Boost Views: add timestamp to youtube link for better shares
Ever sent a friend a link to a hilarious comedy special, only to have to type, "skip to around the 3-minute mark, that's where the good part is"? We've all been there. What if you could send them a link that jumps directly to the punchline?
That's exactly what a timestamped YouTube link does. It's a simple, powerful trick that lets you point someone straight to the exact moment you want them to see.
Why Timestamps Are Your Secret Weapon
Let's be clear: this isn't just some nerdy technicality. Timestamping is a strategic move that respects your audience's time and supercharges your content's impact. In a world of ever-shrinking attention spans, getting someone directly to the gold is a game-changer.
When a viewer clicks your link and gets immediate value, it sends a positive signal to the YouTube algorithm. You’re not just sharing a video; you’re sharing a specific, valuable moment.
Instead of telling a colleague, "the key point is about halfway through the hour-long webinar," you can send a link that starts playing at exactly 32:15. It’s professional, efficient, and incredibly helpful.
When to Use a Timestamp
The uses are practically endless, but here are a few scenarios where I find myself using them all the time:
- Sharing highlights: Pinpointing the exact moment of a mind-blowing guitar solo or a perfect movie quote.
- Education: Directing students to the 2-minute explanation they need from a 45-minute lecture.
- Business & Marketing: Showing a client the specific product feature they asked about in a longer demo video.
- Content Creation: Linking to key moments from your own videos in blog posts or social media comments to drive targeted views.
The big idea here is removing friction. By eliminating the need for someone to scrub through a progress bar, you make it almost effortless for them to see what you want them to see. That precision makes your content far more shareable and effective.
It's All About the Viewer Experience
A timestamped link is a small gesture that says, "I value your time." For creators, this builds a ton of goodwill and makes people more likely to come back for more.
It also makes your long-form content, like podcasts and interviews, infinitely more accessible. By breaking down a long video into linkable moments, you can easily repurpose video content into smaller, more digestible clips for other platforms.
Learning to add a timestamp to a YouTube link is a small skill that pays huge dividends. It will change how you share videos—making you a more precise communicator and a more user-friendly creator.
The Easiest Way to Create a Timestamped Link: YouTube's Share Feature
Forget manually messing with URLs—the simplest way to create a link that jumps to a specific moment is built right into YouTube's interface. If you need to quickly share a video that starts at the perfect spot, this is your go-to method.
First, find the YouTube video you want to share. Just below the video player, you'll see the “Share” button nestled between the "Like/Dislike" options and the "Download" button. Give that a click.
A pop-up window will appear with all your sharing options.
This screenshot shows you the key element here: that little "Start at" checkbox at the bottom of the pop-up. That's where the magic happens.
Setting Your Start Time
Once the share window is open, look for the small checkbox labeled “Start at.” It’s unchecked by default. As soon as you click it, YouTube automatically fills in the time field with the exact moment the video was paused. Super handy.
You can also type in the time yourself. Say you want the video to kick off at 1 minute and 23 seconds—just type "1:23" into the box. You'll see the shareable URL in the box above instantly update to include your new timestamp.
This is hands-down the most reliable way to create a timestamped link. Because it's an official YouTube feature, you know the URL is formatted correctly and will work everywhere. No guesswork needed.
Getting viewers right to the action is more important than ever. In the world of YouTube Shorts, where projections suggest 77.4% of U.S. views will come from videos under one minute in 2025, creators can't afford any dead air. A timestamped link jumps past the fluff, driving the kind of instant engagement that the algorithm loves. You can dive deeper into the explosion of Shorts and their 200 billion daily global views by reading these 2025 YouTube Shorts statistics.
Once your time is set, just hit the “Copy” button. That's it. Your link is ready to be pasted, and anyone who clicks it will land exactly where you want them to.
Manually Editing URLs to Create Custom Timestamps
While YouTube’s "Share" feature is handy, sometimes you need to get your hands dirty. Manually editing a video’s URL gives you way more flexibility, especially when you're drafting an email, working in a text editor, or just want to add a timestamp to a link without going back to the video page.
