Transcription
As you can see from the title of this video, my channel has been demonetized and I will no longer be able to post on here anymore. In this video, I will walk you through exactly how I got demonetized and everything I've done to fight it.
A lot of the subscribers here came from this video. During this time, I was thinking that if YouTube is my career, then I want to be the most successful YouTuber that I can possibly be. And the biggest YouTuber in the world is Mr. Beast. So, I thought that if I invest a ton of money into big ideas, then I could also go down that path. But as well-received as this video was, I lost a ton of money on it. And I just couldn't afford to make more videos like it.
But the thing about the YouTube algorithm is that it rewards you for making more of the same. I learned this the hard way because I tried to make a bunch of different types of videos, different topics, different formats on this channel and none of them worked because they all hit the wall of the Bugatti video. They were being pushed to a car build audience and they never had a fair chance.
Even then, I didn't want to give up. So, I invested more money, more time, and this dragged out for three long years. The channel was stuck the entire time. Eventually, I saw that YouTube CEO posted something about investing in AI tools for the next generation of creators. And I thought, and honestly, still believe that the next generation of creators will use AI. But it's risky because right now there's a lot of AI hate. And if you use AI, you're immediately outcasted.
Even then, I thought if I can bite the bullet, go for it, then maybe I could be one of the first in line, you know, get ahead of these new tools and that would be worth it. The thing is, I noticed that a lot of channels that were using AI were creating pure slop. And the way that I define slop is minimal or no human involvement. So they were creating scripts, clips, the entire edits all with AI and they could upload 10 to 100 videos a day across multiple channels.
So I told myself that if I'm going to use AI, I want to try to create non-slop AI. So I wrote everything myself, edited everything myself, and each week I would post the very best video that I could make that week. It was a long shot and a huge learning curve to learn these new tools and going against the hate of the old subscribers abandoning the channel and getting mad at me for using AI.
And what finally broke me out of the Bugatti jail was, and it wasn't an easy decision, but I decided to unlist all of the old viral videos, so the Bugatti and that whole series because I wanted to give this new direction a fair chance. And after three long years, it was working until on April 7th, 2026, I got this email from YouTube. No warnings. The entire channel was just demonetized overnight.
And at first, I thought, okay, like this has to be a mistake. Clearly, they're just trying to shut down AI slop. And I don't think that's me. So, I'll just submit an appeal and everything will be okay. Within a couple hours, my appeal was rejected. They said that my content was mass-produced. And these were the reasons why. It was either exclusively featuring readings of material that I didn't create. It was songs that I didn't write or I modified. It was highly repetitive with minimal variation across videos. It was using a template across multiple videos. Or it's just a slideshow with scrolling text and no narrative or commentary.
If you watched more than 5 seconds of my videos, then you would know that none of that is true. If you really wanted to stretch it, okay, we could say that I use a loose template, but I'm going to get to that in a second. I emailed them back and I sent them proof that I wrote the stories myself. I edit the videos myself and I even had proof that I licensed the music because surely this had to be a mistake.
And just a little while later, I got an email back. Basically, he said that he looked over all of my screenshots and sometimes even with high-quality editing, using a template can still be considered mass-produced. Right? So, I use similar intros and outros, but on YouTube's website, they literally encourage you to do that, and it's okay as long as the bulk of the video is different.
So, I'm kind of paranoid at this point. I take two of my scripts and I put them into AI and ask it, "Are these two similar?" And it said, "No, you use similar story beats, but your stories are completely different. One is about a zombie apocalypse and the other one is about intercepting a meteor that's going to hit the earth." Now, this is where it gets very gray because if YouTube is saying that you're not allowed to use similar story beats, then they're saying you're not allowed to use formats. And that would mean that Mr. Beast's game shows would be considered a template. Ryan Trean's one-star reviews would be considered a template. Arax's sneaking in videos would be considered a template. I'm not trying to single them out, but my point is that if they really went through with this, then 99.9% of YouTube would be demonetized right now.
So, I started to look for others that were experiencing this. A big YouTuber, Jax Films, made a video talking about a 2D animation YouTuber named Eddie FRB. When I looked into this, it really put my case into perspective because Eddie FRB does these animated rap battles and he probably has some of the most original, most high-effort, least repetitive content on all of YouTube. But here's the thing, he got demonetized all the same. And when he went to appeal, he got rejected just like me. If Eddie FRB's content can be rejected after a manual review when anyone who spends more than 3 seconds on his video understands this is obviously not mass-produced, then what chance did the rest of us have?
So, the thing is after Jack's Films made that video about Eddie FRB and a bunch of community support rallied behind him, he eventually got his monetization back. I got the memo. The only way to get YouTube to give me a proper manual review is if I go and make a huge fuss on Twitter or X, whatever, to create enough external pressure so that they would finally make somebody check out my case. I went to X. Wow, there were thousands of other creators every day that were being hit by this same demonetization wave. I started documenting what I was experiencing, responding to their posts to try and bring more attention to not just my case, but to the whole situation.
