YouTube playlists are easy to share, but the useful bits of the URL can be surprisingly easy to miss. If you are building a small tool, organizing research, or planning how long a playlist will take to watch, two details matter most: the playlist ID and the total watch time.

This guide walks through both.

1. Find the playlist ID in a YouTube URL

Most playlist URLs include a query parameter named list. The value after list= is the playlist ID.

For example: