YouTube Channels Are Getting Deleted (Don't Make This Mistake)

Imagine you woke up and you found out that your YouTube channel was permanently deleted. No warning, no notice, no nothing. This is the exact reality that thousands of creators are facing right now. But there is a solution to it, and I'm about to share it with you. If you're running a YouTube channel, it's a really good idea that you're watching this video because I'm gonna share with you the exact protection system that's keeping my own channel safe while other channels get terminated every single day. Because without this system, You could literally wake up tomorrow and years of hard work and dedication could be erased in seconds. And this is not just happening to small creators. It's actually happening to a lot of big channels right now, including the one you're watching right now. So recently some of the videos on this channel you're watching right now, Make Money Matt, recently got targeted. I was given strikes for some of the content that I posted on this channel. And in my personal opinion, after reading through all the YouTube terms of service and everything else, These videos didn't violate any community guidelines and they weren't deceptive content. My aim with this channel is the same that it's always been, which is to make extremely helpful content that's educational, that you can walk away from knowing more than you knew before. But I wasn't the only one that got hit. Mr. Beast, who's another big YouTuber in the make money online space, recently emailed me saying that he had to delete all the videos on his channel and start from complete scratch. Odedda, who's another big creator, in the make money online space, had over 50 videos removed and she was given a community guidelines strike for posting content that talks about financial content and making money online. Stacey Law is another big creator who's facing the same thing and she was on hiatus for almost 3 months because of this. She just posted a video about her experience with all this a few weeks ago. So at this point you might be starting to sense a theme here just like how I was. However, channels talking about finance and making money online are not the only channels that are getting targeted. Noah Morris, for example, who's one of the most respected creators in the Faceless Community, lost 8 of his channels back in January of 2025. That's $3.8 million of lifetime ad revenue from those channels, plus 1.5 million subscribers that just disappeared. The World Table Tennis official channel got terminated in 2025 after crypto scammers hacked their account. Even Wainer Arts, who's another massive player in the YouTube automation space, had many of his channels die off in May of 2024. The Hustler Casino Live channel, despite having over 360,000 followers, it had massive viewership, just got banned without any clear explanation. Most recently, another famous YouTube creator, RomeyRoe, suffered a major loss in June of 2025. A faceless channel that he had built up over 8 years, that he uploaded 3,000 videos to with no strikes, no issues, was deleted overnight. His appeal was also rejected instantly. Now these are just a few examples, but this is what should really scare you. YouTube processed almost 16 million terminations in just the first quarter of 2024 alone. That's more than 175,000 channels getting deleted every single day. And with the brand new inauthentic content policies that went into place recently on July 15th, terminations are happening faster than ever before. Now, the appeal success rate— and by the way, appealing for a channel termination is when your channel gets deleted and you say that there was something wrong with it, so you try to give an explanation to YouTube as to why you think they made the wrong decision— the success rate of those appeals is below 5%. So what that practically means is that if your channel gets terminated tomorrow, you potentially have less than a 1 in 20 chance of getting it back. Now I personally run 12 different YouTube channels. I've gone channels to millions of subscribers. I've helped over 11,000 people start their very own channels. I've seen what's happening behind the scenes that most creators completely miss. But with making this video, I feel like I should let you in on a really big secret. The creators who are surviving this new enforcement landscape from YouTube are not just getting lucky. They're following a specific system that I'm gonna give you here today. So you can walk away from this video knowing this system to make sure that you can sleep good at night knowing that your channels are safe. So the way that YouTube's enforcement works now is completely different than it was even 12 months ago. And if you wanna get really scientific with it, YouTube's automated systems now process 96.6% of all content removals. And so what this tells us is that we're not dealing with humans making decisions about our content anymore. You're dealing with algorithms that process these violations with unprecedented scale and speed. And now what's really concerning about this is that 96% of YouTube terminations are due to what YouTube calls spam and deceptive practices. What YouTube defines as spam or deceptive practices has expanded so drastically that channels doing legitimate businesses are getting caught in the crossfires of this. Now at this point you might be saying, "Matt, this sounds super complicated. Is it even safe to do YouTube anymore? How can I know if my content is at risk?" Well, YouTube has something called a violative view rate, and this sits at about 0.16 to 0.18%. You might be saying, "Matt, why are you even telling me this?" Well, what this practically means is that out of every 10,000 views on the platform, 16 to 