You watch a video, something happens at the 2:35 mark, and you want to send exactly that moment to someone - not the whole 40-minute video with a "skip to 2:35" instruction attached. YouTube can do this. The problem is that a real YouTube timestamp link looks like garbage by the time you're done making one, and most guides to it stop at "here's the parameter" without dealing with that.

How to actually make one

On desktop, pause the video where you want the link to start, right-click the player, and choose "Copy video URL at current time." YouTube hands you something like:

https://youtu.be/hkfMnGXlaRY?t=142

That t=142 is seconds from the start - 2 minutes, 22 seconds in this case. You can also click Share → Start at, which gives you an editable time field if you want to fine-tune it instead of trusting where you happened to pause.

On mobile, tap Share under the video, toggle the "Start at [time]" option, and copy the link. Same format comes out the other end.

A couple of format details worth knowing: the long-form URL (https://youtu.be/hkfMnGXlaRY?t=142) and the short-form one (youtu.be/ID?t=142) both work, and YouTube accepts the timestamp as either plain seconds (t=142) or compound notation (t=2m22s, t=1h05m30s) - handy if you're eyeballing a time from a video description instead of counting seconds yourself. If you're embedding the video on your own site rather than linking out, the parameter changes to start= instead of t=, which trips people up more often than it should.

Why the link YouTube gives you still isn't good enough

Two problems, and neither is really about the t= part.

First, since 2023, YouTube's share button has been quietly appending a second parameter - si= - to links people share, tied to the account that shared them. It's a per-share identifier, not a video identifier: share the same clip twice and you'll get two different si= values. It doesn't affect view counts or change what the video does; it just lets YouTube trace a click back to the specific share that produced it. Stack that on top of a timestamp and a link that started as "skip to 2:35" turns into something like:

https://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?si=xK9pQrT2vLmNw4Bz&t=142

Whether the mobile share sheet always attaches si= to a timestamped link specifically, or only to plain share links, isn't something sources fully agree on - it's added broadly via the share button, but the timestamp case specifically isn't nailed down anywhere consistent, so don't be surprised either way.

Second - and this is the part that actually matters when you're the one sending it - that string is unreadable. You can't read it over a call, you can't put it on a slide without it wrapping to two lines, and if you're pasting it into a text field that trims special characters, there's a real chance the ? and & break something. None of that is YouTube's fault, exactly. It just wasn't built to be spoken or typed by a person; it was built to be clicked.

Give it a slug instead

This is the same fix as texting someone driving directions or reading a link over the phone: don't send the raw parameter string, send a short link with a name on it. Drop the timestamped URL into squish.to and give it a slug that describes the moment instead of the seconds - squish.to/watch-this-part, squish.to/the-good-bit, squish.to/2min-in, whatever actually means something to the person receiving it. It's free, doesn't require an account, and the destination is still the exact same timestamped video underneath - you're just putting a name on it instead of a query string.

This matters most in exactly the situations where a raw YouTube link struggles: reading a link out loud on a podcast or in a meeting, printing it in a handout or slide deck, or texting it to someone who's going to have to type it on a TV remote instead of tapping it. If you haven't already, the how to build a link you can say out loud post covers the actual design rules for picking a slug that survives being spoken or handwritten - the same rules apply whether you're linking to a whole video or one specific moment in it.

The short version

Right-click the video (or use Share → Start at) to get a youtu.be/ID?t=seconds link. Expect a si= tracking parameter to ride along with it if it came from the share button - harmless, but it's most of why the link looks so messy. If you're going to send that link anywhere a person has to read, retype, or say it out loud, run it through squish.to first and give it a name instead of a number.

For reference, squish.to custom slugs run 3–30 characters, using letters, numbers, and hyphens - no underscores - and they're case-sensitive, so stick to lowercase to avoid any ambiguity.