YouTube Is Deleting My Channel (My Response) - YouTube

Hi my name is Andrei Jikh, hope you’re doing well, come for the finance and stay because

I need your help.

Today I want to bring attention to something that’s been affecting all of us here on

YouTube not only as creators but also anyone watching and commenting on YouTube videos.

If you’ve ever watched a video of mine and you left a comment - you might have seen responses

from someone that looks like my account, who also has my picture, and my name, and usually

they’ll respond some sort of phone number or email asking you to get in touch with them

or their manager.

Surprise, it’s not actually me - this is a platform wide pandemic that has been going

on for over a year now that started with people creating random usernames until they figured

out they could make duplicates of our account which was way more effective in tricking people

into thinking it was coming directly from the creators.

Now you might be thinking “Pfft if anyone falls for that their dumb” But you’d be

surprised to find that there are dozens of people who regularly get taken advantage of

this way and it’s become a serious problem and in today’s video I want to tell more

about how far it got because on July 12th, Graham Stephan’s channel is going to be

deleted.

If you’re not sure who Graham Stephan is a good friend of mine here on YouTube with

over 3 million subscribers who also talks about finance, chances are if you know who

I am and you watch me, you probably know who he is - I’m the better looking one with

more subscribers and the nicer voice.

I’m just kidding, jokes aside, he’s got more subscribers.

Now Graham is someone I met through another friend of mine Jeremy from Financial Education

those guys along with Meet Kevin are people that have really helped me out here on YouTube,

without them I’m sure I wouldn’t have got as far as I have here on YouTube - they’re

the friends that push me to be better and I look up to them and today I want to help

by bringing more light and attention to what’s actually going on because on July 12th, his

YouTube channel is set to be deleted.

So the thing about YouTube is that we don’t really have a personal connection to anyone

who works at YouTube so it’s hard to reach out and find answers.

I’m not sure what size a creator has to be to get support but to this day I don’t

know anyone who works for YouTube who could potentially help us understand what’s going

on so that’s one of the reasons I’m making this video so that hopefully it gets shared

and someone sees it.

I can’t imagine how terrifying it is to wake up and see that you’re about to be

fired from your job with no explanation after you helped build it for over 4 years and it’s

your main source of income, you no one to get in touch with other than this automated

email

And looking further into what YouTube defines as spam comments as comments with the sole

purpose to mislead people and drive them off of YouTube and to collect personal information

from the viewers and if you’ve ever watched Graham’s videos or my videos you’d know

that this is something we would never do.

We’re never going to reach out and ask you to send us money, we’d never accept crypto

payments, or ask for you to email anyone or get in touch on WhatsApp - ever.

One of the theories why YouTube is deleting Graham’s channel is that maybe it’s because

we leave too many repetitive comments thanking people for watching our videos, this is something

both Graham and I do in the first hour after posting our videos.

If you leave a comment on our videos in the first hour after posting because you subscribed

and hit the notification bell, chances are you will get some sort of a response in that

first hour.

I know personally I will go out of my way to respond to almost every single comment

and give it a heart because I want to acknowledge and thank people for watching, but this also

does get repetitive sometimes which technically breaks YouTube’s policy.

Now I don’t think that’s the reason YouTube is targeting channels for deletion because

if that was the case, I would probably also get scheduled for deletion.

Instead, remember that YouTube bot problem I talked about in the beginning?

It’s bad.

Anytime you make a comment on our channels, within seconds, you will have some sort of

a response from someone with the exact same name as the channel, the exact same picture

profile, and somehow YouTube allows this to happen.

Now the bigger your channel gets, the bigger this problem becomes and because Graham has

over 3 million subscribers, the amount of comments he gets is massive.

All of these comments obviously get very repetitive because each one asks you to reach out to

them so that you too can make a ton of profits, they will leave their email address, their

manager’s contact info, their instagram, or some other link designed to get you off

YouTube and onto their landing page encouraging you to give them money - which is obviously

a scam.

