How many YouTube channels am I subscribed to?

Last reviewed: October 3, 2026 · Markdown version

YouTube will show you the list, but its help pages never mention a number. The page that explains subscriptions tells you where your channels live — in the app, “Tap the Subscriptions tab,” then “You can go to a list of your channels by tapping All” — and stops there (YouTube Help: Subscribe to YouTube channels, read 3 October 2026). We read its Android, computer and iPhone versions today, and none of them describes a count of the channels you follow. So the honest answer is that you work the number out yourself. There are four ways, from quickest to most technical.

1. Count the list where YouTube keeps it

On a computer, the help's route is “In the Guide, click Subscriptions” (YouTube Help: Subscribe to YouTube channels (computer), read 3 October 2026); on a phone it is the All button inside the Subscriptions tab, quoted above. Our page on seeing every channel you follow covers the full-list address on the web and what that list leaves out.

Scrolling and counting is perfectly reasonable for a few dozen names. Our view, not YouTube's: past a hundred or so, counting by eye gets error-prone, and one of the routes below will be faster.

2. Look at “Your Data in YouTube”

Google describes this page as one that “includes a summary of your content and activity data,” reached by signing in, selecting your profile picture and then Your Data in YouTube; it adds that the page is “currently only available on desktop and mobile web” (YouTube Help: Your Data in YouTube, read 3 October 2026). The help names a “Subscriptions privacy setting” among the things you can manage there, but it does not say whether the summary includes a subscription count. Worth a look before anything heavier; just don't go in expecting a number the help itself never promises.

3. Export your data with Google Takeout

Takeout is Google's tool for downloading what your account holds, and its help names “YouTube videos” among the examples of what you can export (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 3 October 2026). The steps: sign in, open the Google Takeout page, untick the products you don't want, choose Next step, then pick a delivery method and Create export.

What that help page does not do is say which YouTube files the archive holds — it names no subscriptions file and no format for one. It does point to the place that will tell you: inside the download “will be a file named archive_browser.html that will have additional information about the file formats.” If your archive contains a list of subscriptions, counting its entries gives you the number. Three things from the same page to plan around:

Timing: it “could take from a few minutes to a few days. Most people get the link to their archive the same day.”
The link does not last: “Your archive expires in about 7 days,” and each archive can be downloaded 5 times.
Google recommends opening Takeout exports “from a desktop computer, not a mobile device.”

4. Ask the YouTube Data API directly

This is the developer's route, and the only one where Google's documentation describes a total. The subscriptions.list method, called with mine=true, will “retrieve a feed of the authenticated user's subscriptions”, and its response carries pageInfo.totalResults, documented as “The total number of results in the result set” (YouTube Data API: Subscriptions: list, read 3 October 2026). The same page offers a “Try it!” panel: “Use the APIs Explorer to call this API and see the API request and response.” Because mine “can only be used in a properly authorized request,” you will be asked to sign in and grant access to your account; only do that if you are comfortable reading what you are approving.

Why people go looking for the number

Usually it is one of two worries. The first is a ceiling: YouTube's help says “In general, you can subscribe to a maximum of 2,000 channels,” with a limit that grows with your channel, and an error reading “Too many subscriptions” when you hit it (YouTube Help: Subscribe to YouTube channels, read 3 October 2026). The full picture on limits, including the softer number YouTube recommends, has its own page. The second is a feed that has stopped being readable — and there the count matters less than which channels are doing the crowding.

Where SubSense fits

SubSense answers a slightly bigger question than “how many”. Sign in with Google and SubSense organises the channels you follow into smart categories, and its Dashboard carries a Subs figure alongside them — in the no-sign-in demo it reads 15, one for each of the demo's 15 sample channels. Channels the categoriser cannot place go to Mystery Box — a real category with its own screen, not a silent failure. The app also shows which channels have gone quiet or flood your feed, which is usually what the number was standing in for.

Its limits, plainly: it runs on iPhone and Android only, it needs a Google sign-in for your real list (the demo uses sample data), and SubSense is an independent tool, not affiliated with YouTube.