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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand how typical users of YouTube judge the relevance of videos in leisure contexts; what are the reasons users give when judging video material as relevant or not relevant?Design/methodology/approach A naturalistic diary was performed in which 30 participants completed diaries providing details on their video relevance criteria. The analysis revealed 28 relevance criteria grouped into eight categories.Findings In total, 28 relevance criteria were identified through the analyses of the diaries’ content and they were grouped into eight categories. The findings revealed that criteria related to the content of the video are the most dominant group of criteria with topicality being the most dominant criterion. There is a considerable overlap between leisure relevance criteria and previous relevance criteria studies, but the importance of these criteria varies among different contexts. New criteria, e.g. habit emerged from the data which tend to be more related to leisure contexts.Research limitations/implications The decision to follow a naturalistic approach reduced the level of control on the study. A further limitation can be found in the participants’ sample used in this study, all the participants of the main study were university or college students.Practical implications This study attempted to enrich the current literature by investigating users’ video relevance criteria in leisure contexts. This investigation might have implications on the design of video search systems.Originality/value Previous relevance criteria studies focussed on work contexts and the information judged was mainly in text format. This paper outlines new insights by investigating video relevance criteria in leisure context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]