5 Ways to Discover New YouTube Channels or Users You Might Like

There are so many artists with their own little corner on YouTube. The most popular YouTube channels are easy to find, but it can be hard to discover new or smaller channels. Here are a few ways to uncover hidden gems.

YouTube doesn't have a particularly good system to filter and find channels you might like, nor a good search function, particularly for channels. It's better to use a third-party website that tells you about new YouTubers you might like.

Channel Crawler (Web): The Missing Channel Filter Tool

Channel Crawler should really be something that YouTube builds into its own site. The site has indexed over 600,000 YouTube channels to make a simple tool that lets you filter channels easily.

You can filter by:

The categories that the channel is listed under on YouTube.
The languages that the channel uses.
The country that the channel is from.
Minimum or maximum number of subscribers.
Minimum or maximum amount of total views.
Minimum or maximum amount of total videos.
How many days it has been since the channel last uploaded a video.

You can even add keywords to your search, which work the same as Google search strings. For example, you can add "-Minecraft" to exclude Minecraft channels while searching in the video games category.

Channels Hunt (Web): Categorized List and Newest Channels

Channels Hunt has done what YouTube has been terrible at doing for so long: a neat category-wise list of all the major channels. The site has classified 1172 YouTube channels so far, across categories like sports, beauty and fashion, entertainment, gaming, science, how-to, tech reviews, food and drink, children, and so on. You'll even find awesome wrestling channels!

Each category has a bunch of sub-categories too, each labeled with how many channels are in it. So for instance, with a couple of clicks, you can find the best channels for movie lovers.

Channels Hunt also recommends six new channels every week, usually from popular accounts with plenty of videos. It also has a list of the biggest channels added in the last 30 days, so you might find some cool new people to follow.

&Chill (Web): Public Rooms to Watch YouTube With Others

At its core, &Chill is like all those other apps to watch YouTube simultaneously with friends far away. You create a room, send a link to whoever you want to watch with, and you get a movie theater-like experience. But &Chill also features public rooms, which serves as a great discovery tool.

Go through the list of public rooms to find something others are interested in watching. It's a good way to expose yourself to new things on YouTube that you wouldn't see otherwise since YouTube's algorithms only push videos it thinks you are interested in.

There's even a chat within each room so you can send messages to the strangers you're watching with, and make some new friends or get a few recommendations for channels to check out.

Tube Spark (Web): Stumble Upon Niche Channels

Tube Spark is trying to build a discovery engine for niche YouTube channels. It's a bit like StumbleUpon, the random link discovery engine, but only for YouTube channels that create a certain type of content.

The main page has a single video that you can watch, or skip to the next video. Once you finish viewing it, click the thumbs up or thumbs down button to vote on it, based on which the video will be shown (or not shown) to other people. If you like what you see, you can also the channel through its button under the video.

All said and done, Tube Spark is actually a pretty good StumbleUpon alternative that still works.

r/ChannelWatch (Web): Reddit's Recommendations

If you want recommendations from real people, you can always head to Reddit's r/ChannelWatch community to find new channels to subscribe to. It's not aggressively active, but you still get a few new channel recommendations each month.

The good news is that r/ChannelWatch has been around for five years now, so it has a huge repository of old posts that you can go through. Try the top posts of all time, or filter by the most controversial recommendations to find crazy YouTube channels you need to see to believe.

The moderators are pretty good at keeping the channel clean, and if you find something you like, then comment on it to ask others for similar recommendations. It's a generally helpful community.