This whole process boils down to adding a small piece of code—a URL parameter—to the end of the video’s web address.
The magic parameter is t=, which simply stands for "time." The real trick is knowing whether to use a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) before it.
Use
?t=if the URL is "clean" and has no other parameters.- Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID?t=45s
- Example:
Use
&t=if the URL already contains a?, which you'll often see in links from playlists or search results.- Example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID&list=PLAYLIST_ID&t=45s
- Example:
Getting this right is critical. If you use the wrong character, the timestamp will be ignored, and the video will just play from the beginning.
Choosing Your Time Format
Once you know whether to use ?t= or &t=, you can specify the exact time. YouTube is surprisingly forgiving here, accepting the time in total seconds or in a more human-readable mix of hours, minutes, and seconds.
For instance, to link to the 2-minute, 30-second mark, you could use t=150s (for 150 seconds total) or the much clearer t=2m30s. Both work perfectly.
This is a lifesaver for creators with detailed show notes. If you've already mapped out key moments, you can generate a precise link in an instant. In fact, many creators I know keep a time-stamped text file as a core part of their workflow—something you can easily generate with an accurate YouTube video transcription.
Pro Tip: Always test your manually-created links in an incognito browser window before sharing them. This confirms it works for someone who isn't logged into YouTube and ensures no weird cookie settings are interfering with the timestamp.
YouTube Timestamp URL Parameter Formats
To make things even easier, here's a quick reference table for formatting your timestamps.
| Format | Example Parameter | Resulting Time | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seconds Only | &t=75s |
1 minute, 15 seconds | Short videos where calculating total seconds is fast. |
| Minutes & Seconds | &t=3m45s |
3 minutes, 45 seconds | The most common and readable format for most videos. |
| Hours, Min & Sec | &t=1h10m20s |
1 hour, 10 minutes, 20 seconds | Long-form content like webinars, podcasts, or live streams. |
Having these formats in your back pocket lets you create a perfect, shareable link for any moment in any video, no matter how long it is.
How to Add Timestamps on Mobile Devices
It’s one of the most frustrating things about the YouTube mobile app. You want to share a specific moment from a video, but when you hit the share button on iOS or Android, the handy "Start at" checkbox you’re used to seeing on desktop is just… gone.
Don't worry, there's a simple and powerful workaround. It just takes a quick manual edit.
First, go to the video you want to share and tap the "Share" button, then hit "Copy link." This puts the standard URL onto your phone's clipboard.
The Quick Mobile Edit
Now, paste that link anywhere you can edit text—a text message, an email draft, or even your Notes app. This is where you’ll add the magic.
A standard copied link usually looks something like this:
https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
To make it start playing at 1 minute and 15 seconds, you just have to tack ?t=75s onto the end. The final link you share will be:
https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID?t=75s
That's it. This quick edit bypasses the app's limitations and sends your friends or audience straight to the good part.
Knowing how to do this manually is a must-have skill for anyone sharing videos on the go. It ensures you can always add a timestamp to a YouTube link from your phone, saving everyone time.
In a world with over 200 billion daily views and more than 1.058 billion Shorts uploaded, grabbing attention in seconds is everything. For creators, this is especially powerful. You can instantly generate a time-stamped transcript with tools like Transcriby, find the perfect viral moment, and link directly to it in your comments or descriptions.
To learn more about the staggering scale of YouTube, check out these stats on the YouTube Shorts creator economy.
Mastering this little URL trick means you can share the exact moments that matter, anytime, anywhere.
Advanced Timestamp Strategies for Creators and Marketers
Once you've nailed the basics of creating a timestamp, you can start using it as a serious growth tool. For creators and marketers, knowing how to add a timestamp to a YouTube link is just the start. The real magic happens when you get creative with it.
The easiest win is to create a clickable table of contents right in your video's description. You've seen them before—just a simple list of key moments with their times, like 00:00 Intro or 02:15 Key Point 1. This small step transforms a long video into a skimmable, user-friendly resource. It keeps people on your video longer and encourages them to jump around, which can give your overall session watch time a nice boost.
