YouTube Recap is a fascinating review of your year in videos – here’s how to find it

YouTube Recap
Your YouTube Recap is presented in story format (Image credit: Future)

  • YouTube is launching a recap of your year's viewing
  • It's available from now until the end of the year
  • See your top channels, interests, and more inside the app

YouTube is getting in on the Spotify Wrapped action with its own annual recap, showcasing your viewing history for the past year, and highlighting the channels you watched most often and the topics you were most interested in.

Recaps are rolling out now, and are presented in the familiar story-style format you'll see on social media. There are up to 12 different cards to tap through, covering everything from your 'personality type' based on your watching, to how your viewing evolved over the course of the year.

You can find the recap inside the YouTube app on your phone by opening the You tab: if your recap is available, you'll see a banner advertising it at the top. You can also check for it in a browser, by heading to www.youtube.com/recap.

If you've listened to at least 10 hours of music on YouTube over the year, you'll get some music summaries too. These recaps aren't available in all regions or countries, YouTube says, and won't show up for supervised or child accounts.

An interesting review of the year

YouTube Recap

Find the recap on the You tab in the app (Image credit: Future)

I've already had the chance to try out the YouTube Recap feature, and it's an interesting summary of the year gone by – though don't expect too many in-depth insights (and there's the usual "AI can make mistakes" disclaimer included).

It was fun to see just how many channels I had watched, and which were top, even if they were exactly the ones I would've guessed. I also liked the way your viewing history is compared against the YouTube average: I'm in the top 0.7% of listeners for Lofi Girl videos apparently, which I often have on while I'm working.

If YouTube is looking for suggestions for next year, a few more detailed findings would be welcome – like how my viewing habits tend to change over the course of the day, for instance, or examples of some really obscure videos I watched in the past 12 months.

Still, it's a solid start for the YouTube Recap, which will be available in your account until the end of the year and is a more personalized take on YouTube Rewind, the annual series of videos that ran from 2010 to 2019.

Click or tap on any of the cards in your recap story, and you can download them or share them with other people.


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David Nield
Freelance Contributor

Dave is a freelance tech journalist who has been writing about gadgets, apps and the web for more than two decades. Based out of Stockport, England, on TechRadar you'll find him covering news, features and reviews, particularly for phones, tablets and wearables. Working to ensure our breaking news coverage is the best in the business over weekends, David also has bylines at Gizmodo, T3, PopSci and a few other places besides, as well as being many years editing the likes of PC Explorer and The Hardware Handbook.

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