Transcription
What if I told you that there are some very innocent mistakes that I see so many creators making that's getting their channels banned? It's getting their channels buried in the algorithm. And at the very least, it's making it impossible for them to grow.
Now, the reason I know this is because I built up tons of different YouTube channels and I have a community of over 11,000 YouTubers. And I've been doing YouTube for the past 10 years. And in that time, I've seen channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers get completely wiped off the platform because of mistakes that seemed completely harmless at the time. There are creators who thought they were doing everything right only to wake up one day from an email from YouTube saying that their channel has been terminated.
Now, you might be saying, "Matt, they had to have been doing something wrong, something that was very obviously wrong, right?" Well, a lot of these creators that have gotten banned are genuinely good people trying to do their best, but they didn't know what I'm about to teach you right here. Because nobody teaches this stuff. You have to literally siphon through pages of the YouTube terms of service to find some of this. And the scary part is that creators don't even realize they're making these mistakes often times until it's too late.
And now I've tried my best to distill down everything for you into eight mistakes that consistently triggers YouTube automated systems to flag your account and cause YouTube to work against you rather than working for you. Because when YouTube works for you, it can allow you to build the life potentially of your dreams. YouTube has made me a multi-millionaire at a very young age. So obviously I love YouTube. It's the best place to build a business, but it's not if you're doing these mistakes. And if you're doing these mistakes, your journey is not going to be as pleasant.
Now, before we get into these specific mistakes, you need to understand something crucial about how YouTube systems work. You might be saying, "Matt, it's unfair that YouTube is taking down a lot of these creators." What you need to understand is that YouTube processes 500 hours of content that's uploaded on the platform every single minute. So, 60 seconds go by, boom, 500 hours over the course of a day, that's more content than you could literally watch in several lifetimes. So obviously they cannot have humans reviewing every single video and every single channel behavior.
So instead what YouTube does is they rely on automated systems and they look for patterns. And the key here is that these systems are designed to be aggressive because YouTube would rather accidentally flag a legitimate creator than let a spam network or a copyright infringer slip through the cracks which could lead to a giant lawsuit for YouTube which YouTube does not want. Because YouTube's relationship with advertisers and content owners is worth billions of dollars. And if brands start pulling advertising because of content that they might see as controversial, or if media companies start filing massive lawsuits because of copyright infringement, then YouTube's entire business model collapses. So when their systems detect patterns of behavior, they don't wait around to investigate whether you're actually violating the policies or not. They act first and they ask questions later. And unfortunately, the appeals process can take weeks or even months if you're lucky enough to get a human review at all. And this is why understanding these patterns and just avoiding them completely is critical to your long-term success on YouTube.
Now, let's start with what's probably one of the most common mistakes I see small channels making, which is getting involved in subscriber exchange schemes. Now, you might be saying, "Matt, what does that even mean?" Well, basically, when you're just starting out on YouTube, getting those first 100 subscribers seems absolutely impossible. And you see other small creators in comment sections saying things like, "Hey, I'll subscribe to everybody who subscribes to me." or they say something like, "Small YouTube supporting each other." And it seems like a harmless way to give each other a boost. But here's what you need to understand. YouTube systems are incredibly sophisticated when it comes to detecting artificial engagement patterns, which doing that would be.
Now, you might be saying, "Matt, what's wrong with creators supporting each other, though? What if they're just doing it out of the kindness of their heart? Isn't that what community is about?" And you're right. There's nothing wrong with genuine community support, but the problem is how you do it. Because what YouTube systems actually detect when a bunch of people rapidly subscribe to each other's channels, YouTube sees this as coordinated inflation, especially when they're not also seeing things like engagement and watch time increasing proportionally. If you want to support other creators, do it to other creators that are within your niche and leave genuine comments because doing sub for sub is going to hurt your channel more than helping it.
Now, the second mistake that's killing channels is hashtag abuse. Now, hashtags are simply things that you put in the title or the description of your videos. And you may have heard that hashtags can help your videos get discovered because anytime someone clicks one of those hashtags, they'll see all the videos under that. So, if you can get under the same hashtag as other popular videos, you might naturally think that adding more hashtags equals more discoverability. But here's where YouTube's guidelines are really important to read. Because according to their official policy, and I want you to pay close attention to this because it's directly from the Google support website, they say if a video has more than 60 hashtags, YouTube will ignore all the hashtags on the content, not just the excess ones, literally all of them. But it gets worse. YouTube explicitly states that overtagging may result in the removal of your video from your uploads or your searches.
