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How to download your YouTube watch history
Google Takeout exports everything YouTube keeps about you. Ask for history only and the export is small and quick, often ready in minutes.
- Open takeout.google.com and click Deselect all.
- Tick YouTube and YouTube Music, open All YouTube data included, and keep only history.
- Under Multiple formats, set History to JSON. The HTML version works too, in English.
- Create the export, download the zip, and find history/watch-history.json inside.
How watch time is estimated
The history records the moment you opened each video, not how long it played. So each video counts as the gap until the next one started, up to a cap. With the default 20-minute cap:
| You did this | It counts as |
|---|---|
| Watched 3 Shorts, 40 seconds apart | About 2 minutes |
| Watched a 12-minute video, then another | 12 minutes |
| Opened one video, then closed YouTube | 20 minutes |
| Left a video playing overnight | 20 minutes |
Raise the cap if you watch long videos and podcasts; lower it if you mostly skim.
What a year of YouTube adds up to
| Per day | Per year | Days of your life |
|---|---|---|
| 0:30 | 183 hours | 7.6 |
| 1:00 | 365 hours | 15.2 |
| 1:30 | 548 hours | 22.8 |
| 2:00 | 730 hours | 30.4 |
| 3:00 | 1095 hours | 45.6 |
To see YouTube next to everything else you do on a Mac, every day instead of once a year, Timecard tracks every app and website and can stop YouTube once your daily time is used. See how to limit YouTube on Mac.