- Probably the worst news you could get
as a YouTube content creator
is that YouTube is gonna delete your channel,
and that is what's happening to Graham Stephan,
a YouTuber with over three million subscribers
in the financial education niche,
probably one of the best and biggest channels
in that niche on YouTube,
and this is something we need to talk about
because this affects more than Graham,
this is something that could happen
to any YouTube content creator,
and the worst part is it's not even his fault.
Graham is one of my favorite YouTube content creators,
we're actually both gonna be speakers at VidSummit
and hopefully I'll get to meet him.
But this video is not really for Graham,
it's actually for the rest of you.
Andrei Jikh, another financial education YouTuber
recently made a video
about what's happening to Graham and his channel,
and so I wanted to chime in,
it's not the video I had planned to put out today,
but I wanted to chime in
because this is something that many YouTubers
have actually DMed me about recently.
It's not an issue I was aware had gotten this extreme
and it could potentially mean
that more YouTube channels could be queued for deletion,
and so I wanna make this video for you, the creators,
to know how to kinda protect your channel,
but I also have a message for team YouTube
if they happen to be watching.
And don't worry,
this is not me like dunking on them in any way,
it's just some concerns
that a lot of people in the community have
and what we think can be done about it.
Sometimes you don't just sit there
and complain about problems,
sometimes you actually have to come up
with solutions for them.
So you understand what's going on.
There are several YouTube policies
with regard to spam and comments that become a problem.
They become a bigger problem when it's not you doing them,
and when it's bots and scammers doing it in your name.
Many of you probably know
that there has been a massive problem on YouTube
with fake accounts impersonating creators,
especially on their own channel
and leaving comments that then try to get you
to give your email address or use a WhatsApp number,
and ultimately, they try to scam a creator's audience.
Usually it ends up being a crypto scheme of some kind,
and that has become a rampant problem on YouTube lately.
Social media as a whole, but in particular, YouTube.
In the past, we've actually covered the fact
that hackers have targeted YouTubers for crypto schemes
it even happened to a friend of the channel,
Jon Prosser from Front Page Tech.
You may have even seen videos from creators like Coffeezilla
covering these crypto scams
and the rampant abuse of bots here on YouTube
that are becoming a problem with impersonation,
even impersonating channels
that are warning you about scams,
how meta and ridiculous is that?
It's something I've been going through here on the channel
and something I wanna tell my audiences,
if you don't see the icon with me
and my verified YouTube check mark,
that thing I have because of having 100,000 subscribers
also a lot of OG channels have it without having that,
and you get verified, then it's not me,
and I'm not gonna hock you some crypto app
or anything like that, I don't use WhatsApp,
so this what, if you see that in the comments
replying to what you're saying, it's not me,
just so we're clear on that.
And again, Graham, myself, everybody,
we try to go through and prune these,
we try and do hide from channel,
send that person to the shadow realm
and banish them forever.
But you know, it's like cutting off
the heads of the hydra is what I think Andre said,
like, you know, you cut one off,
seven more grow back, it's a problem.
Now, if you're a content creator,
one of the ways you can address this
is in YouTube in your channel settings,
if you go to where it says community,
you have community settings.
Here, not only can you permanently ban people
from commenting on your channel
and you can send them to the shadow realm,
for all my nerds out there, you know what's up,
just send them to the shadow realm and that's taken care of,
but in case they keep cropping up
with the same thing over and over again,
you can actually put banned words
into your community settings
and therefore you can kind of prune
and moderate your channel in an automated fashion.
Another thing you can choose to do
is block links from your comment section,
and this could really help as well.
I've had to make robust comment filters,
largely due to racism, and usually due to creepos
whenever I collab with a female content creator,
but lately, most of my energy
has been dedicated to putting in the proper spam filters
to stop people from scamming my audience,
especially with these WhatsApp and cryptocurrency schemes.
And with Graham's channel, this has been rampantly abused,
and they're just so much of a problem with it,
and it's gone even further
to people making an ad impersonating him
and then targeting it against his audience,
abusing not only the comment section of YouTube
with impersonation and fraud,
but also repetitive spam comments,
which is against terms of service,
but then on top of that, impersonating the YouTuber
and then taking people off site for fraud and scams,
like again, trifecta of breaking terms of service.