Pinning Key Moments and Embedding Videos
Another killer technique is dropping a timestamp into a pinned comment. This is perfect for highlighting a fan-favorite joke, adding a quick correction without having to re-upload, or just pointing everyone to the most valuable part of your video. A pinned comment always sits at the top, so it's the first thing viewers see.
If you're a marketer, embedding a video on your website with a specific start time is a game-changer. Imagine writing a blog post about a new product feature. You can embed your demo video so it starts playing at the exact moment you begin discussing that feature. All it takes is adding the ?start=SECONDS parameter to the video URL inside the embed code.
Timestamps in YouTube links are a strategic weapon in the short-form video wars. With 200 billion daily views and an algorithm favoring high watch rates, adding
?t=XXslets you beam viewers to the peak moment. You can discover more insights about short-form video trends from TVREV's analysis on YouTube Shorts.
Unlocking SEO with Time-Stamped Transcripts
Here's where things get really powerful: combining timestamps with a full video transcript. This is a massive, untapped SEO opportunity for most creators.
When you generate a transcript, you can quickly spot the keyword-rich segments in your video. From there, you can create links from your blog posts or other articles that point directly to those specific moments, driving super-targeted traffic.
A tool like Transcriby can spit out an accurate, time-stamped transcript in seconds. You can then pull the exact times you need to create links that align perfectly with the keywords you're trying to rank for. This strategy turns your video library into a goldmine for search engine discovery.
This works hand-in-hand with other traffic strategies. For example, knowing how to use a full video link in bio lets you send followers from social media directly to the most compelling part of your latest video. You can also dig deeper into this approach by checking out our guide on how to summarize a YouTube video.
YouTube Timestamp Troubleshooting & FAQs
Even with the right steps, you might hit a snag trying to get a timestamped link to work. It happens to everyone. Let's walk through some of the most common hangups and questions I see all the time.
Why Is My YouTube Timestamp Link Not Working?
Nine times out of ten, the culprit is a tiny formatting error. It's almost always the link structure itself.
If you have a clean URL (like youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID), you need to add your timestamp with ?t=. But if the URL already has a question mark—like links from a playlist often do—you have to use &t= instead.
Also, double-check your time format. Keep it simple with 45s for seconds or 1m30s for minutes and seconds. If it still doesn't work, remember that some social media platforms or weird custom video players just don't play nice with timestamp parameters. Test your link in a normal browser window first to make sure the URL is solid before you share it.
It really comes down to this: a single character (
?versus&) is the difference between a link that works and one that just plays from the start. Give it a quick second look before you hit send.
Can I Add a Timestamp to a YouTube Short?
Absolutely, and you definitely should. It's a killer strategy for Shorts. The method is exactly the same as for a regular video—just tack on ?t=Xs (where X is the number of seconds) to the end of the Shorts URL.
Shorts are all about instant gratification. Linking straight to the most important moment or the punchline is a powerful way to hook someone immediately and stop their scroll.
Common Questions and Quick Answers
Here are a few other questions that pop up frequently:
- Do timestamps in comments become clickable? Yep. When you type out a time like
02:45or1:15:30in a YouTube comment or video description, YouTube automatically turns it into a clickable link that jumps to that spot in the video. - Can I link to a specific millisecond? Nope. YouTube's timestamp game is limited to whole seconds. You can't get any more granular than that, so just round to the nearest second.
Thinking like a creator, these little details are huge. When you're trying to promote your content, combining precise timestamps with smart distribution is key. For example, learning how to properly share YouTube video on Facebook for maximum reach is even more effective when you can send people to the exact moment that will grab their attention.
Ready to stop guessing which parts of your videos will go viral? With Transcriby, you can instantly get accurate, time-stamped transcripts from any short-form video. Identify the perfect moments for sharing, repurpose content faster, and get AI-powered insights to create your next viral hit. Start your free trial at Transcriby today.