In this step-by-step guide, we’ll walk you through the easiest way to transfer all your subscribed channels from one YouTube account to another so you don’t have to manually subscribe to each creator individually.
Since there is no official option to copy YouTube subscriptions between accounts, I spent a long time researching and found a great third-party solution that I will share with you.
How it works
The entire process is simple.
- You’ll use a handy YouTube subscription transfer browser extension that will collect all your channel subscriptions from one account.
- Then switch to another YouTube account in the same browser.
- Use the same browser extension again, and this time it will run a background process that automatically subscribes to those channels with your new YouTube account.
What you need
- Mac or Windows PC
- Access to both Google/YouTube accounts
- About 4 seconds for every subscription you have. So, if you have 100 subscriptions to transfer, you’ll need 100 x 4 = 400 seconds or ~7 minutes.
A couple of important things to keep in mind
First off, this browser extension doesn’t require you to log in or give it access to your Google account. You only need to sign in to YouTube like you normally do. But to be extra secure, you can create a new Google Chrome profile and not sync any personal info (like passwords, history, etc.) to it. Use the YouTube subscription transfer tool in this new browser profile, and then delete it once the job is complete.
Secondly, like all online services, YouTube also has a soft limit on how many times you can subscribe to or unsubscribe from channels in a given time frame. If you transfer several hundred subscriptions in a short time frame, YouTube may block you from subscribing for a while or even take drastic measures like restricting your account. So, I recommend checking your old YouTube account and manually unsubscribing from any channels you no longer want to carry over to the new account.
With basics out of the way, here’s how to proceed.
Transfer all subscriptions from one YouTube account to another
1) Visit YouTube.com in Chrome, Edge, or Firefox and make sure you’re signed in to the account that has all the subscriptions. Then, click the profile picture icon in the top-right corner of YouTube, select Switch account > Add account, and sign in to the second YouTube account where you want to carry over subscriptions from the first account.
2) After signing in, switch back to the first YouTube account where all your subscriptions are.
3) Visit biplobsd.me/apps/yst (this is the developer’s website) and install the YouTube Subscriptions Transfer extension.
4) Visit YouTube.com and click the new browser extension icon at the top, followed by the “Open Subscriptions” button to load the youtube.com/feed/channels page.
5) Click the YouTube Subscriptions Transfer extension icon again, and this time click the “Collect channel” button. If you don’t see this button, refresh the youtube.com/feed/channels page and retry. Wait until you see “Channel IDs collected successfully” in the Status box.
6) Now, click the YouTube profile picture icon and switch to another YouTube account.
7) Click the YouTube Subscriptions Transfer extension icon again, and you’ll see “Subscriptions: X number” in the Data section. Click the “Subscribe” button and wait.
The extension will individually subscribe to all the channels for your new account. It took me 9 minutes to transfer 137 subscriptions from one YouTube account to another.
Once all your subscriptions are carried over, you can delete the extension and this browser profile.
Manual methods you can try
These two methods are doable if you have just a few subscriptions to transfer and your computer is powerful enough to handle several open browser tabs.
- Log in to both YouTube accounts in the same browser (step 2 above).
- Then, visit youtube.com/feed/channels for your old YouTube account.
- Hold the Command key on Mac or the Control key on Windows PC and click every channel link to open them in new tabs.
- Then, switch to another YouTube account.
- Now, refresh each channel page and click the Subscribe button. Or, close the browser and reopen it: you should see an option to restore the previous session or restore all recently closed tabs. Do one of these, and it should refresh all channel pages. Click the subscribe button for all creator channels individually.
Yet another method involves requesting a Google Takeout export of your YouTube subscriptions list. Then, open that file and click the individual channel URLs to load them and subscribe manually.
Also, check out: How to remove all videos from your YouTube Watch Later