How do I change the name of my YouTube channel to not be my first name and last name?
And what exactly is a YouTube brand channel?
I know exactly why you're asking this because I’m moving my YouTube channel too.
This channel the one that you're watching right now, and you can follow along with
this in real time with me step by step. I’m going to get you and me through this as
quickly as possible I promise, but this is going to be a long video because I don't want you making
the same mistakes that I did along the way! You and I both know that if we get this
wrong we could wreck our YouTube channel so we are going to avoid all of that.
The quick way to change your channel name is to go into YouTube studio.
Scroll down to customization on the left hand side which is a magic wand icon.
That opens up this window and we want to click on the basic info tab
which shows channel name and description. We click on the pen icon to edit the channel name
and that opens up this box where you can put your new YouTube channel name.
But what we can do instead is make it into a brand channel which unlocks
a load of really great features. You can have a really long name.
You can add more people to run your channel all with different roles, and who knows I’m thinking
I can maybe pass my channel on to my family or anyone else if I needed to if... you know,
anything happens to me. It's a bit grim isn't it!
I think about these things. So we are moving my YouTube
channel from my google account to a brand account. And my google account is the owner of this brand
account - that's how we get all of these features. The channel stays the same.
Videos and playlists stay the same, and I get to keep my custom URL, even though the
YouTube help article says that I would lose it. You do lose some things from your channel though,
and I’ll show you how to get around these losses while we're making the move.
The first place we need to go is YouTube.com/account_advanced
We want to click on “move channel to a brand account” then we sign in again.
That opens up this page: move your YouTube channel to a different account.
Now at this stage you might have this problem. I completely freaked out when I saw this.
No subscribers no videos and no playlists! I think it's just a protection because down here
it says “I can't move my channel until I’ve removed people that I have given permission
to manage my channel” so don't forget to remove any permissions if you want to move your channel.
It now shows my subscribers, videos and playlist counts.
Phew! Then it says choose
an account to move this channel to. I don't want to use any of these.
These are all old brand accounts I’ve made in the past so I need to
create a new channel. Are you still there?!
I know there are a lot of steps but I promise you, I know you can do this because I’ve done this.
You're watching the channel now. I didn't delete this channel
so I know you've got this. If we go back to the desktop the
next step is to go to my channel list: YouTube.com/channel_switcher
These are my channels and we'll click this button: create a channel.
That opens up this reassuring page: to create a new channel, create a brand account!
This is where we can put our new channel name. Just to confuse things
I’m keeping my channel name the same. Next we click on “create” and there it is!
It's giving me a nice pink letter “N” avatar. This is the brand account and I’m going to move
my YouTube channel to here, which will delete this YouTube channel that it automatically created.
Now don't forget: because we have created this new google brand account, we are now logged into this
new google brand account, so we need to log out and then log back in again to the original YouTube
channel that we want to move. There's my lovely face.
Then choose settings. Then on the menu on the left hand
side click on advanced settings, then click again on the option to move channel to a brand account.
That brings up all my brand accounts again, except this time it has the brand that we just created.
See that pink letter “N” there? We can now choose this as the brand
account that we want to move my channel to, so I will click on this scary button marked replace...
I know, if you're doing this along with me, this moment is really terrifying
because it brings up this warning. If you move your channel to account Neil Mossey,
the currently connected channel will be deleted. When we created the brand channel,
it automatically created an empty YouTube channel, and when we move
our channel this one will get deleted. But it's okay because it has no subscribers,
no videos and no playlists. There is another warning though
that we will permanently delete all the comments that I’ve ever made on YouTube,
my replies and thumbs up on all videos and comments, and my entire search and watch history.
This is a really big blow to me because I have left thousands of comments on my own channel
and this will delete all my pinned comments too. So, for safety we can go to google takeout
and download all my comments as a backup in case I ever need them in the future.
The search and watch history are not deleted despite what this says and I’ll show you where
to find those after we've moved the channel. So... should we do this?
See, the sun's come out at this moment - this is the leap.
I understand and wish to proceed. And it's asking us if we are
sure that we want to do this. You can pause the video if you want to
read the warning but this is now actual footage of me moving this channel to become a brand channel.
Move channel? Should we do it?
I love you for doing this. Move channel.
Your YouTube channel has been successfully moved it might
take up to 10 minutes. I’m still recovering.
Here's what happens next. Sign out and then log back
in as your moved YouTube channel and you'll see a few massive changes to your channel.
The first one is this one: your avatar has now gone, not only from your channel page
but also from all your comments everywhere. Here's a clip of me realizing this moment.
Oh no! It's going to remove all my pinned comments!
Oh no no no no! Quick I need to rescue this one!
Now the good news is it takes a few hours to remove all your comments so I copy and
pasted all my pinned comments back onto my own videos before they disappear forever.
It's so much easier doing this now than when those comments are gone and disappeared.
And I’m doing this as my new YouTube channel account, you can see the pink letter “N”
there next to the comments. Does this affect my monetization?
You do not lose your monetization status. All the revenue and adsense stays the same,
because nothing's happened to my actual channel. All we're changing is how we access the channel.
If we want to see our old search history and watch history
all we have to do is click on our avatar on the top right hand corner of YouTube and click on
the personal account that we've moved away from. You can see it says “no channel” because we just
moved the channel, so if I need to look anything up from the past I just switch accounts to this
empty account and it's all there. Are you still watching this?
I’m now two months on and I have no regrets whatsoever.
I promise you can do this, and right here is another video about how I run my YouTube channel.
Good luck and thanks for subscribing!