This is a massive problem
and it's meant that Graham's channel is queued for deletion
for July 12th.
Now, I don't believe his channel will fully be deleted,
it is a possibility
because in the attempts that YouTube has made in the past
to try to deal with these scams and fraud
and things of this nature,
it's accidentally targeted innocent YouTubers
just for talking about cryptocurrency at all,
even exposing scams involving cryptocurrency.
Coffeezilla who runs an anti scam channel
temporarily had his channel deleted for a couple of hours
just for talking about cryptocurrency, which is insane.
What I would want to happen
at least as far as team YouTube is concerned
is this may feel like, okay,
it doesn't help smaller channels,
but for the larger channels
that are basically full-time content creators,
I think for anybody
that's at the silver play button level or more
that before anyone is targeted or queued for deletion
before that deletion happens,
then they should absolutely have a YouTube team member
actually reach out to them
and have direct communication with them.
I don't think that anybody
who has built up a channel to 100,000 subscribers
that YouTube can say is a full-time, or legitimate,
or seasoned content creator
should have their channel queued for deletion
without a conversation being had
either through email or something.
I think that there should be a direct outreach
and a way for a content creator
to have a communication with YouTube
when they're at that level, at least.
And the reason that I'm using 100,000 as the cutoff here,
'cause I know there's people
that are gonna feel offended by that,
I just think that there are too many channels
that would make it impossible
for YouTube to offer this to everybody,
but we know that there are only, and I say only,
about a quarter million silver play button channels
worldwide as of the making this video,
and that's a huge, ridiculous number anyway,
but that at least is reasonable and manageable
and I could see them having the resources to handle that.
So if you're gonna queue a channel for deletion,
and I think at that level,
it's much rarer for channels to end up queued for deletion
so you can see why this for me is a process
and a workflow problem of, okay,
there's a quarter million channels,
how many of them could ever possibly be queued for deletion
if they're at 100,000 subscribers,
it seems reasonable that you could get a human being
on the phone at that point, 'cause it can't be that many,
not in any given month anyway,
not without a larger systemic massive problem
on the platform.
So I feel like that's an appropriate step
for YouTube as a company to make.
I also believe that for channels at that level,
what about just having a paid customer service tier?
I understand that it's a free platform
and that we have to temper our expectations
because we're getting free hosting,
we're getting free unlimited uploads,
we get access to an audience
that have potential to monetize with ads.
YouTube does a lot, I do think it's generous,
and I don't think they get enough credit for that.
However, I think that there are expectations
that you can have when you're a paying customer
versus just a contractor, or a partner with a revenue share.
I think when you're paying up front money,
it goes a long way toward investing
in the staffing and resources for quality customer service,
and then it also means that there's a contractual obligation
when money has been exchanged.
When there's not that contract and that obligation in place,
again, probably need to expect very little in that instance.
However, if we can become paying customers,
I think it's worth a lot of us
who are full-time content creators,
we'd be willing to do it.
I know I would just rather be a paying customer
and know that I have expectations
since I'm putting money on the line
and I have skin in the game,
in that way, I can have a guarantee of service.
I also think that for everybody else,
if YouTube could be very transparent with us
about what the channel deletion process
and queue looks like, even just a little bit,
I know they don't want people to game the system,
but it's like we would love to know
just a little bit more about this process
and how the decisions are made,
and at what point they're made,
because it just feels like there are a lot of problems
where channels like Graham or Coffeezilla or others
end up getting deleted for things that are not their fault,
I think that maybe some more help with security and things
so that people like Jon Prosser,
if they get hacked, there's a faster resolution to that,
I just feel like we need a little bit more support
and a little bit more help
with things that happen on the platform
that aren't our fault as content creators.
And I think that that's not a huge ask to make of YouTube.
Now when it comes
to again, managing and pruning the comments,
I think that that's something
that we can help out a little bit with.
YouTube I think has been stepping up with some of that
problem is sometimes innocent comments
get caught up in all of that.
I've had to be very aggressive with my filters
so there might be some of you that are doing, you know,
funny things or memes or things
that then get caught in my filter,
there's some people who probably think
that, oh, you know, he's censoring this or censoring that,
but it's really, I have to be so aggressive
about preventing these scams
that my comment filters
are kind of ridiculous at this point,
and there's just really nothing else I can do about it.
