How to delete all your Watch Later videos on YouTube, and why there is no button for it

"YouTube doesn't tell you when you hit the cap, and there's no bulk delete, so you're stuck removing videos one by one forever"

— a commenter on r/youtube

The short answer: YouTube has no button that deletes every video in Watch Later. Its own help article documents one way to remove a video — More → Remove from Watch later, one video per click. The Watch Later page adds one bulk removal option, Remove watched videos, which clears only what YouTube counts as watched. For everything else there are three routes: remove videos one at a time, run a script in the browser console, or use an extension that can select hundreds of videos and remove them in one batch.

Which of those is right depends on whether you want the list empty or want it sorted out. They are different jobs, and most of the frustration comes from treating the second as the first.

1. What YouTube gives you

One at a time. YouTube's help article for Watch Later describes removal on a computer as: open You, find the video under Watch Later, click More below it, click Remove from Watch later. It describes no bulk removal and no way to clear the whole list. That is three clicks per video, so a queue of 1,000 is 3,000 clicks.

Only the watched ones. The one bulk removal lives on the Watch Later page's own menu: Remove watched videos. It is not in the help article, but people ask about it by name on YouTube's own community forum. It does exactly what it says, and that is the problem. The watched videos were never the backlog. The backlog is the four hundred you saved and never started, and this button leaves every one of them where it was.

2. By hand, or by script

By hand works, and it is worth being honest about its shape: it is fine for fifty videos and hopeless for two thousand. The cost is not only the clicks. It is that every removal is decided alone, in the order YouTube shows the list, with no way to see "all the hour-long ones" or "everything from a channel I stopped watching" as one pile.

By script is the other common answer: a snippet pasted into the browser's developer console that clicks each row's menu and presses Remove, over and over. It does empty the list. Three things are worth knowing before you paste one:

• It depends on the page's markup. It finds the buttons by how YouTube's page is built today. When the page changes, the script stops working, or clicks the wrong thing.
• It removes everything it reaches. There is no step where you keep the forty videos you still meant to watch.
• There is nothing to undo. Getting a video back means saving it again, which means remembering what it was.

And one general rule: code pasted into the console of a signed-in page runs as you on that site. Only paste code you can read.

Why there is no app that "just uses the API" for this. YouTube's Data API stopped serving Watch Later in 2016. Its revision history records that, after September 12 of that year, requests for the watch later playlist's details or its items return an empty list. So anything that manages Watch Later has to work inside your own signed-in YouTube page, whether it is a console script or an extension.

3. Sort the queue first, then clear it in batches

A delete-all button answers "make this list empty". What people with a four-figure Watch Later usually want is different: get rid of what I will never watch, and keep what I will. That takes four steps, in this order, and the order is the point.

1. Read the whole list first. Pull every video into one place where it can be sorted, instead of scrolling YouTube's page in the order the videos went in.
2. Filter it into piles. Watched. Started and abandoned. Under twenty minutes. Over it. Already saved in another playlist. Each pile is a separate decision, and most of them are easy once you see them together.
3. Act on a whole pile at once. Remove it, or move it into a playlist that means something, as one batch rather than one click per video.
4. Keep an undo. A batch that removes 300 videos should be able to put 300 back.

That shape is what Tubekeep is built around. It is a Chrome extension that reads your Watch Later, playlists, liked videos and subscriptions into the browser, through the YouTube tab you are already signed in to. There is no Google sign-in to grant and no API key, and the index stays on your machine.

In practice, clearing Watch Later with it looks like this:

• Sort by length, by how long a video has sat there, or by channel, in either direction. The sort happens on the local copy, so YouTube's own order is never touched.
• Narrow with the filter row: Watched, In progress, Under 20 min, 20 min+, Unavailable, In 2+ lists, In no list. Each button shows how many videos it would leave. A text box at the head of the row matches titles and channel names, and works together with whichever button is pressed.
• Select by clicking, shift-clicking a range, dragging a box across the grid, or taking everything the filter left in one press. Then Remove from Watch Later, or Move to… a playlist, including one you create in the picker.
• Watch it run. Batches are paced, with a pause between requests. The local library changes only after YouTube confirms each write. If YouTube starts refusing, the batch stops and says so, and nothing unsent is lost.
• Undo a finished batch for 30 days; the undo runs as another paced batch. The exception is removing videos that were already deleted or made private: nothing can add those back, so the confirmation says before you press it that such a batch cannot be undone.

The step-by-step version, with the filter row in detail, is in Tubekeep's help: Clearing out Watch Later.

What it costs. Reading, sorting, filtering and removing videos one at a time are free without limit. Batches are free for the first 500 items, counted for the life of the install; every confirmation shows how many are left. Past that, Pro lifts the ceiling as a one-time purchase, not a subscription. It is on the pricing page, and if your queue never needs more than 500 batch removals, there is nothing to buy.

Questions

Q: Is there a way to delete all Watch Later videos at once on YouTube? A: Not with YouTube alone. Its help article documents removing one video at a time, and the one bulk removal option on the Watch Later page, Remove watched videos, clears only the videos YouTube counts as watched. Emptying the unwatched part takes either one removal per video, a console script, or an extension that removes a selection in a batch.

Q: Does "Remove watched videos" delete the videos I have not watched? A: No. It clears only what YouTube has marked as watched, which is why a queue that has grown for years barely shrinks when you press it: the backlog is the videos you saved and never started.

Q: Can I get Watch Later videos back after removing them? A: A removal made on YouTube itself has no batch to undo: getting a video back means finding it and saving it again. A batch run through Tubekeep can be undone for 30 days, except a batch that clears videos that were already deleted or made private, because YouTube will not accept those back into a list.

Q: Why can't an app clear Watch Later through YouTube's API? A: Because the API has not served Watch Later since 2016: YouTube's revision history records that requests for the watch later playlist and its items return an empty list after September 12, 2016. Tools that manage it therefore work inside your own signed-in YouTube page.

Q: Do I need an account to clear Watch Later with Tubekeep? A: No. It reads and edits your lists through the YouTube tab you are already signed in to, and every part of the library works without a Deft Foundry account. The only thing that needs one is the optional AI filing of subscriptions into folders, or buying Pro.