So, let me break this down for you. If you're trying to game the system by stuffing your videos with hashtags, YouTube doesn't just ignore your hashtags. They can literally remove your video from search results entirely and then your content basically just becomes invisible. So, I've seen channels with thousands of subscribers suddenly lose 90% of their views because they're trying to game the system, stuff their descriptions, and their titles full of hashtags because they saw some outdated YouTube growth tutorial telling them to do that.
Now, personally, I don't do anything with hashtags whatsoever. So, I say feel free to skip them because if you think about it, what's the likelihood from somebody clicking a hashtag on another popular video and then going to watch your video next? It's probably pretty low. People are more likely to search something directly on YouTube than to even use hashtags. But I say if you are going to use hashtags, then the optimal strategy for that would be to just use three to six highly specific ones that directly relate to your content and your audience. And the key word here is specific. Don't use generic hashtags like #YouTube, #viral, or #subscribe. These are so broad that they basically mean nothing. Instead, what you want to do is use hashtags that someone genuinely interested in your specific topic would actually search for. For example, if you're making a video about productivity apps for college students, your hashtags would be #productivityapps #college #studyhacks #collegehacks. These are specific enough that people searching for them are genuinely interested in your content, but they're broad enough that they actually get searched. But as I mentioned, I don't do anything with hashtags. I think hashtags are less than 1% of your discoverability strategy. The other 99% comes from YouTube understanding what your video is actually about through your title, description, and most importantly, how people interact with your videos.
And now let's talk about something that can get your channel terminated faster than anything else, which is copyright violations. And this is where I need to address something that a lot of YouTube educators, including myself, have taught in the past, which is the concept of viral replication. Now, viral replication, when it's done correctly, is about studying successful videos in your niche, understanding what made them work, and then creating your own original content inspired by what you saw on those videos. It's about learning from success of other people and then applying those lessons to your own unique perspective in content. But here's where a lot of creators go wrong. They confuse inspired by with copied from. I've seen creators literally take viral video scripts or take an article from online where they literally just copy paste this exact same thing word for word as their script and then upload it as their own video. And I've seen people literally download other people's videos, slightly edit it, put maybe just a slightly different voice over, but it's literally the same exact order of clips that were being used and everything else, and then they present it as their own original video. And I've seen creators copy entire segments of popular videos, word for word, and literally just change the narrator. This is not viral replication, as I recommend it. This is copyright infringement. And YouTube's content ID system is incredibly sophisticated and is getting better and better at detecting copyright issues. So the truth about viral replication that actually works is that if you study successful videos to understand why they worked, then you create original content that serves the same audience need, but from your unique perspective.
Now, this is such a big issue on YouTube that I literally built an AI spending over six figures developing it just to help me with this process of doing viral replication the right way. So, what Tube Magic does is you can put in context video links of videos that you're modeling and then Tube Magic will take all of the best information from each of those videos, and I recommend putting several so you're not just getting info from one video. And then it runs it through a bunch of the best practices for writing scripts, including great hooks, great open loop strategies to keep people watching throughout your entire video, plus advanced psychology to also keep people watching. And then it writes you an original script based off of that. And this will be a god tier script that's actually really good. So you're not just copying stuff. You're not just copy pasting stuff from somebody else's video. That could get you in trouble. Also, if you're using other people's clips in your videos, make sure to abide by the terms of fair use by doing things like having an original voice over on your videos, using multiple different clips so it's different in nature than the original. This isn't foolproof, by the way. Channels still have copyright problems even if they do all of this, but I think you'll be in a much better position abiding by all the terms of fair use than if you didn't.
Now, you could always run like a stock footage YouTube channel as well, where if you get the stock footage the right way, you'd never have to deal with copyright issues whatsoever. That's why I built my second software, which is Vid.AI, which allows you to generate full 20-minute videos using stock footage. And these will be videos that you'll never have to deal with copyright ever.