Now, with regard to the fraudulent advertisers,
I'm a paying advertiser on YouTube myself
for my coaching business, Awesome Creator Academy.
Sometimes you might see an ad from me pop up
for one-on-one coaching, or for the YouTube starter kit,
and those are legitimately me.
Now, the problem is that Graham Stephan, and MrBeast,
and several other very prominent creators,
usually people that are either over a million subscribers,
or tens of millions of subscribers,
or that are very relevant in finance or cryptocurrency
have people using their likeness
and fraudulently impersonating them and running ads
targeting their audience or other creators channels,
and basically trying to manipulate them
into these scams and get their money.
And Google advertising is a separate entity
and different than YouTube,
even though they're both owned by Google,
most content creators are not aware of that,
they don't know how the advertising that pays them works.
I was Google AdWords certified
before I was a YouTube content creator,
that was my job back in corporate America
and I'm still very familiar with it today,
as I manage it for myself,
I've managed it for other people before.
So when it comes to the advertising side,
I want Google ads and that team
to step up a lot more in the vetting.
I know that it's almost as crazy
as the uploads captaining to YouTube in terms of vetting,
but I do believe that there should be filters in place,
especially when you know you have prominent content creators
that have some extra mechanism
for verifying that association,
and so that people cannot fraudulently impersonate us
and target our audience.
Otherwise the only recourse we're really left with
is the YouTube copyright system,
because just blocking those individual links
as an AdSense publisher,
what they do, you take one down seven more grow back.
It's not working.
Also people reporting that people are impersonating MrBeast
and using him for cryptocurrency schemes,
or Graham Stephan, or anybody,
that reporting system is not getting the job done either.
So aside from us needing to go the legal route
of copyright and trademark,
which again, if you're a full-time content creator,
start looking into trademarks for things for your brand
so that when people impersonate you and use your likeness,
you have a legal recourse and a way to take them down
with DMCA and those types of things,
it's a pain, and again, don't use it in bad faith
but it's important at this point
with people literally going out of their way to run scams
and defraud your audience.
And so we have to protect our audiences at this point,
not just our own reputation,
but we have to protect people
from getting scammed and losing money.
And we're having to intervene and step in that way
because again, I know it's unwieldy,
I know it's a global platform,
and I know it gets very bogged down,
but the Google ad system
when it comes to the fact that YouTube content creators
are a thing that exists,
I think has to take that into consideration in some way,
and that there needs to be
more aggressive filtering and vetting
to make sure that impersonation is not happening,
that prominent creators are not being targeted,
and their audiences aren't being targeted
for these type of scams, and these types of things.
Maybe give us as creators
a little bit more transparency and control
over some of the ads and vendors
that appear on our channels,
and that would go a long way
toward us taking on some of that responsibility
and protecting the audience.
I know that it's hard on Google and YouTube side
to always do these things,
but again, if you give us the tools, we as a community
will take care of ourselves a lot of the time.
So to the creators out there,
just remember, do everything you can
to be in compliance with YouTube's terms of service,
make sure you understand those things fully,
and if you are a full-time content creator
and you don't understand the terms of service,
hire a lawyer to explain the terms of service to you
if this is something you rely on, and it's your livelihood.
Like I said, there are other channels besides Graham
that this has happened to,
there are people who have DMed me about this issue
and this isn't the only issue we're seeing in the community
with things like this,
and so I really just want there to be solutions
that exist for people.
So if you're on team YouTube and you're watching this,
I hope that you take some of this to heart
and know that this is not me in any way coming at you guys,
I know you have a really difficult job,
I know there are literally just shy
of a hundred million creators
that you're trying to take care of,
but we need more resources, we need more help with this.
And then as for the creators,
just make sure everything you're doing that can protect you
and your audience, and your reputation, your channel
is something that you're making a priority,
and I hope that this video helped you in some way.
It's not a fun video to make,
but I think it's a necessary video to make.
And I hope that it helps you in some way,
or at least lets you know
that there are people who are looking at these problems
and are trying to find solutions.
As always, thank you so much for watching
and don't forget,
go out there and create something awesome today,
I'll be back with a regular video later this week.
Take care.