But that's when I realized YouTube is not just demonetizing all of us with an AI. The appeal process was also done by an AI. And that would explain how the appeals were happening so fast within just a few hours instead of days or weeks. And that would also explain how a channel like Eddie FRB's channel could have been appealed and rejected within a couple hours. So, YouTube knows that their AI is really bad at understanding animation, gameplay, and anything involving AI. And instead of training it on simulated data, they are recklessly using it, training it on real creators, rug-pulling people's livelihoods overnight with no warning and no apology, no ownership over their mistake. I mean, even for a trillion-dollar corporation, this is just heartless. I just want to say that one more time. Instead of training their AI on simulated data, they are choosing to train their AI on real creators, real lives, and they just don't care.
If you think that's bad, it gets worse. So, I'm emailing back and forth with creator support, and I'm getting increasingly frustrated. Not only were they demonetizing my channel going forward, but they said they were going to keep all the money that it had earned up until it got demonetized. I was counting on that money to pay for some of the production costs that I invested in these videos. I mean, believe it or not, AI is still not cheap. I've spent thousands of dollars on these videos, and that's not including the time editing, writing, all of that.
So, out of my emotional frustration, I said, "If you guys are going to steal my money, then I'm going to look into my legal options." And that was a big mistake. But more on that in a second. So, while talking to creator support, something really, really strange happened. I started to ask them, "Okay, specifically, what did my videos do that broke the rules for inauthentic content?" This is what they said. "The patterns our team refers to involve the high frequency of recurring third-party assets, game footage, combined with templated visual overlay like consistent pop text styles and transitions that appear across the majority of your 500 plus videos. While these are common editing techniques, when they form the primary visual experience of a channel, they can be flagged as repetitive under current monetization standards. We don't provide a line item list of these patterns because they are inherent to the channel's overall format. While many creators use the three-act structure or hooks, our reviewers evaluate whether the unique narrative and original visual contribution outweighs the reused elements. These evaluations are done on a case-by-case basis as we cannot comment on the status of other channels." They mention other channels because I brought up the Eddie FRB case.
So, I mean, this all makes sense, but there's just one problem. I don't have 500 plus videos up. At the time, my channel only had seven videos up and 14 shorts. And besides that, I don't have any gameplay on in any video. So, I don't know what channel they were talking about. Even if I did have gameplay, does that mean that gameplay aka third-party assets and reusing the same text and font animations would be considered inauthentic? But then that's when it hit me. These rules are fugazi, vague enough that they could apply to literally any channel on YouTube. And I think that's the point.
And what's even worse, the creator support that I had been emailing back and forth with, sending proof, passionately defending myself, uh, not human. This was irrefutable evidence that YouTube had assigned an AI to be the creator support for everyone who had been hit by these mass demonetizations. So, I shared this email on X and this one gained some traction. Got just under 10,000 views and it helped a lot of other creators realize that they were talking to an AI, not a person.
So, I took advantage of this momentum and I decided to push as hard as I could. I kept emailing with creator support. I knew it was an AI on the other side, but I thought if I can trip it up, get it to hallucinate, keep the X momentum going, then maybe I could get a human to actually look at my channel. This went on for days. It's been over a week now, so I won't bore you with all of the emails back and forth, but it all ended up with two key moments.
Yesterday, April 14th, 2026, I got two emails. One said that my channel had already been thoroughly reviewed and the decision stands and if I keep bothering creator support, they're going to ban me for 30 days. Two was the heavy hitter. This email was signed off differently than all of the other emails. So, I knew it came from a human. They referred to my legal threat from earlier. You remember that? And they used that as an excuse to close the case indefinitely and that it's been passed to YouTube's legal department. So, if I continued to talk to them, then I would be talking to the legal department. Basically, they're bullying me into just shutting up. Lastly, they said the decision was final. And the best part, at the end of all of this, this entire week, they could not give me an explanation for what rules I broke on any of my videos.
After I got that email, I felt my stomach drop. I could not sleep at all last night. I was just thinking about what I could do next. Uh, and you might be wondering, why don't I just be posting on this channel and then reapply in 90 days? Well, there's two main reasons. One is that because I don't know what rules my videos even broke, then I don't know what to change. So, even if I reapplied after 90 days, there's no guarantee that I would be reaccepted back into the monetization program. And two, over the last three years, I have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into this channel and I have made not even a fraction of that back.
So, obviously, it's not about the money for me. YouTube has been my lifelong passion. It's what I live and breathe. But this fight with YouTube has led to insane stress and damage to me, to my damage to my mental and emotional health. In my opinion, any human with more than two seconds of their time would realize that my channel is not mass-produced. And this has been kind of reinforced by other creators on X who have taken the time to look at my channel and confirm they don't understand what I did wrong.
So the bottom line is this. After an entire week of going back and forth with YouTube, giving them all of the evidence, not a single human from YouTube has taken any time to actually look at my channel. And this is coming from someone who has been creating on this platform for over 10 years. And this is how they're treating me. I don't feel like YouTube is a safe place for creators right now. I hope that changes. I really do. But as for me, I'm done.