This should help you reenable your YouTube notifications, and don’t worry, there’s a step-by-step guide below, screenshots included, that’ll help you follow along with the instructions!

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Related guide: What Does “Join” Mean on YouTube?

What Are YouTube Notifications?

The YouTube notifications were a way of being informed about new content from your favorite creators, or interactions between you and other users.

YouTube doesn’t send marketing ads or infomercials of its own, so instead, you could opt to receive notifications about creators.

However, YouTube removed this feature back on August 13, 2020.

Now, you won’t receive any notifications about your favorite YouTube creator anymore.

You will, however, receive notifications from the YouTube browser or app if you have turned the notifications on.

Not receiving these notifications happens for several reasons:

• You’re signed-in to the wrong YouTube account
• The YouTube notification settings are scrambled (desktop or mobile)
• The notification settings are disabled
• Your ad-blocker or other extensions are messing things up

Let’s see how you can fix this, down below:

How Can You Fix the YouTube Email Notifications Not Working?

There are several ways to solve this problem:

• Turn on your desktop notifications
• Turn on your mobile notifications
• Use a workaround URL
• Disable your AdBlock or other extensions
• Sign in to the right YouTube account

The first thing you should do is check your notification options on desktop or mobile.

If those options are scrambled, or the notifications are disabled, you’re not receiving them.

We’ll start with:

1. Enable notifications on Desktop

The reason your email notifications might have stopped working is that you haven’t enabled the Desktop notifications.

So here’s how to enable them:

Begin by opening YouTube and left-clicking on your profile picture located in the top-right corner (see the screenshot above).

A menu will appear, showing several options like “Your Channel,” “YouTube Studio,” “Help,” “Settings,” and more.

Select “Settings” to open your account settings (screenshot below)

Next, look for the “Notifications” option on the left-hand side bar and select it. This will reveal several options on the right-hand side of the window (see the screenshot above).

That’s where you can customize your desktop notifications for YouTube.

Enable “Subscriptions” to receive notifications about the channels you’ve subscribed to, including new videos they post.

The “Recommended videos” option will keep you notified about what YouTube thinks you’ll enjoy.

Read the description of all the other options and enable the ones you need.

2. Enable notifications on mobile

The same goes for mobile YouTube notifications. Enable them through the YouTube app and you’ll continue receiving notifications, as simple as that!

However, instead of receiving email notifications, you’ll receive mobile push notifications. Same thing, almost…

Let’s begin:

Start by opening your phone settings (gear icon), and then scroll down through the options until you find the “Apps” option.

It should be near the “Battery” and “Security” options.

Tap on it and see the steps below:

After selecting “Apps,” you’ll be taken to a different window where you should see several options. One of these should be “Manage Apps” or “App management” or “Installed apps“, depending on your OS.

This step might not be necessary on your mobile device since all mobile devices are somewhat different.

If this applies to you, then select that option and you should reach a list with all your installed apps. Use the search bar to look for YouTube and select it (screenshot below).

Once you find YouTube, either with the search box or by scrolling manually, select it to open its settings.

On the App Info page, you should find the “Notifications” option if you scroll down. Select it to start customizing the notification settings. We’re nearly there!

The first thing you’ll want to tick is the “Show notifications” option. Make sure it’s enabled (blue icon), and then look through all the other options and see if you need any of them.

That’s it! For the basic notifications…

But if you want to go one step further, you can customize what type of notifications you receive from YouTube. 

Scroll down the App Info page (the one from above), and you’ll see a list of all the notification options you can customize.

The “Show notifications” button in the previous step includes all these notifications.

But you can customize it to receive, say, Subscription notifications only, excluding everything else.

You won’t receive notifications about live streams, recommended videos, feedback, etc.

Select one of the options from above and look below to see what you’re dealing with:

On this window, you’ll see the “Show notifications” for that specific type of notification (Subscriptions). You can do this for all of the notification types from above.

And you’re done with this method!

3. Use the Subscriptions feature on YouTube

Disclaimer – this isn’t a solution for the email notifications per se.

It’s more of a temporary replacement you can use to quickly get updated on the latest news from YouTube.

The “Subscriptions” tab on YouTube shows you a list of all recent videos from all the channels you’re subscribed to.

To access it, open YouTube on your mobile device and look at the bottom of the screen.

You’ll see the YouTube bar with 4 menus.

The menus are “Home,” “Shorts,” “+,” “Subscriptions,” and “Library.”

Tap on “Subscriptions” (see screenshot above) to see a list of all recent videos from your subscribed channels.

After you get to the Subscriptions page, you’ll see some of the channels you subscribed to at the top.

Tap on “All” (to the right of your subscribed channels) to see all your subscribed channels. Please select one of them, and YouTube will show you the most recent videos on that channel.

Simple, eh?

4. Sign in to the correct YouTube account

Did you consider the fact that you might be signed in to the wrong YouTube account? Maybe one of your friends or family members forgot to log off when they last used your computer.

That’s most likely why you’re not receiving notifications.

To check if you’re logged in to your YouTube account or not, click/tap on your profile picture on YouTube.

Your YouTube channel name will appear there.

If that’s not your name, then you’re clearly logged into the wrong YouTube account. And all the notifications are going to the other person’s email address.

To switch your YouTube account to the YouTube mobile app, select your profile picture and tap on it again.

This will open the Accounts tab, where you can select which account to use for YouTube (see below).

In the “Other Accounts” tab, you’ll see all your other accounts or accounts used to access YouTube on this device.

Select your email address from the list and use it to connect to YouTube with it.

Now you should receive all YouTube notifications without a problem.

5. Disable AdBlock or other extensions

This is for computer users because mobile owners likely aren’t using extensions. But if you do, then the same principle applies – if you’re using AdBlock, this might interfere with the YouTube notifications and result in a complete notification blackout.

To deactivate AdBlock, click on the three-dot icon in the top-right corner, then select More Tools – Extensions (see screenshot below)

This will open the Extensions tab, where you’ll find all your installed extensions.

Any extension on this list could interfere with the proper functioning of YouTube and your browser.

First, try disabling your ad-blocker extension and see if this changes anything.

If not, try to remember if you’ve installed any new extensions recently.

Has the YouTube notification problem coincided with your installation of an extension?

Try disabling it and see if the notifications are coming back.

Either way, one of these solutions should fix your YouTube notification issue. But if somehow, none of these solutions worked, hit me up in the comments below and I’ll try to find a suitable workaround for you!