And now, let's talk about something that most creators never think about until it's too late. And that is channel security. As your channel grows, it becomes a target, unfortunately, not just for viewers, but also for scammers, hackers, and competitors that might want to damage your reputation or steal your channel. And I personally have seen very successful channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers get completely compromised because of basic security mistakes. And once somebody has access to your channel, they can do permanent damage to your reputation, your relationship with YouTube. They could get you banned potentially by doing things like fake live streams. I actually got hacked on my channel. We'll talk about that a little bit later. And that's what they did. I made a very rookie mistake though that you can easily avoid and I'll tell you about that in mistake number seven. But the first biggest security mistake that I see constantly is using the same email address for your channel management and then making it public facing. Meaning that if you put an email address on your about page or in your video descriptions for business inquiries, that email becomes visible to potentially thousands of people who might not have good intentions. And if somebody gets access to that email address through hacking, social engineering, or data breaches at other companies, they potentially have access to your entire YouTube channel.
So, the solution is to create a separate business email that's only for public communications, but to keep your actual YouTube account email completely private. You never want to share the email that you actually made your YouTube channel on. This way, even if someone compromises your business email, your channel itself remains secure. Also, make sure you have a really good password for your channel as well. And I recommend using Bit Warden, which is a completely free password manager that you can get to store all your passwords and also generate very complex passwords. you're not just using a reuse thing on a bunch of different stuff.
Now, this next mistake led me to almost losing my entire channel that you're watching right now in the past few months. And that mistake was falling into something that I like to call the make money online trap. Basically, what happened was YouTube started going after make money online channels. And I saw this happening on other people's channels as well because I had a whole playlist of all the biggest videos in the make money online space. And one day, I opened that playlist and like half of them were gone. They're just completely gone. And I was like, "What is going on here?" Then I started receiving warnings on my channel, which I kind of brushed off at first cuz I was like, "Okay, it's just a warning. I'm sure everything's fine." But then those warnings turn into actual strikes. And when you get three strikes, your channel is completely deleted. So, I attempted to appeal these strikes thinking that there literally just a mistake, but they were just reinstated almost immediately. So, then I panicked and I tried to figure out what was going on, but I saw the pattern with the make money online videos. So, what I did is I went in and I deleted every single video on my channel that had to do with making money online or having make money online in my titles or my thumbnails or anything else like that because these are YouTube's automated systems automatically going after those videos because they probably did some type of AI update or something. And also, they might be getting pressure for all we know from agencies like the FTC who don't want people making, you know, income claims as to saying, "Oh, you could make this much money if you just watch this video." So, that reflects badly on YouTube. YouTube probably retrained their AI and then their AI system is now going after channels like that. That's at least my guess what's going on. I'm not 100% sure if that is exactly what's going on, but what I did seems to have worked. I didn't get another strike and luckily those two strikes expired and I started uploading again on the channel.
And a huge tip that you can do to make sure that you never have to deal with this is to make a custom GPT within Chat GPT where you copy paste all of the YouTube terms of service. And this is what I did as well. And then this will allow you to then run any title ideas you have. Run any scripts that you have directly through this GPT and then ask it, "Is there anything within this title or script or anything else that will violate the YouTube terms of service?" And if there isn't, then you're good. And then it can also give you tips and tricks of adjusting certain things to make sure that you do abide by the YouTube terms of service.
Now, this next mistake is something that is hugely prevalent right now on YouTube and it's something that I got called out for by John Oliver, who's the host of this TV show in the US. And he was saying that I was part of the problem with propagating something called AI slop online. And what they did is they cherrypicked one little feature from one of my software companies about a type of video that it could produce, which I 100% agree. If you just relied on making content like that, that is not the way of building a real big business online. So, the point they're making is 100% correct. You want to make sure that your videos on YouTube give people value. Now, value can be either educational or entertainment value. So, I've been doing my best to build my AI tools around that. Like, for example, Tube Magic, by definition, it will produce very valuable videos cuz you're taking the best aspects of other videos that have done incredibly good and writing them in new and unique ways. But where people go wrong and where this sixth mistake really gets a lot of channels is the fact that they don't use a specialized tool like that. They use something like Chat GPT for their scripts and then they AI generate visuals on top of that. Or even worse, they copy paste stuff directly from Reddit and then use that to AI generate a visual behind it. Like I've seen all these revenge story channels popping up from subreddits where they're literally just copy pasting stuff from subreddits. That is not the way to build a unique channel that actually gives a lot of value. That's just robotic mass generated nonsense. Yes, some people might get entertained by some of it, but that's a recipe of also producing a lot of very bad videos that not many people are going to like. So, don't fall into that AI trap. If you're going to use AI, make sure to use tools like Tube Magic or Vid AI and make sure that your videos actually give value. Always do a QC quality check before any videos go out to the public as well.
