How to change your YouTube channel name?

How do you change your name on YouTube? Either your name on YouTube or the new @ handle. And how do you remove the numbers in your YouTube name?

I go through all of these questions step-by-step using only my mobile phone. 

How to change your YouTube channel name?



TRANSCRIPT: (CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE)

THIS IS THE TRANSCRIPT - CLICK PLAY ON THE VIDEO ABOVE!

Hello! Welcome back to the Happy Hut. I'm Neil and it is cold tonight. 

This is the coldest night of the year so we'll get through this as quickly as possible.

How do you change your name on YouTube? 

We are going to change our YouTube channel name, but we actually have two names on YouTube... look at my channel here. 

Firstly we have the channel name, so this channel you're watching right now is called “Neil Mossey”. 

You can choose anything you like up to 50 characters and it has to be within YouTube Community guidelines so no rude words! 

But there's a second name down here which starts with an @ symbol and YouTube calls this a handle. 

It's a name that's completely unique to you so no one else on YouTube has this, and it kind of works like the @ names on TikTok and Instagram. 

I've got the YouTube guidelines on screen now, so this can be anything from 3 to 30 characters long and YouTube might have just made up and given you your handle that you have right... right now. 

And it usually puts numbers on the end so you probably want to remove those numbers from your YouTube name. 

If you want to do this using your desktop computer, I'll leave a link down in the description and YouTube will change this over time. 

I'll leave a link right down in the description for the very latest guidance and advice for how to do this. 

So the first thing we're going to do is open the YouTube app, and then I'm going to click on the avatar on the top right hand corner of the screen. 

And we'll make sure that we are logged into the channel where we want to change our name, so on here you can see I'm called “My super first channel” and my handle is my superfirstchannel5798.

I don't want those numbers, so we're going to click on the next menu option down: “your channel” and we click on “your channel” whether or not you have videos up on your channel. 

And on this page, just underneath our name and details you can see some options here. 

We're going to click on the pen icon which... which is the edit icon. 

This opens up all the details for our presence on YouTube. 

At the top here we can change the picture for our Avatar, so if I click on this camera icon here I am... I can even take a picture and change my avatar. 

And the first option down, if I click on the pen icon here, I can change the name of my YouTube channel. 

Now this name doesn't have to be unique, so there might be lots of channels called “my super first channel”. It doesn't matter, so long as it's 50 characters or less. 

The second option down is where we can change our handle. 

Let me show you what happens if you can't get the handle you want. 

So I want to change this to “mysuperfirstchannel” and lose those numbers. 

But unfortunately the handle has been taken by another Channel with this handle. 

What I can do is call this something completely different, so let's try “MySuperSecondChannel” and YouTube is telling me that this handle - this unique handle - is available! 

So I'll click on the “save” button on the bottom here, so if I wanted to change my channel name... I can click on the pen icon here and I could change this to whatever I like. 

And because of this it means that we have a completely unique URL! 

So we have a unique web page for our YouTube channel or our YouTube name and this URL is youtube.com/@mysupersecondchannel 

So if we go to our YouTube channel, this is how it looks now. 

I think it's beautiful! 

If this video is helping thanks for saying hi in the comments below it'd be great to hear from you and right here are all my videos to help you get started on YouTube.

Previous post...
How to free up Google Photos storage space on mobile

All about me, and getting these by email.