A Whole Bunch of Unlisted YouTube Videos are About to Disappear

Google is about to make a major change to Unlisted videos that will impact a lot of videos on their YouTube platform.

When you upload a video to YouTube, you get options to post them publicly for all to see, keep them private, or allow them to live “Unlisted.” The Unlisted option has always been a useful selection because it lets you share those videos freely, as well as anyone else, as long as they have a link to it. However, they won’t show up in search listings and other tabs.

In a blog post today, Google announced that on July 23, it will switch all Unlisted videos to Private that were uploaded prior to 2017. Google is calling this a “security update.”

In the coming days, should you have a video that is impacted by this move, Google will notify you with some options. For those who don’t mind, you can simply do nothing and let your older pre-2017 videos go Private. Switching to Private will (obviously) stop the video from being embedded or shared widely going forward, plus it’ll kill all old embeds and links.

Another option will be for you to opt out of the change. If you don’t want your Unlisted videos to hide completely from the world, you can fill out this form and tell Google to leave them alone.

You could also simply switch all of your old Unlisted videos to Public or reupload them as Unlisted, since they would be uploaded outside of the pre-2017 cutoff.

Security!