“Why don’t you just delete the comments?”

Well as creators we do have the power to delete comments this is true.

In fact we have several tools at our disposal.

One of those tools Graham talked about for example is deleting them manually which would

literally take a full time job working 40 hours a week day and night just to keep up

with these comments because the second you delete it, by the time you go through the

function of actually deleting that comment, there will be 3 more that you have to remove

in it’s place.

It’s like a hydra, remember?

Believe it or not it is faster to leave comments than it is to delete them.

So deleting each one manually is out of the question.

The second tool we have is to hide users from our channel, this is a feature we both use

a lot where we can go into the creator dashboard, click the comment section, then click these

little dots here and pick hide user from channel.

This makes it so that all their future comments don’t appear at all and it doesn’t notify

them about it on their end which is awesome, except, it isn’t.

Because it doesn’t retroactively hide all their previous comments.

And what these guys do that’s so clever, is that they respond to the oldest comments

first, so that by the time we see it and hide them, it’s already too late, they’ve spread

their little evil seeds.

This is the last tool we have to track and clean up our comment section.

We can manually go in and put specific key words these guys are using, so if they’re

asking people to reach out through email, phone, WhatsApp, I can go in and block any

key word and if anything in their comments contains said words, their comments won’t

show up.

But just like Graham said, they will immediately realize their comments are not showing up

and all it takes, is one simple variation and the comments show up again.

So for example I can block the word WhatsApp.

But if they leave a comment that has a comma before the word WhatsApp, YouTube considers

that as two different words so it doesn’t even matter what word we block because they

can make an infinite amount of variations.

Now leaving these comments is one thing but one of the worst things that can happen is

this

So this has fortunately never happened to me, hold on.

*knock on wood* But one piece of advice I can give Graham is that if you trademark your

name as a brand, it becomes pretty straight forward to delete.

Now if this person happens to live outside the US you might think it’s not really effective,

after all what good are the rules and laws of a nation you don’t live in.

But the benefit of doing this is that even though they might live outside the US, the

platform they post these links to are usually hosted by companies within the US.

You’re not actually reaching out to these people with a threat, instead you reach out

to the platform that’s hosting it and those companies will almost without fail have to

follow US law.

This is a pro tip I got from a lawyer friend of mine, Matt Powell.

Shout to his new YouTube channel Varroom, which has nothing to do with investing or

law but it’s awesome.

And that’s probably what’s going on, YouTube almost certainly knows that this is going

on and they found a way to automatically mass delete all of these accounts and in the process,

it’s the real accounts that got included for deletion and that’s why I’m making

this video and where I need your help to bring more attention to this so that hopefully YouTube

reaches out to creators and tells them everything will be ok or fixes the system because chances

are if Graham Stephan’s channel is at risk for being deleted that it’s only a matter

of time before a lot of other people’s channels are deleted as well.

And my fear is that once YouTube does delete the channel, even if they restore it which

is could will probably end up happening, there’s a chance that we lose the momentum we’ve

created for ourselves by posting videos regularly and on schedule so if we can prevent that

from happening in the first place, we’d all be better off.

If YouTube could just prevent new accounts from being created with the same name, that

would be a place to start.

The second thing is to make hiding users from channel work retroactively so if someone does

slip through the cracks, one simple button could hide everything they’ve ever commented

on the channel.

And my favorite solution that YouTube can implement almost right away is highlighting

creator comment to stand out much more, maybe highlight the name in a different color and

give us more custom options to put emojis or something to stand out from the rest of

the comments.

That way even if you see someone posting under our name and profile, it would be very hard

to mistake the fake one and the real accounts because right now, this gray little highlight

and checkmark is just not enough.

Let’s tweet at Susan Wojiski not to delete Graham Stephans’ channel.

Or mine, please.

Pretty please.

I’m desperate.

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