YouTube chapters with timestamps

What it's for

YouTube creates automatic chapters if your description has a list of timestamps starting at 0:00. This tool computes them for you from each section's length.

How it works

Write the title, a vertical bar «|» and that section's duration (mm:ss). The first chapter always starts at 0:00, as YouTube requires.

The three rules without which chapters do not appear

The first and most important: the first timestamp has to be 0:00. If the list starts at 0:15 or 1:20, the platform does not recognise the chapters and the description stays a list of numbers. It is the error behind almost every case of chapters «not working».

The second: you need at least three chapters. The third: each must last at least ten seconds, and they must be in ascending order. These are mechanical rules, not stylistic ones, and they admit no exceptions: breaking one is enough for the whole list to be ignored.

What they are actually for

Making people stay. A twenty-minute video without chapters asks the viewer to trust it; with chapters, anyone looking for one thing finds it and stays, instead of leaving after thirty seconds. The platform measures precisely that behaviour, and videos that retain get shown to more people.

Then they serve search: chapter titles are text, and become one more way to be found. A chapter titled «How to remove limescale» can bring visits from people searching for exactly that who did not even know the video existed.

How the titles are written

Like the entries of a table of contents, not like the parts of a film: descriptive and short. «The problem», «Background», «At last» say nothing to someone scrolling; «What it costs», «The commonest mistake», «Step-by-step assembly» say exactly where to go.

It is worth keeping them under forty characters, because on the video bar they get truncated, and not putting in too many: fifteen chapters in a ten-minute video become a list nobody reads. A good proportion is one chapter every one or two minutes, with a minimum length that can be noticed.

Chapter zero is the one always got wrong

The first chapter covers the start of the video, and almost everyone calls it «Introduction». That is a word telling the viewer «you can skip this part», and skip it they do: the chapter bar turns the introduction into the least watched part of the video.

People who care write it differently: «What we'll cover», or the name of the question the video answers. And people who work well do the simplest thing of all: shorten the introduction, because a chapter everyone skips is a chapter that should not have been long.

Nearby tools

For the title there is Title generator, for the cover Video thumbnail and for income Earnings estimate. On the video there are Video trimmer and Subtitles to text.