Learn how to safely get rid of all watched and unwatched videos you have added to your YouTube Watch Later playlist and start with a clean slate.
X (Twitter) bookmarks and YouTube Watch Later are two things I use a lot to save interesting, potentially informative, and helpful posts and videos that I can’t watch immediately but may get to some time in the future.
Over the years, my YouTube Watch Later grew to around a thousand videos, and at that point, I knew I was never going to watch most of the items saved there. So, I wanted to get rid of them all and start fresh.
Sadly, Google/YouTube doesn’t yet offer a native option to delete or empty the Watch Later playlist in a couple of clicks. Therefore, you’ll have to use a third-party extension, and we’ll guide you through the process.
Important: Remove all watched videos first
YouTube does offer a simple way to remove all watched videos from your Watch Later playlist. To do that, visit the Watch later section in the YouTube app or website, then click the three dots icon, and select Remove watched videos. This will significantly reduce the number of videos in your Watch Later playlist, helping clean it up and ensuring shorter runtime when using the extension mentioned below.
Things you need
- Google Chrome or another Chromium-based browser like Brave
- Mac or Windows PC (this extension won’t run properly in Kiwi or other Android browsers that support Chrome extensions)
- About 1 second of time for every video you have in your Watch Later YouTube playlist. So, if you have 800 videos, it should take around 800 seconds or 13.5 minutes.
Steps I followed, and you should too
The extension we’ve mentioned can read and change your data on youtube.com and www.youtube.com, and read your browsing history. Some other extensions for this job ask permission to read data on all sites you visit, not just YouTube.
So I recommend you:
- Create a fresh, new Chrome profile (don’t fully sign into it with your Google account)
- Visit YouTube.com and sign in with your account (again, you can choose not to sign in to Chrome with this YouTube/Google account)
- Use the extension to remove Watch Later videos
- Delete the extension
- Log out of YouTube
- Delete the Chrome profile
Remove all videos from your YouTube Watch Later playlist
1) Open Google Chrome or another Chromium-based browser and install the YT Watch Later Assist extension from the Chrome Web Store. This extension has a ‘Featured’ tag, which is given to extensions that follow recommended practices.
2) Visit YouTube.com, make sure you’re signed in with your account, and click Watch Later. You can also access your Watch Later directly at youtube.com/playlist?list=WL
3) You’ll see a red strip at the top of the Watch Later page saying “Remove all videos.” Click it. If you don’t see it, refresh the page or click the YT Watch Later Assist extension icon and select Remove all Watch Later videos.
4) Now, sit back and wait as the extension removes your videos from your Watch Later playlist.
Important: If it stops without removing all the videos (this will happen if you have several hundred videos), just refresh the YouTube Watch Later page and rerun the extension. I had to run it four times to get rid of over 800 videos. After the operation is complete, you can delete the extension.
If the above extension doesn’t work for you, try:
- YouTube Watch Later Cleaner Plus
- YouTube Watch Later Cleaner
- Use this script to remove videos from Youtube Watch Later playlist (I have not tried this; do your due diligence)
Also, check out: