- If you're a video creator, you know just
how hard it is traditionally speaking to talk to YouTube.
Well I've got some good news for you.
It has just become a lot easier to talk to
YouTube directly for a lot more people, but not everyone.
[Male Voice] vidiq.com (midtempo happy beat)
Hello everyone and rohban welcome back to VidIQ,
the YouTube tool and channel that aims to
educate you on your YouTube journey.
For all of the latest YouTube tips, tricks,
advice, and news make sure to subscribe
and click on the notification bell to make sure
you don't miss any of our content.
(bell dings)
I love doing that.
School is in session.
Before we get into this, a quick shout out to
"Sticky Situations" the channel who brought
this news to my attention, and we're
gonna come back to that channel and phase being able to
use this direct contact with YouTube to fix some
situations on their channel which as you can see
on fist impressions looks a little peculiar.
But before all that, you've waited long enough to
talk to YouTube, let's not make you wait any longer.
Support.google.com is your web address of destination.
In the top right-hand corner of the screen,
just under the Google profile you should be logged in
as on your YouTube channel click on get support.
Next up you want to click on get creator support
where you will see the usual array of
common channel questions.
Now if you click on one of these, say monetization
and ad sense, you will see live chat.
(beep)
Now let's just give this a little bit of context.
Live chat is not new for YouTube.
It's been around for a long time however,
the conditions for having access to live chat
before were very, very strict.
Previously to request a live chat session with YouTube,
your channel would need at least 25 thousand subscribers
and over 100 thousand hours of watch-time
in the last twelve months.
That basically meant you had to be 25 times the size
of a channel that had just monetized on YouTube.
Clearly this used to be a benefit for the privelaged view,
however that same support page will now tell you
that you can chat with the YouTube Creator Support team
for help if your channel is in the YouTube Partner Program.
So if you got this, it means you can talk to them.
No wait that's my subscribe pillow.
You can talk to them.
What's more, YouTube doesn't just support English,
they support all of these languages too.
Multi-language support is very important of course.
That's why we support all of these languages with
our tools that will help you research YouTube,
analyze any video on the platform, order your own channel
and take actual steps that will help
grow your YouTube channel.
Vid IQ is free to download, there is a link in
the video description.
Anyway, if you remember at the start of this video we were
about to click on this Request live Chat button.
When you do this, you'll be presented with a quick form
that you need to fill out and soon after that
you will be live-chatting with someone at
YouTube Creator Support.
And just to clarify, live YouTube chat and email support
are only available to those creators in the
YouTube Partner Program.
If you're not yet there, you may only see these options
which point you to appropriate YouTube support pages.
Up until now YouTube Live Chat was only available
to a fraction of a percent of video creators.
But now we're in to the hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of video creators in the
YouTube Partner Program.
I know that's not gonna satisfy everybody who has
yet to get into the YouTube Partners Program,
but at least it's a step in the right direction.
Now, what benefits can you get from YouTube support?
Well let's take a look at Sticky Situations'
sticky predicament.
On first impressions you'd be forgiven for thinking this is
a "how to kidnap" tutorial channel and it's probably
one of the reasons this channel has brushed up against
YouTube's community guidelines, but on closer inspection
this channel reacts to and commentates on kidnap scenes
in television shows and movies.
The creator calls this 'Damsel in Distress' or DiD.
I call this just another corner of YouTube with
safe and appropriate content.
With 20 thousand subscribers and millions of views
over three years they have established themselves
as a channel.
What the video creator tells me is that sometimes
their videos get hit with age restriction warnings.
And that can have a huge impact on search and discovery
of your content, meaning you get a lot less views
for the same amount of effort you put into
all of your videos.
They have appealed these warnings through
the automated process, not being successful, but have
then been able to utilize YouTube Live Chats to have
somebody have a second look at those videos and get
them overturned so that they are once again freely
available to all audiences.
Not only that, because the video creator is able to
utilize live chat instead of email,
it speeds up the process he says literally by months.
Now we're not saying this is guaranteed to get the right
outcome for your channel and you video content,
but at lest being able to speak to a human being who
may be able to escalate this to a team to
investigate further is better than nothing.
We ourselves have had videos hit with
community guideline strikes because of misleading
metadata, and we went through the automated appeals process
fail, but when we talk to a human through live support,
we were eventually able to overturn it and phewf
was that a relief.
More on that story sometime in the future.
We'd love to hear of your experiences of YouTube Live Chat
if you've had a chance to use it, both good and bad.
Let us know in the comments below and as I've already said,
if you don't yet have access to the YouTube support
don't worry, you still have the avenue of TeamYouTube
on Twitter.
It's not perfect, but they do respond quite frequently
in many different languages and if you kick up
a stink in pubic, there is more chance that YouTube
may resolve it for you and many other video creators.
Enjoy the rest of your video-making day.