YouTube character counter

How to write a title and a description that fit

A video has several text fields and they pull in opposite directions: one is short and decides whether anybody clicks, the others are long and mostly ignored. Write them in that order.

1. 1Paste the title on its own first. It is the shortest field and the one with two limits: what YouTube will accept, and what a search result will show.
2. 2Write the description in this box rather than in Studio. 5,000 characters is enough room to lose track of what the opening was supposed to do.
3. 3Order the description deliberately: the pitch, the links, then the chapters and the credits. Timestamps and their labels come out of the same budget as the prose.
4. 4Move the hashtags to the end and count them in with everything else, then keep the list short for the reason given below.
5. 5Paste the whole tag list in as one line against its 500 characters, because that budget is shared across every tag rather than given to each of them.
6. 6Copy each field into Studio one at a time and keep this page open, since Studio only shows you a counter once you are nearly out of room.

YouTube's fields and their real ceilings

The title is where the constraint really bites, because the number YouTube enforces and the number a search result shows are not the same number at all.

• Description: 5,000 characters. Room for the pitch, the links, the chapters and the credits, in roughly that order of importance.
• Title: 100 characters. Search results cut around 60 characters.
• Tags: 500 characters. A single pool for the whole list, so a long tag is taken out of what is left for the others.
• Angle brackets are rejected in a title, so a title written with them will not save at all.
• A tag containing a space is treated as though it were quoted, and those quotation marks are charged to the same pool.
• Hashtags in the description are ordinary characters. The first three appear above the title, and using more than fifteen makes YouTube ignore all of them.
• Chapter timestamps are description text: the 00:00 line, every label and every line break is charged.
• A link is charged at its full typed length, and the description is where a long tracking URL is least visible and most expensive.
• Emoji are allowed in a title and counted as characters, though they are a poor use of a field a search result is going to cut.

Where a title breaks

A YouTube title fails quietly. It saves, it looks right in Studio, and then it turns up in search results and on a phone with the last three words missing, which is usually where the thing that made it worth clicking was.

• The hard ceiling of 100 characters and the width a result actually shows are different constraints, and only one of them will tell you off.
• A keycap emoji is three code points, a digit, an invisible variation selector and the keycap itself, and one character to a reader, so a code unit counter will insist the title is longer than it is.
• Unicode bold letters pasted into a title are two code units each, and a screen reader reads them out one symbol at a time.
• A description pasted from a document can carry hard line breaks mid-sentence. They count, they survive, and the description renders ragged.

What the count will not fix

Counting characters on YouTube is worth a couple of minutes on the title and almost nothing on the description, whose ceiling is far past anything you will write and whose opening is the only part with a job to do.

• Count the title properly. It is short, it is the whole listing, and both its ceiling and its display width matter.
• Do not pad the description to fill the field. Keyword stuffing does not help and it pushes the useful links further down.
• Community posts and Shorts are different fields; check the one you are actually publishing into.
• No counter tells you whether the title promises something the video delivers, and that is the only job the title has.