'Channels' Solved My Biggest Problem With My YouTube Recommendations

YouTube is a melting pot for everything from music videos and movie trailers to wilderness survival tutorials and funny animal clips. You could quite literally spend all day, every day plugged into the app and never run out of things to watch, or rabbit holes to go down.

That's great, but it's also something of a problem—many of us use YouTube in different ways and for different purposes at different times, and that can make organizing and finding new content tricky. Just because you've spent four hours trying to troubleshoot a car engine problem doesn't mean you necessarily ever want to see a vehicle maintenance video ever again.

For me, the issue is my love of lo-fi and classical music mixes—vocal-free videos that last for hours, which I put on in the background while I'm working. I watch a lot of them, but I only watch them when I need them. Yet because there are so many in my watch history, whenever I want to actively watch other kinds of things, I'm met with only a screen full of similar chill-out videos for study and meditation.

YouTube Channels lets you keep certain videos out of your recommendation feed

There are a few ways to solve for 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 get my mixes through YouTube Music, but they're harder to find and scroll through 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've paid to get rid of).

The best hack I've found, and one 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 different Google account to use them, and you can switch between them easily from the YouTube web interface (you won't even lose your place in the video you're currently watching when you do it).

Channels is one of YouTube's best and most slept-on features, and it's useful whether or not you subscribe to Premium. It silos off not just your viewing 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 YouTube Channels

To get started with channels 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 a bit of an identity: Right away, you'll be asked to give your channel a name, handle, and profile picture.

You can use the feature in a few different ways. For example, you can create a different space for uploads you don't want connected to your main YouTube account. If the channel will be public facing, you'll want to give more thought to the name and profile picture. Personally, I just need a space to listen to background music without it dominating the rest of my YouTube experience, so the details of the channel don't matter so much.

At any time on YouTube on the web, you can click your channel avatar (top right), then View your channel and Customize channel to set a description, contact info, and other details.

That's really all there is to it. You open up your Channel and browse YouTube as normal, only now you've got a new identity with its own subscriptions, playlists, viewing history, followers, and recommendations. If you're a YouTube Premium subscriber, then all of your benefits are carried over—and for me, my separate channel is the one I turn to whenever I need to listen to some lengthy music mixes.

Switching between or removing YouTube Channels

To switch channels on the web, click your profile picture (top right), then Switch account. On mobile, head to the You tab, then tap the cog icon (top right) and Switch or manage account. To remove a channel you no longer need (and all its details), click your profile picture, then View your channel > Customize channel > Settings > Channel > Advanced settings > Remove YouTube content.