Have you ever thought about having your own yearly YouTube Wrapped? Some popular platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, etc. have year-wrapped stats for each user. Users can check their yearly summary of top artists, top songs, most listened to, and more. YouTube does not offer anything like that. It used to have YouTube Rewind which was discontinued after being one of the most disliked videos on the platform. But that was like a Wrap for YouTube and not for individual users.
VideoRecap is a free tool that can help you generate your 2023 YouTube wrap. This is an online tool that takes the watch history data of your YouTube and generates a wrap from that. To do that, you are going to need the “watch history” file of your YouTube data. This can be easily done from the Google Takeout page of your account. So lets see how it can be done step-by-step.
How to Generate Your 2023 YouTube Wrapped?
Head over to the Google Takeout page and log in using the same Google Account that you use for YouTube. The link takes you to a takeout page to create an export of YouTube and YouTube Music.
There are two options to select the export format and type of data to include. You have to customize these options as we only need history data. If you export all the data that can take hours. This is exactly what you need to select:
In the Multiple formats option, scroll down to the end where you get the “Your watch and search history from YouTube“. Click on the dropdown there, select JSON, and click OK.
After that, click on “All YouTube data included“. This opens a set of checkboxes for data types. You only have to select “history“. Then click OK to come back to the export screen and move to the next step. In the next step, pick the Destination of choice to receive the file. Set Frequency to “Export once” and create the export.
When you get the takeout IP file, extract it and find the “watch-history.json” file. This is the file you have to upload to the Video Recap website to generate the year wrap.
Visualizing Data
Head over to this website and select the “setting-icon” from the top. Here you get an option to prioritize either watchtime or views. If you watched lots of shorts then short creators can come on top of your wrap. In that case, you can toggle it to use watchtime instead of video views.
Now, click on the sign-in button and create an account. You can sign in with any Google account as well. When you sign in, it asks you to upload the “watch-history.json” file. Simply browse the file acquired in the above step and upload it to this website.
YouTube Wrapped
After you upload your watch history file, this website shows your YouTube Wrapped. The homepage (2023 Rewind) page takes you through 10 slides covering the number of videos you watched, the number of creators you watched, the top creators, the first video, the most watched videos, and more.
From there you can jump to Dashboard which plots all your data in stats, charts, and graphs. It shows your calendar video history with average videos per day. You get to know which was your most active month and day.
The website also listed your top 10 videos. This list is based on how many times you watched a video.
Lastly. it lists the top 10 creators you watched as well. It shows the names of the creators and how many videos you watched of each of those 10 creators. There is also an estimated watchtime but it is locked for paid users.
Closing Words
This is a nice way to rewind what you have watched on YouTube throughout the year. You can see all your stats in a nice layout with cards, charts, and graphs. A funny thing is that might discover the watch patterns that you weren’t aware of. For me, it was “You enjoy watching videos on Wednesday night”. And the tool only takes the history data and nothing else.
