Guide

Follow a channel or a playlist?

Follow the channel if you want everything it posts. Follow a playlist if you only want one series or topic from it. Three questions are usually enough to decide, and you can also do both.

Three questions to decide

1. 1. Do you want everything the channel posts?

   If yes, follow the channel and stop here. If there's a part of it you'd happily skip, keep going.

2. 2. Does the channel file its videos into playlists?

   Open the channel's Playlists tab. If the series you care about has its own playlist, following that playlist gets you exactly that series. If the channel doesn't use playlists, following the channel is the only option.

3. 3. How often does it post?

   A channel that uploads once a month costs you nothing to follow whole. One that posts daily across five topics is where a single playlist saves you a lot of alerts you'd only dismiss.

Worked examples

Doing both

You can follow one channel's uploads and another channel's playlists from the same account, and each is watched separately. Following a channel and one of its own playlists works too, but a video that lands in both reaches you twice, so pick one per channel unless that's what you want.

What each costs in noise

A channel follow is as loud as the channel: a daily uploader means an alert most days. A playlist follow is as loud as the playlist, and it fires when a video is added to it. That's usually a new upload, but sometimes it's an older video the creator filed there later. On Listabell each account can also follow a limited number of channels, so save channel follows for the ones where you really do want everything.

Ready to set it up? How to subscribe to a YouTube playlist walks through following a playlist, and YouTube channel upload alerts through following a whole channel.