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YouTube Subscriptions Not Updating? Let’s Fix It.

Posted on the 30 May 2016 by Tftb @TFTB

This might not be a global problem for YouTube but sure is affecting a lot of users who are ranting about it on Twitter.


YouTube Subscriptions have stopped updating the feed, the feed doesn't show the new uploads as it should. Instead it is stuck and now it has been more than 18hours that YouTube users have been facing this issue and YouTube has yet to address it and fix it.

For first few hours most users probably thought that the channels they are subscribed to might not have uploaded anything, after all it was a weekend. Even content creators take some break. But if once they visited their channels they can see a new video has been uploaded and it just isn't showed up on their subscription feed for some reason. Imagine if like a power YouTube user, you too are subscribed to more than 200 channels and follow them on your subscriptions feed. This could get really annoying knowing that you probably have missed those videos forever as you practically cannot visit 200+ channels to check what they might or might not have uploaded.

Tweets about youtube subscriptions

Well it is not humanly possible to keep checking all the channels you subscribed to, so we have a simple solution. Rather a few ideas which you can implement to get through this dark phase. Yes, we know sooner or later YouTube will fix this but till then you are in a limbo of watching and probably missing all the videos which are being uploaded.
This will not only help you get the subscription feed back till YouTube fixes it but also help you be prepared if something like this happens again.

YOUTUBE SUBSCRIPTION RSS FEED

You might not be aware but your subscription feed has a RSS feed to it. YouTube does allow you to individually get RSS updates of a single channel or get RSS updates for all your subscriptions. What we need is the RSS feed of all your subscriptions, this will technically replicate the YouTube Subscription feed page just not on their website.

Import all your YouTube Subscriptions to your RSS reader
  • Subscription page is unique for everyone you need to first login to your YouTube Account.
  • Go to the Manage Subscriptions page.
  • Scroll to the bottom of the page and download the OPML file by clicking Export Subscriptions.
  • This will download a file named "subscriptions_manager.xml"
  • Now go to your favorite RSS reader and import the OPML file to it. Not sure how? Read the next step
Import OPML file

If you don't know or don't use a RSS reader, you can use Feedly. It his free, simple and available for mobile too.

  • Go to Feedly, click Get Started and login with Google or Facebook or make a new Feedly account.
  • You will be greeted with a welcome page. Go to the bottom of the page and click on 'IMPORT OPML'
    If you are a feedly user with some RSS feed, you will need to click 'Personalize' and scroll at the bottom of the page to get the 'IMPORT OPML' button.
  • Choose the downloaded OPML file named "subscriptions_manager.xml", and click IMPORT.
  • Within few seconds it will import your subscriptions feed.
    Now you will have a feed named 'YouTube Subscriptions' on the left. Click on it and you have your real-time subscriptions feed.To make things more visually appealing, click on the gear icon on the top right, choose 'Cards' in the presentation option.

TWITTER LISTS

If RSS feed is not your thing and you rather not want to do all that, we have a more tenuous, difficult but foolproof idea. This might take you few hours or even days to fulfill but make a create a private or public twitter list of all the twitter accounts of all your YouTube subscriptions. This obviously doesn't guarantee you not missing every video as they might tweet a lot of things but if you a power user, and know your way around twitter lists, you know how powerful it is. Most YouTubers tweet about what and when they upload.

Till YouTube fixes this I hope this helps you get your YouTube feed back with these easy methods. If you are a content creator on YouTube, you know how important it is to land in your subscribers feed. I urge you to share it with your viewers so that nobody misses your upload just because YouTube managed to break their own website.