How to Delete a Playlist on YouTube (in 22 Seconds!)

Last updated on 1st April 2022

YouTube playlists are a useful marketing tool for all kinds of businesses. When you create a playlist on YouTube, you can string together several videos to tell a bigger story in multiple chapters rather than one long video – after all, wouldn’t you rather watch 10 short videos than one 100-minute video?

There are plenty of reasons to make playlists; you might want to promote a specific product or service, answer common FAQs, or compile multiple customer testimonials. But at some point, you’re going to need to know how to delete playlists on YouTube. Why would you want to delete a playlist? There are plenty of reasons, including:

• Your business is evolving: As your business grows, your marketing messages will change too. The things you’re promoting now might not be promotion-worthy a year from now. You might have changed your product offering, started targeting a new audience, or updated your visual brand identity. Any of these changes is cause for a video content revamp.
• Your content is stale: Just like your website, you don’t want your YouTube channel to stay stagnant for too long. Creating new playlists, deleting old ones, and keeping your content fresh engages your audience and gives them a reason to keep interacting with your brand.
• Your playlist was time sensitive: You could create a playlist around the holidays, or a playlist to promote a new sales special, or a playlist to win a very specific client. All of these purposes have an end date, so after you’ve achieved your goal, it might be appropriate to delete that playlist.

Without further ado, let’s get to it. Here’s how to delete a playlist on YouTube in 22 seconds or less.

How to delete a playlist on YouTube

Eating an apple. Taking out the garbage. Catching up with your coworker at the water cooler. What do all of these things have in common? They take longer to do than deleting a playlist on YouTube. From start to finish, deleting a playlist takes seven clicks of the mouse. It took us 22 seconds from end to end, and with this step-by-step guide, you’ll be deleting playlists even faster than that.

1. To get started, go to your YouTube channel’s homepage and select the “Customise Channel” button, located right under your channel header image.

2. This will take you into your channel editor, where you can add videos and playlists, and manage other details about your channel. For the purpose of this exercise, you should click on the “Playlists” tab.

3. This will take you to your playlist manager where all your YouTube playlists are housed. Select the playlist you want to delete by clicking on the playlist title.

4. This will drop you into a playlist editor. From here, select “Edit,” located right in the middle of the screen.

5. Next, select the vertical ellipses on the right side of the playlist menu. This will trigger a dropdown menu with a few options.

6. You guessed it – select “Delete playlist” from the dropdown menu.

7. As a last step, confirm you want to delete your playlist, and that’s it! You’ve just learned how to delete playlists on YouTube.

But wait – let’s take a look at that confirmation screen again. Note that deleting playlists is a permanent action. That means there’s no going back. What if you’re not quite sure you really want to delete your playlist?

There’s an in-between step you can take if you’re not ready to part with your playlist forever. You can make your playlist unlisted or private. Unlisted playlists are only available to users who you share a link with; they don’t populate in search results. Private playlists, however, are visible only to you. It’s like making your playlist completely inactive until you’re ready to use it again.

To make your playlist unlisted or private, simply select “Playlist settings” from the “Playlist” tab in the channel editor.

Then select the correct option from the dropdown menu on the “Basic” tab, and you’re all set. Your playlist is available to those you want to see it, and hidden from those you don’t.

Wrapping up

That’s it – you’re now a master YouTube playlist deleter! But you can’t delete a playlist if you don’t know how to make one in the first place. Luckily we’ve created a step-by-step guide to creating playlists on YouTube, complete with screenshots so you can learn how to do just that. Check out How To Make a Playlist on YouTube for everything you need to know about creating killer YouTube playlists.

For even more ways to optimise your YouTube channel, check out:

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