Google discontinues Youtube’s Collections feature

Google just announced that it will discontinue YouTube's Collections feature on May 20, 2015.

Collections allow you to group subscriptions on YouTube into different categories. For instance, you could create a music collection and move all of your music related subscriptions into it.

You have full control meaning that you select the name and the subscriptions that you want to group under a collection.

Collections offer several advantages compared to maintaining individual subscriptions on YouTube:

1. Subscriptions can be sorted thematically.
2. It reduces the length of the list when you display your subscription using the menu on YouTube.
3. Collections can be loaded and display only videos of channels that you have added to individual collections.

When you open a collection on YouTube or the manage subscriptions page of your account, the following notification is displayed on top:

On 5/20/15 we'll discontinue collections, as we'll focus on other efforts to make your subscriptions even more enjoyable.

While Google mentions that it wants to make subscriptions more enjoyable, it announced the exact opposite of that in the notification as users will have less options when it comes to managing subscriptions. "Even more enjoyable" seems like a strange choice of words for a feature removal announcement.

While it is possible that the company will add a new feature to YouTube eventually that improves subscription management on the site, it has not made an announcement in this regard yet.

Discontinuation likely means that collections vanish on YouTube on May 20. While there is a chance that existing collections won't be touched, it is highly unlikely that Google will go down that route.

The most likely course of action is a complete removal of the feature on YouTube. YouTube users who have created collections in the past will see a list of individual subscriptions instead when they open their personal menu on YouTube which is less practicable, especially for users who are subscribed to dozens or even hundreds of different channels.

This removes the option to display thematic videos only on YouTube. Previously, you could click on a collection to only display videos by channels that you have added to it which was a great way to display specific videos only (e.g. development, movie trailers or gaming videos) without displaying other video types at the same time.

New collections can still be created as of today from within the subscription manager.