YouTube does not advertise it, but every channel has an RSS feed with its latest uploads. Following channels in your reader means you see every new video from the people you chose, without the recommendations, and you can keep them next to the blogs and news you already follow.
The quick way
Copy the address of the channel page, for example https://www.youtube.com/@channelname, and paste it into your reader. Most current readers, including Inoreader, Feedly, NewsBlur, FreshRSS and Miniflux, recognise YouTube pages and find the feed for you.
The manual way
If your reader does not, you can build the address yourself. The feed of a channel is:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_IDThe channel ID is a code that starts with UC. Since YouTube moved to @handles it is not visible in the address bar, but you can find it two ways:
- On the channel page, open “About” (the “more” link under the description), choose “Share channel” and then “Copy channel ID”.
- Or open the page source of the channel and search for
channel_id=or"externalId".
Playlists
Playlists have feeds too, with a different parameter:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLAYLIST_IDThe playlist ID is the part after list= in a playlist address. This is handy for channels that sort their videos into series and you only care about one of them.
What the feed contains
The feed lists the 15 most recent videos, with title, date, description and thumbnail. It does not include live streams that have not started, and Shorts appear mixed with regular videos; some readers let you filter them out by title or by the /shorts/ in the link.
Following many channels? Put their feed addresses in our OPML Builder with a folder name like YouTube / Channel name | address, and import them in one go.
