I say this with all due respect and love for the thousands of hours of programming YouTube as a platform has provided me over the past twenty years: it’s too late to debut YouTube Recap. We live in an era where individual YouTube accounts simply do not work for a Spotify Wrapped-style recap in the grand scheme of things for a significant chunk of the adult user base.
One of the biggest news stories for YouTube this year was the announcement that smart TVs are the most commonly-used device for watching YouTube videos, signalling YouTube videos have become “TV” for a lot of people. Who needs to rely on the dour professionalism and cheesy comedy (the latter usually provided by meteorologists) of a local news broadcast when you can just watch a local vlogger’s update video on your own time (presuming you live in a big enough city to support a vlogging ecosystem)?
The problem with YouTube becoming television for a lot of people is television fundamentally does not work for Spotify Wrapped-style year-end recaps.
To be clear: I find year-end recaps fun. But the older I get, and the more rote these recaps on various platforms become, the less fun they are. My top song of the year on Spotify Wrapped back in 2018 genuinely was a song I listened to a lot that year. My top artists were artists I genuinely listened to a lot. But Spotify is a music service. When I opened the app back then, I was doing so exclusively to pay attention to the media coming through it.
For those of you old enough, think back to 2005. Think about that TV in your living room, bedroom or – if you were fancy enough- the TV in your kitchen. Luxury of luxuries. How many times did you turn that thing on and some garbage played in the background while you half paid attention?
In December of 2005 if someone asked you your favorite TV show, the show you were most passionate about you probably would’ve said House, CSI, Lost, or even that weird racial segregation season of Survivor. But if the TVs in your house had a Wrapped, they would have passionately disagreed. American Idol was on twice a week. Good Morning America was on every damn weekday.
I’ve seen hundreds of episodes of Wheel of Fortune purely because my grandmother would habitually turn it on. There was nothing else good during that timeslot and what are we gonna do, sit in silence? How many countless hours of daytime TV graced the pixelated screen of your statistically-not-HD-yet home TVs 20 years ago? Stuff you wouldn’t have given a second thought, but a Wrapped would’ve fastidiously noted?
YouTube Recap is great in a world where YouTube is used like a music service: a bespoke app on your phone you only open to intentionally consume specific bits of content. Once you introduce the casual daily consumption habits of “TV” or “radio,” the novelty and accuracy falls apart.
And this isn’t just YouTube’s problem. My music recaps have been screwed for years because I consume an entire genre of music I do not want apps to consider a “favorite.” I listen to lo-fi hiphop when I work, as it’s the closest thing to ADHD medication that works for me. Chillhop is one of my favorite distributors, I love their seasonal compilation albums and have found several specific lo-fi artists I like thanks to those comps. But: lo-fi hiphop is not a genre where I need computer assistance in finding anything. Guess what every frickin’ discovery algorithm and year-end Wrapped thinks Gavin wants?
Wrapped, Recap, whatever you call it: they’re the distant relative who heard you say once that you liked sunflower seeds. Lo and behold: you’re gonna get a novelty container of sunflower seeds every damn holiday and birthday for the rest of time. There’s no nuance for considering what is enjoyed content versus what is loved content.
I pay for YouTube Premium. Have done so for three years now. Of course, in practice the intention of YouTube on smart TVs is everyone picks their own individual account to watch their content, similar to how everyone chooses their own profile when opening up a Netflix-ian streaming service. Something that doesn’t work for co-watching.
Hours and hours of Northernlion playing The Bazaar and Cloverpit? Yeah, that’s 100% me actively making that decision. Dozens of hours re-watching 10 Minute Power Hour episodes ad nauseum? Nope, that’s my partner and I putting on background noise while we play puzzle games before bed. Or throwing background noise on in the living room while we cross-stitch, crochet, or sort our growing physical media collection.
YouTube is television for me in the same way television existed for me in 2006. I have passionately used YouTube since I was a teenager and some creators have greatly shaped my approach to art, to creating, to life. I’m sure I’m not the most common use-case of a YouTube Premium account out there, but it’s pretty easy to presume that in a household where YouTube regularly appears on actual televisions in front of multiple people, at least one account in that household is going to be re-watching tons of content that isn’t actually being ‘watched.’
For example: YouTube Recap thinks my top channel of the year is The Grumps.
The Grumps have put out 40-ish episodes of 10 Minute Power Hour this year. I’m not gonna sit here and act like I don’t enjoy the show. But my watching the new episode most Mondays does not counterbalance the dozens of hours of Librarian’s Northernlion edits and Skye4’s Jerma985 supercuts I’ve watched on purpose. I’ve watched every Miles in Transitvideo this year. Not every video he put out in 2025. All of them. I’ve watched 10 seasons of Taskmaster UK on YouTube. Well There’s Your Problemhas put out some phenomenal episodes this year, and I’ve revisited several classic multi-hour episodes. I’m current on London Eatsas he cruises around the streets of London on his e-scooter. I keep close tabs on Chillias he cleans up the world one piece of litter at a time.
Is there a way to fix Recap for a TV-ified YouTube? I think so, but it’d require bucking a trend and making the magic black box of algorithmic decisions less magical. Rarely do Recaps and Wrappeds actually give the user any ability to say “actually, my entire musical interests do not start and stop at lo-fi.” For something like a Recap to work and actually capture the buzz of back when Spotify Wrapped was the new hotness, there ironically needs to be more user input to the magic box.
‘Cus let me tell you: any and all nostalgic magic was sucked out of the room the second YouTube Recap proposed car repair is one of my top interests. You know why it said that? I do car maintenance for friends and my own cars, and occasionally while I’m out on the pavement I watch 30 seconds of a tutorial video to double-check a tricky bolt’s location, or make sure I wrote down a torque spec right. I did not sit down and watch a video about the location of the MAF in a random Honda Civic year range.
But then again, Recap isn’t for you, is it? They never are. It’s fun to be reminded of what you did this year. But once you’re reminded of that, what do you do? Screenshot it, and post it on socials. Discord channels are flooded, Bluesky feeds are clogged. Subreddits outright ban them or shunt them into megathreads to isolate them. There is intrinsic value to taking a moment to look back at what happened this year. Hell, I’m writing a second article that’s specifically just YouTube channels I found/loved this year as some sugar to balance out the salt of this critique.
Recap could be good. Wrapped could be good. But we live in a world where ‘new media’ has evolved to the point where, in a way, consumption habits have regressed to how we used to consume media: without care for how a sorting algorithm tabulates the behavior. A big goal of YouTube, and other services like it, was to become “television” for millions of Americans. An unfortunate side effect of achieving that goal is you can’t 1:1 replicate the experiences of niche media apps and expect them to perform the same. Because if you do re-build that for your platform, it’s just gonna give out sunflower seeds.
Creative Writing, Podcasting, and Love of Media 