I'm afraid YouTube doesn't like me anymore, and I have no idea why.

Last week I got this email from YouTube Service:

I've been on YouTube for over 4 years and one of my first videos ""affiliate marketing in 2 minutes"  which you may have seen, just got removed from my account... In fact they have disabled my account entirely with no warning and I have no idea why.

Here's what you'll see if you visit my original video, which had 36,000 views and tons of happy comments:

Huh?

So I'm writing this note as a warning to others who rely on Youtube for hosting their videos - you might want to consider alternate services.

Now, my video is still up on the old "Google Video" - watch it (or try one of the clones below) and tell me if you think it's a violation of their community guidelines?

In fact my tutorial video is popular enough that someone else has taken it, and posted it on their own account here (which is a compliment... but I'd rather have my own video account and videos reinstated) :

But wait, there's more!

Someone has put a scammy banner over top of my video and YouTube is showing it here (may not show if someone reports it - hint hint):

I'm not the only marketer to have this happen either. Other marketers I've heard this happened to include:

• ProBlogger Darren Rowse got hit with the same thing (since been restored - not sure how he did it)
• Ross Goldberg got shut down as well, as he explains here
• Tiffany Dow lost 400 videos in one swoop, as she blogs about here

The ironic thing is that this 2 minute tutorial video was accepted into the AdSense Partner program, so Google was "making money" along with me whenever someone clicked an ad displayed on the video itself.

I have been using YouTube for various purposes - family videos, some educational/instructional videos, and other miscellaneous content like a really bad rap video etc.

Now thanks to this action, I have to expend a huge effort to go around to all my various sites and remove the embed code, or else people will see some message about the video being removed for violation of their terms, which doesn't seem fair and is defamatory.... and then figure out how to get my videos back out there on the interwebs.

I've tried appealing by emailing YouTube Support, and posting in their community help forum.

So far no one from YouTube or partner support has replied to me.

My next steps are to host my own videos using Amazon S3 with EZS3 players (affiliate link) and also explore the SEO possibilities for self-hosted video.

But I'd still love to get back together with YouTube...

So if you have a contact at Google or YouTube pls put in a good word for me. I tweeted about this here.

Pls also tweet about this and mention @youtube - hopefully someone is listening.

Thanks,

Peter Koning

Affiliate-Software-Review.com

blog comments powered by Disqus

--- (Edited on 6/21/2011 4:58 pm [GMT-0500] by Peter) ---