How do I find channels I’m subscribed to that stopped uploading?

Last reviewed: September 2, 2026 · Markdown version

There is no filter for activity. You have to check each channel’s uploads. Your channels list at youtube.com/feed/channels gives you every subscription by name and a Subscribed toggle beside each one — and nothing at all about activity. No last-upload date, no sort by activity. The only route YouTube’s own tools offer is to open a channel, go to its Videos tab, and read the date on the newest video. Then do it again.

That is genuinely fine for thirty subscriptions. It is also why a cleanup of three hundred stalls around channel twenty. An app can do the same check in bulk, and that is what SubSense does: it reads the upload history of the channels you follow and flags every channel that has published nothing for 60 days.

What “inactive” actually means

YouTube publishes no definition of a dead channel, so every answer is a threshold somebody chose. Ours is written down: no upload in 60 days, and on iPhone you can move that line yourself, anywhere from 30 to 180 days.

It is measured from upload activity — the dates on a channel’s own published videos. That is a property of the channel, identical for everyone subscribed to it, and nothing to do with you. SubSense reads upload activity only.

And a threshold is not a verdict. Dormant is not the same as unwanted: a documentary channel that publishes twice a year trips any inactivity rule and may be exactly the subscription you would least like to lose. The rule’s job is to hand you a shortlist of candidates in one pass instead of an afternoon. Deciding is still yours.

The manual route, in full

1. Sign in and open youtube.com/feed/channels.
2. Open a channel from the list.
3. Go to its Videos tab and read the published date on the newest video.
4. Go back, and repeat for the next channel.

Nothing about that is hidden or difficult. The cost is that it does not scale. The one fact you are hunting — when did this channel last publish — never appears next to a name, so the number of round trips is the number of subscriptions. YouTube’s drop-down filters the list but does not add the missing fact, and there is no way to sort by it. For several hundred channels the list stops being a list and becomes a wall: you can see every name and still not know which ones earn their slot.

What SubSense does instead

Sign in with Google and SubSense organises the channels you follow into smart categories, then does the per-channel check for all of them: it pulls each channel’s real upload history from YouTube’s own API and marks the ones past the 60-day line. You can also swipe through them one channel at a time — keep or let go, with the reason on the card (“No uploads in 8 months”), which is the same decision you were making manually, minus the opening and the going back.

Removal is separate and deliberate. SubSense removes only the channels you explicitly select and confirm — never automatically, and never without showing you exactly what will go first. Changed your mind? Undo re-subscribes you and puts the channel back in its category. The analysis runs on your device, with no third-party servers, no ads, no analytics and no tracking; data is only ever exchanged with Google’s own YouTube API.

The limits, said out loud

• Upload history costs API calls. YouTube’s daily quota can stop a large analysis part-way; when that happens the app tells you its coverage is partial and to resume tomorrow, rather than showing a confident answer built on half the data.
• Nothing is kept indefinitely. Cached YouTube data is purged after 30 days — YouTube’s own limit — so a long absence means a re-sync rather than a list waiting where you left it.
• You never need the app to unsubscribe. The free way is always there: open any channel in YouTube and do it yourself — unlimited, never metered.

SubSense is an independent tool, not affiliated with YouTube. iPhone and Android.

Related: How to clean up your subscriptions · How to see all the channels you’re subscribed to · Why a few channels dominate your feed · The Feed Flood Calculator