The traditional method of creating YouTube playlists is pretty easy but always requires that you log into your YouTube or Google account to do so. That’s why YouTube playlists are usually associated with a YouTube account. It is however, possible to create “anonymous” YouTube playlists that are not associated with any account using the simple trick described in this article.

As with regular YouTube playlists, you can also share the “anonymous” playlists I describe here on social media or in an email newsletter.

Playlists From Video IDs

Since this is just a demonstration, I’m going to use only these two “randomly” selected videos to make an anonymous playlist. You can add more videos of course.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTCNwgzM2rQ
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8hy8NxZvFY

Notice the unique video ID of each video (highlighted in blue). All YouTube videos have a similar but unique video ID.

Also notice that both videos don’t belong to the same YouTube channel. The YouTube channel where the videos originate don’t matter here.

To create your anonymous playlist, you need to create a special URL. Part of which contains a concatenated list of video IDs (separated with commas). The concatenated string will be added as parameter value for YouTube’s video_ids parameter.

The full format for the special URL is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch_videos?video_ids=ID1,ID2… (for all the videos you want to add).

So for my example videos above, the anonymous YouTube playlist URL will be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch_videos?video_ids=dTCNwgzM2rQ,y8hy8NxZvFY

Click on the link to test it out. It has all the behaviors of regular YouTube playlists (sharing and so forth).

Here’s a screenshot of how it looks when playing. Notice the playlist features to the right.