YouTube Watch History Analyzer

Google Takeout exports your YouTube watch history as a flat JSON array. Every element is one viewing event, and the fields are the same whether the export covers a week or a decade. Knowing the shape matters because it explains what this analyzer can and cannot tell you.

The export is text only. It records that you watched something and when, but carries no watch duration, no percentage watched, and no video length. Any tool claiming to show your total hours watched from a Takeout export is estimating, not measuring.

Two filters run before anything is counted. An entry is included only if its activityControls array contains 'YouTube watch history', and only if its title begins with 'Watched '. Everything else in the file is discarded.

That second filter matters more than it looks. A combined MyActivity.json export mixes searches, comments, and subscriptions into the same array, and those entries begin with 'Searched for' or similar. Filtering on the 'Watched ' prefix keeps searches out of your view count. It also means this tool reports a lower number than any tool that simply counts array length — that difference is intentional, not a bug.

Ads are not separated out. If an entry was recorded as a watch event, it is counted as one.

Takeout offers both JSON and HTML for watch history. This analyzer reads either, plus the .zip or .tgz archive straight from Takeout without you having to unpack it first — the tar reader runs in the browser alongside everything else.

Prefer JSON. The HTML export is a rendered page, not structured data: entries live in .content-cell blocks where 'Watched ' is a bare text node, the first link is the video, the second is the channel, and the timestamp is whichever text node happens to contain a four-digit year.

That timestamp is written in your Google account's display language, so parsing it is locale-dependent. This tool currently handles the English format and the Portuguese 'DD de MMM de YYYY' format including BRT and BRST offsets. Other locales fall back to the browser's own date parser and may produce wrong dates. If your charts look shifted, re-export as JSON — the ISO timestamps there are unambiguous.