Many YouTube users may have had a channel for a long time where you accumulate videos, but you are not comfortable with the URL . This address is created automatically by copying the name of the Gmail account associated with the channel.
Maybe you want to differentiate the two a bit, so we are going to teach you to customize that URL beyond the limitations that YouTube will put you.
From YouTube, limited possibilities
The management of the YouTube channel has moved a couple of years ago to the Creator Studio. To enter this menu, you must click on your avatar, in the upper right corner . Right below My Channel is Creator Studio.
Within this menu, you can edit your videos or access your statistics. In the Channel option, you are given the possibility of updating aspects related to your channel , such as monetization, live broadcasting or (attention) the customization of our URL.
This option may appear to us as available or not, depending on whether we have met the requirements that the web asks us to do so. The main requirement is to have a minimum of 100 subscribers , and apart from that, that we have an active account, with uploaded videos, avatar photo and more than 30 days old.
If we qualify, in the Channel menu we will have available the function of activating URL customization. When we click, a new menu will appear where we are given the option to request customization . It is not a very visual menu, so we mark in this screenshot where you have to click exactly:
Once we click to customize the URL, we will access a new window where a series of pre-selected options appear . Essentially it is our name of the channel, but can include capital letters to differentiate. We can also add suffixes, making the address even longer. It is not a very rosy outlook.
Our YouTube account name is not editable, so it seems that we are doomed to stick with that name for our URL . But wait, don't confirm yet. There is a way to get away with it.
The trick is on Google+
As you know, when you create a Gmail account, Google automatically creates a Google+ profile for you , whether you are going to use it or not. And in that profile is the key to be able to change your YouTube URL, since both accounts are also related.
From Gmail, or from any other Google product, you can access your Google+ account by checking your avatar in the upper right corner. Once inside the profile, we will find a way to change the username. To do this we go to Edit profile, and then, on our name, click on the information button .
This will take us to a menu where we can change all aspects of our profile. If we mark the pencil icon on our name , we will arrive at a new window, where it will allow us to change our name, surname and alias.
If we want to put a short and easy to remember name, we can simply fill in the name without using the last name , and the system will leave us. When we have written the name we want, we mark save and exit Google+.
Going back to YouTube
It is time to go back to YouTube and repeat the same steps as at the beginning to request a URL change (if you have the same window open, you will have to refresh, so that the changes are updated).
In the window where the options to customize the URL appear, we will find a new one that did not appear before, and this is the one that you have written in the Google+ profile. Here you can see the change compared to the screenshot at the beginning:
In this way, you can now update your URL with the name you want (while it is available, of course) . You click on Change URL, confirm, and that's it. Finally, you can undo your steps, return to the Google+ account and recover the original name that you had in the profile, to leave everything as it was initially.