YouTube Studio Removed Likes From the Content Page — Here’s How to Still Track Them

If you opened YouTube Studio recently, glanced at your Content tab to scan how your videos were landing, and felt like something was missing — you weren’t imagining it. The Likes column is gone. The little like-to-dislike ratio bar that let you read every video’s reception in one sweep has been pulled from the Content page table. Views and Comments are still there. Likes? You now have to go digging. Here’s exactly what changed, where your likes actually went, and the fastest way to get them back at a glance.

What actually changed in YouTube Studio

On the YouTube Studio Content page — that master list of all your videos, Shorts, and lives at studio.youtube.com → Content — the row-level Likes information was removed. Historically that table carried a “Likes (vs. dislikes)” column on the right: a small ratio bar plus the like count, with the exact like and dislike numbers popping up on hover. It was the kind of feature you didn’t think about until it disappeared, because it let you grade your whole catalog in a single scroll.

That column is what vanished. What stays in the Content table is the Views column and the Comments column, alongside the usual thumbnail, title, visibility, restrictions, and date. To make things more confusing, the rollout looks uneven:

• Some creators saw the Likes column simply disappear.
• Others saw it replaced by a blank “Notices” column, and later a “Restrictions” column.
• A few accounts still had it — classic signs of a phased, A/B-style rollout rather than one hard switch.

One important clarification: this is specifically about the Content list view inside Studio. It is not the 2021 removal of public dislike counts for viewers, and it’s separate from a March 2026 test that hid like counts on the public watch page for some users. Three different changes, often mashed together in the panic — but this one is about creators losing an at-a-glance signal in their own dashboard.

When did this happen?

Honestly? Nobody can pin it to a single date, and we won’t pretend otherwise. YouTube didn’t publish an announcement for this specific Content-page change, and it rolled out account by account. The best-supported timeline looks like this: the column started disappearing around mid-to-late May 2026 (one creator forum thread documents it being swapped for a blank column around May 15, then partially returning in early June), with a fresh wave of confused and frustrated creators — plus an official YouTube Help Community thread — landing around late June 2026.

So the fair summary is a gradual rollout across May–June 2026, still inconsistent across accounts as of this writing. If your column briefly came back, don’t get comfortable — that’s likely just your account mid-rollout, not a reversal of the decision.

Where your likes live now (and how to find them)

The data didn’t evaporate — it moved into views that take more clicks. Here’s the genuine workaround, step by step. Note up front: there is no Content-page toggle to re-add the Likes column. YouTube removed the column itself, so this is about navigating to where the data now lives, not flipping a hidden setting.

1. Per video — the main workaround

1. Go to studio.youtube.com and click Content in the left sidebar.
2. Hover over the video and click the Analytics (bar-chart) icon.
3. Open the Engagement tab.
4. Read the “Likes (vs. dislikes)” report for that video’s like count and ratio.

A faster variant: from Content, click straight into a video’s title to open it, then hit Analytics → Engagement → Likes (vs. dislikes). Same destination, one fewer hover.

2. Channel-wide — the closest thing to the old column

Want to compare likes across many videos at once, like the old table did? In Studio, open the Dashboard or Analytics → Engagement, then click Advanced Mode (top-right) or “See more.” Add the “Likes (vs. dislikes)” metric and you can pull likes into a sortable table across your catalog. It’s the nearest native replacement for that glanceable column — just buried under a couple of extra menus.

3. The public watch page — the lazy check

If you only need the raw like count for one video and don’t care about the ratio, just open the video on youtube.com. The like count still sits right under the player. No Studio gymnastics required.

The real problem: native Studio hides the signals that matter

Here’s the bigger picture. The frustration in the creator community — from tech YouTubers to the Help Community threads asking, almost verbatim, “why did you get rid of being able to see likes on the Content tab?” — isn’t really about three extra clicks. It echoes a pattern. First public dislike counts went away in 2021. Then a 2026 test hid public like counts for some viewers. Now the at-a-glance engagement signal is stripped from the creator’s own dashboard.

The throughline: the people making the videos keep losing fast access to the feedback that tells them if a video worked. Engagement is the single most honest quality signal a creator has — it cuts through inflated view counts and tells you whether an audience actually reacted. Burying it one video at a time, behind tabs and “Advanced Mode,” quietly raises the cost of the most important question you can ask: is my content landing?

That’s exactly the gap iamcreator.io was built to close. The moment you connect your channel, engagement is surfaced front and center — likes, comments, and the engagement rate per video, side by side across your whole catalog — instead of being scattered across per-video Analytics screens. No hovering, no “Advanced Mode,” no wondering whether a column got removed in last week’s rollout.

Engagement plus a single quality score

Beyond raw engagement, iamcreator.io distills each video into a proprietary multi-factor Value Score — a single at-a-glance read on how a video is really performing, weighing engagement alongside other signals so you don’t have to cross-reference five reports to judge one upload. It’s the scannable dashboard the Content page used to be, except it’s getting richer over time instead of quietly losing columns.

You don’t even need to connect your own channel to feel the difference. Our free channel analyzer reads engagement for any public channel instantly — handy for sizing up competitors or collaborators without logging into anything. If you want the full walkthrough, our guide on how to analyze any YouTube channel covers which metrics actually matter and how to read them.

What to do right now

• Don’t panic about lost likes. They’re intact — use the per-video Analytics → Engagement route above when you need a quick number.
• Set up Advanced Mode once. Add the “Likes (vs. dislikes)” metric so you have a sortable, multi-video table bookmarked for when you want the old at-a-glance view.
• Stop depending on a dashboard that keeps shrinking. If at-a-glance engagement matters to how you make decisions, put it somewhere it won’t vanish in the next silent rollout.

And if your channel is climbing toward eligibility, pair this with our monetization checker to see exactly where you stand against the 2026 YouTube Partner Program requirements — or browse the rest of the best free YouTube tools worth keeping in your kit. YouTube can move the Likes column wherever it wants. With iamcreator.io, the signals that actually drive your decisions stay one glance away.