If you find that the lower limit of your YouTube usage translates to ~1.5% of your life, you'd say, "That's enough YouTube for today," as well. This is probably why YouTube offers no easy way of downloading your history. I scraped for my history through my cookies, but it can downloaded via Google's Takeout service as well.

Scraping YouTube History

While there are multiple methods to do this, I scraped the data by using YouTube cookies from my browser. I exported my cookies through the Edit This Cookie extension on Chrome. The actual scraping part was done using the Python library, Scrapy. You could use Selenium, beautifulsoup, and others as well.

Analysis

After collecting the video URLs, titles, and duration, I saved it to a CSV file. This resulted in an over 5 MB file, just text. This should be indicative of the size of the history. The file contains over 19,000 rows.

I used Python for the analysis. The Jupyter notebook at the end, outlines this analysis.

Here's a bunch of insights:

• I have watched over 19,340 videos.
• Amongst these, areound 11,500 have been unique videos, and 7,500 have been repeats. There is some ambiguity here.
• I have watched videos from over 5,368 channels.
• The total watch time comes out to 9899651 seconds , 2750 hours or 115 days.
• This translates to ~1.42% of my life.