YouTube just rolled out a new feature called “Recap,” which gives users a personalized review of their video-watching habits over the past year. Instead of just logging hours, Recap turns your watch history into an at-a-glance highlight reel, complete with top channels, interest trends, and even a “viewer personality type” based on what you watched most.
With Recap, YouTube analyses your viewing patterns — which creators you visited most, recurring topics you browsed, shifts in interest over time — and distills them into up to a dozen interactive “cards.” These cards can show things like “Top Channels,” “Trending Topics for You,” or “Year in Review,” and aim to give you a sense of how your tastes evolved across the year.
What adds a playful twist is the personality tagging. Depending on your habits, you might be labeled an “Adventurer,” “Skill Builder,” “Sunshiner,” or “Creative Spirit,” among others. The idea seems to be to turn passive viewing data into a fun, shareable snapshot — a way to reflect on how you consumed media this year.
If you’ve also used YouTube Music during the year, Recap can combine that data too — showing you your top artists, songs, or podcasts you listened to. It’s meant as a consolidated glance at both video and audio consumption, to give a fuller picture of your time spent on the platform.
But not everyone loves it. Some users say that the personality labels feel arbitrary — hearing that a year of random browsing made you a “Creative Spirit” can seem weird or inaccurate. Others worry that such simplified summaries reduce viewing to data points, overlooking nuance: the context behind a video, the mood at the time, or why you clicked something. For heavy users who scroll through a mix of educational, funny, nostalgic, or random content, the “personality” result might feel generic or shallow.
Despite mixed reactions, Recap clearly aims to make YouTube more reflective — not just a stream of endless videos, but a place where you can see your own media habits in a new light. For some users, it’ll be a fun year-end look-back; for others, a reminder of time spent watching. Either way, it’s a fresh take on memory and media consumption for 2025.
