YouTube is launching its first-ever Recap, joining the year-in-review fever on the planet’s largest video platform. The feature wraps your personal viewing story in a collection of themed cards pointing out what you watched most, which channels shaped your habits, and patterns behind your time on the platform. The launch puts YouTube in line with a broader trend across the industry of personalized annual summaries that transform data into shareable moments.
What YouTube Recap Includes in Your Yearly Summary
The experience revolves around 12 cards reflecting your interests and behavior on YouTube. Look forward to callouts for top channels and standout content categories, as well as a peek at your viewing habits across the year. If music was front and center in your watch history, your Recap will also feature the songs and artists most connected to what you’ve watched. To top it off, YouTube sorts you into one of 14 different personality types based on your habits — a sort of Mad Libs character sheet that draws from a menagerie of behaviors to give an at-a-glance sense of how you watch.
Eligibility and Availability Details for YouTube Recap
YouTube says you’ll need enough watch history between January and late October to be eligible. If your watch history is turned off or you’ve toggled on auto-delete, Recap won’t be available. You need to be signed in and at least 13 years old, and running app version 18.43 or newer on Android or iPhone. The feature is launching this week, including in North America, and will roll out to more than 185 countries.
How to Find Your Recap on YouTube Across Devices
- Look for a Recap prompt on your YouTube homepage on mobile or desktop.
- Check the You tab, alongside your library and profile tools.
- If you meet the requirements but don’t see it yet, it may be a rollout timing issue — check back soon.
Recaps are great cultural markers; Spotify Wrapped floods social feeds, and Apple Music Replay, Reddit Recap, and Twitch Recap are all useful retention tools utilizing personal visuals. The importance of YouTube is that it is the leading platform: according to the company, YouTube has over 2 billion logged-in users per month and over 1 billion hours of video are streamed every day. Plus, YouTube remains by far the most popular platform for U.S. teens, according to Pew Research Center, explaining how broadly a Recap might resonate.
For creators, Recap could introduce discovery and loyalty. When viewers see the channels that defined their year, they rekindle passions and new fandoms and may encourage further subscriptions or community creation. As for brands, a Recap may give creators a fun sign of their affinity bins — gaming, clothing, fun, and learning. How audiences move through Shorts and long-form videos is frequently determined by how they move between different engagement mechanisms.
Privacy and controls for your YouTube Recap
Recap is made from your watch history, so your privacy settings make a difference. If you don’t want a Recap emailed to you, stop watch history or enable auto-delete. On the other hand, retaining history makes personalization work better across YouTube’s products. YouTube’s support documentation also states that you must be signed in to a compatible app version for Recap videos to surface, offering users yet another lever to control participation.
The Bigger Picture of YouTube Recap and Personalization
Personalized storytelling is now table stakes for consumer platforms, and YouTube’s Recap is a natural extension of its recommendation engine cranked into celebratory format. It turns a year of fragmented viewing into a narrative — one that can intensify user attachment while showcasing the creators and content categories driving the most engagement. With YouTube Music already doing its own Recap, the addition of a new experience helps streamline the ecosystem and offer viewers a more complete picture of their year across video and music.
