YouTube playlist: Learn how to create one

Purpose of YouTube playlist

You can make a YouTube playlist of similar videos on your channel. That way once the viewer is finished watching one video, they may choose to watch other related videos of your channel as well. So having such playlists on your channel increases your audience retention. Although in this case ‘audience retention’ doesn’t mean longer watch time on individual videos, it basically means your combined watch time. Every time the viewer starts watching a new video, they may be presented with a new ad, thus playlists tend to earn more revenue for you.

How to create such playlists?

Let us now learn how to create a YouTube playlist. While you’re on video manager you’ll see two sub-tabs under the tab ‘VIDEO MANAGER’: Videos and Playlists.

You need to click on the ‘Playlists’ sub-tab. You’ll arrive on the page with url https://www.youtube.com/view_all_playlists. As the name suggests you’re supposed to see all your playlists on this page. In case you didn’t create one, you’ll see the message ‘No playlists were found’. Now to the top of this displayed message you’ll see a button-like thing that says’New playlist’. You need to click on it to create a new playlist.

A sort of dialogue box will open where you have to put the name for your new playlist and also set the privacy. If you want every viewer to see this playlist, then choose ‘Public’. The privacy of a new playlist is set as ‘Public’ by default. Now hit the ‘Create’ button, your playlist will be created.

How to add videos to a YouTube playlist?

Look at the above image, this is how a YouTube playlist looks just after creation. As obvious, there are no videos in it yet, so you have to add a few. To the right of this image on the YouTube page, you’ll see a button that says ‘Add videos’, you need to click on it. A dialogue box will appear with the title ‘Add video to playlist’.

On this box, there will be three tabs. On the first tab, you get to search for certain videos. In the second tab, you can enter urls to your YouTube videos. In the third, you’ll be shown a list of all the videos on your channel. I prefer the third tab to add videos to a YouTube playlist, you may do the same. On this tab, you have an option to add multiple videos at a time, just by holding the ‘ctrl’ key pressed down and clicking on the videos you want to select. After selecting the videos, click on the button below that reads ‘Add videos’. After adding the videos you’ll get to see your updated playlist which will look somewhat like below:

How to edit a YouTube playlist?

You can add more videos later to a certain YouTube playlist. All you have to do is press the ‘Add videos’ button and then select your videos on the aforementioned dialogue box. You can even edit a Playlist, like changing its name, order of the videos, add or change description etc. Just watch the following short video to learn to change order of videos.

change order of videos in a playlist

There’s another shortcut way to move a video either to top or bottom. Actually, to the right of each video in a YouTube playlist, there’s a ‘More’ button and a cross button right above its duration. These two buttons normally don’t show, they show only while you hover over them. Click on the ‘more’ button to move a video to the top or the bottom. You can also use the cross button to get a video off the YouTube playlist.

Add a video to multiple playlists

You can actually add any video to multiple playlists on your channel. I am talking about the non-time-consuming way. Surely you can visit the ‘playlists’ page to edit any playlist(s) individually and add a certain video manually. But that would be a time-consuming matter. What I am going to show you now could be called the ‘shortcut way’. It’s described below.

First of all you need to click on the ‘Edit’ option of the particular video while you’re on video manager. To the lower-right of the page you’ll see the option to ‘+Add to playlist’. Just click on it, you’ll see the list of all the created playlists on your channel. Check the boxes next to playlists you want to add the video to. You will also see an option to create a playlist right there and then. Create a new YouTube playlist if needed. After creating it, you can add the video to it by checking the associating box. Well, whatever changes you made here, be sure to hit the blue ‘Save’ button at last. The while procedure is shown in the following short video.

adding a video to multiple playlists and creating a new playlist

Download a YouTube playlist by YTD

Now that we have talked about how to create and edit a YouTube playlist, let’s learn how to download one. There might be many ways to do that, but I prefer to use YTD in this case. When you put the url of a playlist in YTD to download, you may see the following warning/confirmation:

If you hit the ‘Yes’ button, then the whole playlist will start to be downloaded. Upon hitting the ‘No’ button only the first video of the YouTube playlist will be downloaded. Also while downloading a single video from a playlist, be careful. Suppose you were watching all the videos in a YouTube playlist and suddenly you felt the urge of downloading a single video from the middle of the list. If you copy its link and then paste on YTD, then the above warning sign may appear. If you’re going to download a single video, then be sure to hit the ‘No’ button. To know more about YTD video downloader, here’s a nice article for you:

YTD video downloader: Learn how to use that properly