In this video I will talk about our experience of getting step 2 error
on YouTube. This error typically happens when you try to connect Adsense account to YouTube
for monetization. I will also give advice on what to do and how to fix this problem.
The step two error message looks like this. It will say that your associated Adsense account
was disapproved. The Adsense lets you solve issues to comply with program policies. Later,
you can resubmit your request again. Yet, if you look around Adsense policies, they are applicable
to websites for the most part. There is very little information about YouTube monetization.
The background for our situation is this. You can create two types of accounts for Adsense:
business and individual. In our case, I created an individual Adsense account under my personal name
and then connected it to our YouTube channel. We had no issues whatsoever because it was my first
Adsense account. If you look around you’ll see that many YouTubers experience step 2 error. The
typical reason for this is having a duplicate account on Adsense. You need to delete that
old Adsense account first before associating the new Adsense account to your YouTube. Otherwise,
if you do not delete the old Adsense account, Google will see it as a duplicate attempt and
will throw this step 2 error message at you. Yet, this is where things got different for us.
Shortly, we decided to have a business company for all our YouTube businesses.
So, I created a separate business Adsense account for YouTube monetization purposes.
When you create a business Adsense account, you must list organization name and the name of the
contact person for the company. In our case, I listed my name under the contact person,
which was the same name as under my individual Adsense account. Next, I disconnected my
individual Adsense account from YouTube. Then, I submitted a request to connect our
business Adsense account to our YouTube channel. About several days later we got a rejection. A
generic email from Google said that there could be many reasons. But one of them was
a duplicate account for Adsense. However, why would Google think that our individual and
business accounts are duplicates? Yes, I listed my name under both individual and business accounts.
However, the business account was under the organization name, not my personal name. I
was only listed as a contact person. This could have triggered this rejection reason for us.
Thinking that this is the issue, I closed my individual Adsense account. I later resubmitted
my request to connect business Adsense account to our YouTube channel. About 5 days later,
we got a rejection again! But this time, I had no clue what is going on. Luckily,
we were part of the YouTube partner program and we had access to the chat support at that time.
As you may know, there is no way to get in touch with Google Adsense now. There is no chat, phone
number, email or anything else for that matter. It seems that the only way to solve issues with
Adsense is through YouTube Partners chat support. That was the biggest surprise for me, given the
size of Google. You would think that Adsense will have some way to get in touch with them, but no.
After I contacted YouTube through their chat support, they created the ticket for us.
This ticket was later redirected to Adsense internal team.
It took them over 3 weeks to solve our problem and get back to us. Actually, they did not get
back to us. I noticed that our business Adsense account after 3 weeks got connected to our YouTube
channel and monetization was resumed. I tried to ask them what seemed to be the problem. However,
they responded that the Adsense internal team took care of that problem for us and YouTube does not
know what the problem was in the first place. There are several lessons to draw from here.
First, make sure there are no duplicate Adsense accounts exist. If they exist,
delete them first before connecting anything else. But as you can see, deleting your old
account does not necessarily solve the problem. My only explanation is that there needs to be time,
at least several weeks, to pass for Google to close your Adsense account. If we waited two
or more weeks before connecting our business account, the issue may not have been there.
However, I cannot confirm this information. Second, if you got that step 2 error message,
your only option may be to contact YouTube chat support. If you do not have access to that chat,
you may be out of options. I saw other YouTubers doing risky things to solve this problem. This
involved transferring ownership of their YouTube ownership to someone with access
to YouTube chat support. It could be a person who has a monetized YouTube channel. If you
know someone you can trust, this could be an option, albeit a very risky one.
Third, if you are pondering over forming a business company for your YouTube channel,
the time could be now. As you can see, we had to wait for over 3 weeks to get our problem
solved. If you are earning big bucks from YouTube ad revenues, this could a problem
because all this revenue will be foregone. In our case, it was three weeks. Yes, nothing earned.
Finally, if you are going down our route, you can do the following. When opening a business account,
consider having someone else under the contact name. This person should not
have opened any Adsense accounts under their name in the past. For instance,
if you have a multi-member company, you can include the other co-owner's name under the
contact name. Doing so may not trigger Google Adsense rejection for duplicate accounts.
We still do not know for sure what happened. But our problem got solved thanks to YouTube
chat support who were very friendly and kept us updated throughout this process.
I hope this video helped you plan your YouTube monetization strategy. If you got something out
of it, please give it a like and subscribe to our channel. We regularly post travel guides,
photography tutorials and other useful tips for YouTubers. Thank you for watching.