How do you export your YouTube subscriptions?

Last reviewed: October 7, 2026 · Markdown version

Google Takeout is the export tool Google documents, and it is the route to use — but Google's help never says which file in the archive holds your channel list. Takeout's page says “You can export and download your data for the Google products you use,” and names “YouTube videos” among its examples; it also says that downloading “doesn’t delete it from Google’s servers,” so exporting changes nothing on your account (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 7 October 2026). Plan on a computer: Google recommends opening Takeout exports on one rather than on a phone (same page).

The export, start to finish

All from the same Google page (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 7 October 2026):

Sign in and open Google Takeout. The products that hold your data arrive already ticked. Untick everything except YouTube if the channel list is all you want.
Trim inside YouTube, if offered. The help says you “may have the option to select a button like All data included” and then untick the parts you don't need. It does not list YouTube's parts by name.
Choose Next step, then a delivery method. An emailed download link, or a copy added to Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive or Box. The Drive option comes with a warning: “Your data will count toward your storage.”
Pick the export type and file type. One archive, or scheduled exports that run every 2 months for a year. Zip opens almost anywhere; for the other choice, .tgz, the page notes “You may need additional software to open these files on Windows.”
Select Create export and wait for the email. Google puts the wait anywhere from minutes to days, with most links arriving the same day, and the finished archive lasts about a week and can be downloaded five times before you need a fresh one.

One more limit from the same page: you cannot ask for a slice by date. “At this time, we do not currently support exporting data for certain time frames,” so the export is the whole list as it stands that day.

Which file is the list?

Google's Takeout page does not say. It names no subscriptions file and no format for one; its one example of a format choice is about contacts, which it exports “as vCard.” What it offers instead is a guide inside every download, a file called archive_browser.html that describes the formats (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 7 October 2026). Open that first.

YouTube's own help is no more specific. Its page on downloading what you uploaded is about videos — “You can also use Google Takeout to download all the videos you've uploaded” — and says nothing about subscriptions (YouTube Help: Download YouTube videos that you've uploaded, read 7 October 2026). Its Your Data in YouTube page lists a “Subscriptions privacy setting” among the things it manages, not a subscriptions download (YouTube Help: Your Data in YouTube, read 7 October 2026). We are not going to name the file from guesswork; the guide in your own archive is the authority.

Moving the list to another account or service

Google documents one direct transfer from YouTube, and it carries playlists, not channels. The page describes sharing “a copy of the YouTube Music playlists saved in your Google Account” with another music service, currently Apple Music, and it does not mention subscriptions at all (Google Account Help: Copy your playlists to a service outside of YouTube Music, read 7 October 2026).

For anything else, the Takeout page's answer is the file: if you downloaded the archive, you can hand it to a third-party app or website “using that third party’s access point,” such as an upload button (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 7 October 2026). None of the pages above describes importing the list back into a different YouTube account.

Rebuilding a list by hand on a new account runs into YouTube's daily cap of 75 new subscriptions (YouTube Help: Subscribe to YouTube channels, read 7 October 2026). A list of 300 takes at least four days; the limits page has the rest of YouTube's numbers.

Other ways to get the names out

If you only need to read the list, not keep a file, the full channels list on the web is quicker than any export. For developers, YouTube's Data API returns your subscriptions directly; the counting page walks through that call. And if the aim is to follow a few channels outside your account, a channel's RSS feed needs no export at all.

SubSense has no export feature, so it is not a route for this one.