter below and by clicking the push notifications.