Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
Back in April, I watched dozens of YouTube videos about Budapest before traveling there. When I returned home, my YouTube home page was still full of Budapest videos, and although I haven’t clicked on any since then, I still get them in my recommendations to this day. The same happened when I obsessed over lawnmowers before buying one, and the Ninja Woodfire grill before I splurged on it. YouTube keeps recommending videos for things I was momentarily intrigued by, which hides the videos I’m always interested in.
Like many users before, I tried switching to incognito for these random searches to stop them from ruining my algorithm, but incognito mode on YouTube is highly restricted (for a reason). It’s not age-verified, it doesn’t allow me to create playlists or save history, and most crucially, it doesn’t benefit from any YouTube Premium benefit. So even though I pay for YouTube, I have to watch long and annoying ads each time I go incognito.
There’s a solution for this, and it’s one of YouTube’s most obvious but also most hidden perks: multiple channels.
Why I use multiple YouTube channels, and why you should too
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority Screenshot
There’s no custom profile option in YouTube, but there’s a workaround to build multiple profiles by creating multiple channels. Every YouTube account is a channel — whether you post videos, comments, or simply loiter around — and you can have many under the same Google email address. No separate logins or passwords, no multiple email addresses; it’s all linked to one Google account. I discovered this a few years ago when a Coursera language course required me to upload videos of myself speaking to get graded. I didn’t want those on my personal channel, so I created a secondary one under the same account.
That’s when I discovered that different channels give me a completely separate YouTube experience from my main profile. I can subscribe to another set of channels, keep a separate watch and search history, make independent playlists, and tailor the algorithm with a unique set of likes and dislikes. Even better, I can choose different settings for each channel, so one of them can have smart downloads or notifications enabled while the other does not.
Separate watch history, search history, subscriptions, settings, recommendations, and Music profiles — a new channel is like a whole new YouTube account.
Going one step further, I realized I could independently control YouTube’s watch and search history settings for each channel. So I can turn it on in one of the channels while the other keeps it off. This lets me have a pseudo-incognito YouTube account where the algorithm doesn’t affect anything I see, with a completely blank home page, while also maintaining a personal YouTube channel with all of my permanent interests.
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