How to Gracefully Retire YouTube Videos

What to do with old YouTube videos when they’re no longer relevant? I’ve found a good way.

After you’ve been a member of youtube for a while and uploaded videos for more than a year, some of the videos are likely to become old and no longer relevant. In my case, they no longer accurately represent my playing ability (nor the pitch of my voice).

Fortunately, I’ve found a great way to gracefully retire videos — it keeps them publicly available and accessible through your channel but removes them from your video feed and search results.

Steps:

  1. Make a new playlist — call it something like ‘Archived Videos’
  2. Add the videos you want to retire to the playlist
  3. Set the videos to ‘Unlisted’ (this can be done in batch in the Video Manager)

The videos will now no longer appear in your channel or feed, or in search results, but they are publicly accessible through your channel through the ‘Archived’ playlist.

This is a nice compromise between deleting, keeping or simply making the videos unlisted — they’re still available for anyone to watch, but they’re not ‘active’, or cluttering up your channel.

Do as I do

ATOW I’ve made two of these archive playlists: