If You Have Your YouTube Watch History Disabled, You Will See an Empty Page

YouTube is set to undergo a transformation, altering the familiar platform we are accustomed to. Users who opt to disable their watch history may notice a significant change in their homepage, with a lack of suggested videos and a mostly empty interface. This modification aims to facilitate users in searching for specific content and conveniently accessing their subscribed accounts. The video streaming behemoth refers to this alteration as its “new viewer experience” and promises the addition of further features in the coming times.

According to Google’s blog post, this feature is currently being rolled out and users should start seeing it in the next few days. It stated: “Starting today, if you have YouTube Watch History turned off and don’t have significant past watch history, features that require Watch History to make video recommendations will be disabled — like your YouTube homepage feed… you’ll see a search bar and a left-hand guide menu where there’s no featured videos feed, so you can more easily search, browse subscribed channels, and explore Topic tabs.

The post also mentioned that while the feature has started rolling out, the process is slow and will take a few months before everyone sees these changes.

YouTube will show a blank page to those whose watch history has been disabled

There are two sides to this new update. On the other hand, there are users who don’t want to scroll through more than 10 suggested videos to find the videos they really want to watch, for whom this new update is a breath of fresh air. However, many prefer these suggestions to find new and related content. But now, if they don’t give YouTube access to their watch history, they simply won’t see anything.

“We’re rolling out this new experience to make it clearer which YouTube features rely on your watch history to provide video recommendations and to make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search for recommendations instead of browsing,” added Google.

If you want to enable or disable the viewing history settings, you can do so by going to Settings. However, some users have reported that they still see recommendations even after turning off history and removing suggested videos from the front page. It is not certain how long YouTube will take before the changes start to appear.