YouTube Now Tells You How Many Hours You Spent Watching Videos

2018 is all about digital wellbeing. Both Android and iOS are getting massive updates this year to tackle digital health and making sure users aren’t too addicted to their phones. Other companies, like Facebook and Instagram, are adding new in-app features that help users track their usage and limit usage to focus on other things in life.

Today, YouTube is taking a similar approach. The company is expanding its range of digital wellbeing features to help users track their usage of YouTube itself with a new Time Watch feature. YouTube will now track how many hours you spend watching videos on the platform so you can limit your usage in order to help improve your digital health. YouTube will tell you how many hours you spent watching videos on a single day, the day before, the past week, and it’ll even give you a daily average.

The feature is based on YouTube’s Watch History feature which keeps track of the videos you watch on the platform. This means it won’t track videos that you watch in incognito mode or videos that have been deleted from your Watch History. It will, however, track your YouTube TV usage as well, but Google told TechCrunch the company plans on removing YouTube TV’s usage from the new Time Watched feature.