I was arguing with a friend recently about the Village Cooking Channel. If you don't know them, they're a massive South Indian cooking channel known for their outdoor, traditional cooking videos. While watching one of their uploads, I casually mentioned that I subscribed to them back when they had under 100,000 subscribers. My friend rolled his eyes. "Sure you did," he said. "Everyone claims they were there first."
It made me realize how much my YouTube feed has changed over the years. Many of the creators I followed when they were small are now running million-subscriber operations. But how do you actually prove you were early? Or, just for your own curiosity, how do you find out who your very first subscription was?
You can either dig through Google's hidden activity settings, or just export a clean spreadsheet using our tool.
Method 1: Digging through Google's "My Activity"
Google logs every time you hit the subscribe button, but they bury this data deep in your account dashboard. Here is where to look:
- Go to myactivity.google.com and sign in to your YouTube account.
- In the left sidebar (or by tapping the mobile menu), click on Other activity.
- Scroll all the way down until you see YouTube channel subscriptions.
- Click the View Subscriptions link.
Alternatively, you can go to your YouTube History card, click Manage history, switch to the Interactions tab, and find Channel subscriptions.
If you've turned on Google's auto-delete activity settings (which clears activity older than 3, 18, or 36 months), or if you ever manually cleared your YouTube history, your subscription history here will be gone. Google permanently deletes those timestamps from your activity feed once they're cleared.
Method 2: Export a spreadsheet (Fastest method)
If your Google activity logs are incomplete because of auto-delete, or if you just don't want to spend ten minutes clicking "Load More" to scroll back to 2013, the easiest way is to use Export Venue.
Because we use the official YouTube API, we pull your exact subscription timestamps directly from YouTube's database. It completely bypasses your browser's local activity logs. Here is how it works:
- Sign In (or Sign Up) to your Export Venue account.
- Go to your Profile and click Connect YouTube Account.
- Head over to the Export Subscriptions tool.
- Select your format (CSV or Excel) and ensure the Published At column is checked.
- Click Export.
Open the downloaded spreadsheet, sort the "Published At" column from Oldest to Newest, and you're done. Your entire YouTube history will instantly line up chronologically.
It's actually pretty wild looking back at your oldest subscriptions. You'll probably spot channels you completely forgot about, like abandoned gaming channels, old vloggers, or creators who just stopped posting years ago. Plus, it finally settles the debate about who actually subscribed to a creator first.