YouTube Wrapped 2026: how to make your own year in review
Spotify has Wrapped. YouTube doesn't. Here's how to generate the equivalent from your real watch history — total hours, top patterns, biggest binge day.
YouTube Wrapped 2026: how to make your own
Every December the internet floods with Spotify Wrapped screenshots. Twitter, Instagram, group chats — everyone shares their top artists, top songs, total minutes. It's a marketing masterpiece.
YouTube has nothing equivalent. Despite being the platform people spend the most time on, Google has never released a "YouTube Wrapped" feature. (They probably never will: it'd surface uncomfortable totals.)
So we built one. Here's how to get yours.
What "YouTube Wrapped" actually means
Spotify Wrapped surfaces 5–10 stats: top artists, top genre, total minutes, biggest day, etc. For YouTube the equivalent is:
- Total hours watched (the headline number)
- Number of days that adds up to (always sobering — divide by 24)
- Daily activity chart (with weekend / weeknight patterns)
- Top channels (coming to WoYT)
- Biggest binge day (coming to WoYT)
- Date range (often years longer than people realize)
WoYT ships the first three today; the rest are on the roadmap.
How to get yours
- Download your YouTube watch history via Google Takeout. Detailed 10-minute guide here. Google emails you a .zip within minutes.
- Open the .zip → find
Takeout/YouTube and YouTube Music/history/watch-history.json(English) orcronologia visualizzazioni.json(Italian). - Drop the file into WoYT's uploader. Total hours and chart appear in 10 seconds. Your result gets a sharable URL — drop it in the group chat.
What you'll see
The headline is the total hours number. Most people guess they spend 1–2 hours a day on YouTube. The reality, when you sum every video they've ever watched, is 3–5× their guess. (In our analysis of typical takeouts, the median was 2.3 hours/day across years.)
The chart is the real surprise. People's binges have patterns:
- Sundays are universally the biggest day
- Most viewers have one or two "rabbit hole" weeks per year where they 4–5× their normal usage
- Long gaps (>3 days without watching) are extremely rare even for "I don't watch YouTube" people
Why we built this
A friend of ours guessed she'd watched 50 hours of YouTube in 2025. The real number from her takeout was 1 100. She laughed, then thought about it for a week. That moment of "oh", and the decision it triggered, is what made this site worth building.
Keep reading
- How to see your total YouTube watch time (3 ways that actually work)YouTube doesn't show your lifetime watch time anywhere in the app. Here are the only three ways to get the real number — and which one is most accurate.6 min read
- How to download your YouTube watch history (Google Takeout, 2026)The complete 2026 guide to exporting your YouTube watch history with Google Takeout — including the trick that makes the file 100× smaller and 100× faster.7 min read
- How much time do people actually spend on YouTube?We crunched our own takeout (and a few others) to see the typical number of hours, videos, and channels. The averages are higher than you'd expect — but not for the reason you think.5 min read