Users May Start Seeing Blank YouTube Home Feeds

YouTube has announced a change to its home feed, informing users they will see a blank page if they have their watch history turned off.

Many users turn off their watch history in the interests of privacy, but that may lead to a sparse home feed, if users don’t have much of an existing watch history. The company announced the change in a support page:

Starting today, if you have YouTube watch history off and have no significant prior watch history, features that require watch history to provide video recommendations will be disabled – like your YouTube home feed. This means that starting today, your home feed may look a lot different: you’ll be able to see the search bar and the left-hand guide menu, with no feed of recommended videos thus allowing you to more easily search, browse subscribed channels and explore Topic tabs instead.

We’re rolling these changes out slowly, over the next few months. We are launching this new experience to make it more clear which YouTube features rely on watch history to provide video recommendations and make it more streamlined for those of you who prefer to search rather than browse recommendations. You can change your YouTube watch history settings at any time based on whether you prefer us to provide video recommendations or not.