What is in a YouTube Google Takeout export?

Last reviewed: October 20, 2026 · Markdown version

More than your videos: Takeout's YouTube entry offers eleven kinds of data, and one of them is your channel subscriptions, as a CSV file. Google's own help page names only “YouTube videos” in its list of examples (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 20 October 2026), so the rest of this page comes from the Takeout screen itself. Signed in, the YouTube row is called YouTube and YouTube Music, described as “Watch and search history, videos, comments and other content you've created on YouTube and YouTube Music”, with two buttons under it: Multiple formats and All YouTube data included (checked 20 October 2026, signed in, in Chrome on a computer). Screens like this change without notice, so treat the lists below as a dated snapshot.

The eleven parts you can tick

Clicking All YouTube data included opened a box headed “Choose specific YouTube data for your export”, with every item ticked to begin with (checked 20 October 2026, signed in, in Chrome on a computer):

channels, creator-demographics, history, kids
music (library and uploads), playlists, shopping
subscriptions, support issues, video metadata, videos

Untick anything you do not need. If the list of channels you follow is all you want, subscriptions alone is enough, and leaving out videos keeps a channel with uploads from producing a large download. That fits Google's own instruction: “If you only want to download some of your data from a product, you may have the option to select a button like All data included” and then uncheck the rest (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 20 October 2026).

What format each part comes in

The Multiple formats button opened a second box, “Choose specific formats for your archive”, with one row per kind of file (checked 20 October 2026, signed in, in Chrome on a computer). The rows most people care about:

subscriptions: “Your channel subscriptions.” CSV is the only choice offered.
history: “Your watch and search history from YouTube.” HTML by default, or JSON, as “Separate HTML files for your watch and search history”.
playlists (“Playlists you've created”) and playlist videos (“videos in each playlist”): CSV.
comment (“Comment you've created”), sent live chats and posts: CSV.
music library songs: “A list of all the songs added to your YouTube Music library.” CSV.
video media: your uploads, “Either your originally uploaded videos, or a high-quality transcode.”

The rest of the box is mostly creator-side data (channel settings, images, URL settings, pronouns, clips, Shopping wish lists, Playables saves). Google's help page agrees on the one format it does mention: “Videos are downloaded in their original format, or as MP4 files with H264 video and AAC audio” (same Google Account Help page).

What the screens do not tell you

Neither box shows a file name, a folder layout or the columns inside any CSV, and the help page does not list them either. What it offers instead is a guide packed into every download: “Within your archive will be a file named archive_browser.html that will have additional information about the file formats” (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 20 October 2026). Open that first. The same page says HTML opens in any browser, and that CSV and JSON files can be opened in TextEdit software. A spreadsheet is the more comfortable reader for a CSV, but that is our suggestion, not Google's.

Three other limits from that page:

It is a copy. Downloading “doesn’t delete it from Google’s servers.”
No date range. “At this time, we do not currently support exporting data for certain time frames.” A subscriptions file is your list on the day the archive is built.
It expires. An archive lasts about 7 days and can be downloaded 5 times.

Brand Accounts

Google's tip about missing data is written about uploads only: if some YouTube videos are missing, check whether your channel is linked to a Brand Account and switch to it before exporting (Google Account Help: How to download your Google data, read 20 October 2026). The page says nothing about subscriptions in that context. Our reading: if you followed channels while using a Brand Account's channel, export while switched to that account, because the subscriptions belong to whichever channel did the subscribing.

Using the subscriptions file

How to request the archive, step by step, is on our export page, and what you can and cannot do with the list on another account is on moving subscriptions to a new account. If you only want to follow a few channels outside YouTube, a channel's RSS feed is lighter than any archive.

Adinand Channel Sorter, our app, makes a different kind of list: from Settings it exports your whole channel list as a CSV with each channel's category and your own tags, made on your phone with nothing uploaded. It reads the channels from your account after you sign in with Google rather than from a Takeout file, and the CSV is a list to keep or check against, not something YouTube can import.