Now, this seventh mistake led my channel to getting hacked. And when that happened, I was certain that my channel was gone for good. Now, thankfully, I was able to get this channel back, but what basically happened was I received an email that looked like a very legitimate sponsor request. Someone was saying that they wanted to sponsor the channel and they attached a PDF document to it. Now, I downloaded the document and I attempted to open it on my computer and that was the mistake. And the reason it was a mistake is because that document was not a PDF document at all, even though it looked like it was in the file name, but it was a specific type of file that installed a malicious program on my computer that then downloaded all of my Google account data and all of my logged in Google account because it downloaded all the cookies and cache files from my browser. And this allowed a hacker to be able to log into my channel. And so one day I just wake up and I see that my channel is running a fake SpaceX live stream trying to sell crypto from it. And I was like, "What the heck is going on?" Now luckily I was able to send a tweet to Team YouTube on Twitter and ask for it to be fixed, which thankfully they did. But I've heard of some creators getting their channels hacked and not getting their channels back because YouTube thinks they were the ones running those crypto live streams. So, you got to be really careful and really try to keep your channel secure because I don't want that happening to you. That was one of the scariest moments of my career because this was years and years of dedication and trying to help people online that almost got wiped out in an instant.
So, to avoid this fake brand deal disaster, make sure that whenever you get an email from someone saying that they're a sponsor, if they attach a document and they ask you to open it directly on your computer, do not do that. You can send documents via Google Docs nowadays. you don't need to be downloading stuff on your computer in order to read it. So, I just want to put that out there so you can stay safe.
Now, the final mistake that's killing channels is something called tag stuffing. Now, YouTube gives you a specific section where you can put in video tags. And there's a lot of debate right now whether tags are even useful anymore or whether they're not. I'm going to make a video soon about my thoughts on that. But the thing about tags is that they're limited. You can only add so many that describe your video. And what I see a lot of creators do in an attempt to game the system is they put a bunch of more tags in the description of their videos. That is not the place to put tags. And YouTube obviously does not allow this. Because while you think you might be being smart by giving YouTube more information about your content, in reality, you're triggering YouTube spam detection systems. YouTube's official policy explicitly states that while adding hashtags is allowed, adding ordinary descriptive tags or repetitive sentences in the description is still prohibited. If you violate this policy, your videos or playlist may be removed or penalized. And the reason is simple. YouTube's algorithm is sophisticated enough to understand what your video is about from your title, your description, and your actual content. When you just stuff additional keywords in your description unnaturally, it looks like you're trying to game the system because you are.
So, what smart creators do and what you should also do is write your video description for humans first and the algorithm second. Because at the end of the day, the algorithm just amplifies what humans enjoy. So, make your video description something that provides value to the viewer. Put a brief description of your video written in your own words. And it should clearly explain what viewers will learn or discover or see from watching your video and why they should care about it. And make sure to use natural language that sounds like how you would actually talk to somebody. And just remember also YouTube's algorithm pays way more attention to how people actually interact with your video than how many keywords you have stuffed in your description.
Now, at this point, you might be thinking, "Matt, this all sounds pretty scary, honestly. Like, are you just saying that YouTube is waiting to ban creators for innocent mistakes?" That's not the case. YouTube wants creators to succeed because successful creators make YouTube successful. But they also need to maintain the quality, the integrity of their platform. They also have to keep a lot of advertisers happy as well because at the end of the day, YouTube is a business. And the creators who get caught up in these problems are usually ones trying to find shortcuts, game the system instead of focusing on what actually matters, which is creating valuable content that people genuinely want to watch.
And if you want to discover my secret for growing on YouTube, how I personally have made millions of dollars off the platform, and how I've built a gigantic business instead of just focusing on vanity metrics like views and subscribers, then feel free to check out this video right here, which is a full course which is going to show you that new way of growing on YouTube, the new way of monetizing as well, and the way that I personally have built a giant business off of YouTube without even showing my face on the majority of my channels. Feel free to check this out. My name is Matt Parr. Thanks for watching and I will hopefully see you.