YouTube Scheduled Greyed out? Here’s How to Enable Scheduled Uploads on YouTube.
Whether you’re on a long vacation or don’t want to overwhelm your subscribers, there are many reasons for scheduled YouTube uploads. YouTube has a built-in scheduling option with which you can specify the date and time when the video will go public.
Unfortunately, this “scheduling option” isn’t available to many small YouTube creators. For example, I have two YouTube channels, the planned option works great on our larger YouTube channel (with 200,000 subscriptions), but not on our relatively new YouTube channel with 4,000 subscriptions.
In fact, you also cannot find this schedule option on the Channel Settings page. Even in the YouTube Studio app, this planned feature is grayed out for a small channel, whereas it works fine for a larger channel I have. It looks like YouTube is tying these features to specific channels and not offering them to new YouTube channels.
Some people suggest that when you need to set up monetization, you will see options on a schedule. But this did not happen to us. Even after we passed the monetization check, the planned option did not appear.
One way to fix this is to use third-party apps like Tubebuddy, however this may not be for everyone as these apps log in on your behalf to publish videos.
How to enable scheduled downloads to YouTube
But you know what, I accidentally discovered many an easier way to solve this problem. Just go to YouTube from your desktop and upload a new video. Before selecting a video file on your computer, click the drop-down menu next to Privacy, then select Scheduled. Now upload the video as usual.
After the video is loaded and processed, you can schedule your video for any day and time you want it to go on air. Even if you later decide to change the time, you can easily do so by going to Video Settings, find the Privacy Settings section, and then select a date from the calendar. It works on both YouTube computer and the Studio app on mobile devices.
We tried it and it worked. The only downside is that you have to manually change your privacy settings to Schedule every time you upload a video. There is currently no way to automate this. But if you have another workaround, please let us know in the comments below.