18 of them come from policy-violating content. So it is a relatively low amount of content that is going to be policy violating. And that brings me to what happened on July 15th, 2025. YouTube dropped what they're calling inauthentic content rules that completely changed monetization eligibility. And 99% of creators still have no idea that this happened. This is the breaking news that's going to affect every single creator on this platform. So what does this mean for you right now? Well, for example, if you're making reaction content, for example, you need substantial commentary, not just watching and occasionally saying, wow, that's crazy. If you're using AI, for example, to help help you with producing your YouTube videos, you don't wanna just rely on it 100% and just mass generate videos to put on the platform 'cause YouTube is looking down on that. You want to have a human involved in the videos at some point for any type of channel that you're running. That doesn't mean you can't use AI, you certainly can, but only if you use it the right way. So if you're using any kind of template-based approach to mass generating content on YouTube where all the content looks almost exactly the same and it's not providing any original value, you could face immediate demonetization starting right now. So now that you understand what's happening, and now that I've probably scared the crap out of you, and you might be saying, "Matt, should I even be doing YouTube at this point?" Let me break down the 5 biggest mistakes that are causing channel deletions so you can avoid them. I'm not just telling you this to say that YouTube is over because it certainly is not. You just have to adapt and follow the rules that YouTube is giving us so you can build a real long-term business on the platform because that's certainly possible. But you need to be avoiding these 5 biggest mistakes. And mistake number 1 is the fair use assumption. And this is a pretty big mistake because I see creators creators all the time who think that just giving credit or giving attribution down in the description of your videos to a video that you used in your video instantly protects you from anything. That could not be further from the truth. So YouTube's Content ID system processes nearly a billion copyright takedowns every single year, and the crazy part about that is that 60% of disputes are resolved in favor of uploaders. And so what this tells us is that there's over 2.2 million unjustified takedowns happening that creators have to actively dispute. But most creators don't even know how they can dispute them. Mistake number 2 is using AI content without disclosing it. Since March of 2024, YouTube introduced a setting when you're uploading videos— you might have seen it since most people that watch this channel run YouTube channels— where YouTube requires you to check a box if there's any content containing, quote, realistic altered or synthetic material. And if you don't do that properly and YouTube finds out about it, you could face getting kicked out of the partner program, meaning that you'd be completely demonetized. This label then, once you select it when uploading a video, will appear in your description. Now the third mistake is what YouTube calls pattern-based harassment. And this isn't just obviously threatening somebody on a YouTube video. Even if you're just a commentary channel that specifically targets a single individual over and over, multiple times across multiple videos, you're now at risk from being suspended from YouTube's partner program. Even something as simple as prolonged insults can trigger immediate enforcement action. And the fourth mistake is relying too heavily on template-based videos. And I know this hits really close to home for a lot of YouTube automation channels, but YouTube is now targeting channels that upload almost the same video over and over without any meaningful changes on them. So this means that if you're using nearly identical templates or if you're mass producing videos using only AI without substantial human value, then you're in the danger zone. And the 5th mistake is not monitoring the early warning signs that your channel is at risk. So this happened to me on my channel as well, where I had a couple videos get warnings on them and then the videos got taken down, but I didn't get any strikes for them. So I was just assuming that, you know, these are just one-off instances I could just email YouTube and get this fixed since I didn't think my content violated any policies. But that was just the first step. Then I got 2 strikes on the channel, and by the way, if you get 3 strikes, your entire channel will be completely deleted. So then I panicked, and it was at that point that it was almost too late, and then I took action to protect my channel. And what I think was happening with both my channel and what I've seen across so many different make money online channels as well that are facing issues because they're uploading make money content is the fact that in a lot of these videos they're making claims about how much money someone could potentially make doing a method. Now I always give a disclaimer in my videos telling people that, you know, I can't guarantee you're gonna make a million dollars just by watching this video, and I can't guarantee you'll make any money at all, but I'm just showing some tutorials on how I personally have built my YouTube channels. But when you use titles like "How to Make $100 a Day on YouTube" or "Lazy Way to Make Money Online" and stuff like this, it can trigger alarm bells in the YouTube algorithm due to the fact that I think that YouTube is cracking down on this type of content 'cause they don't want people making those claims because then it reflects badly on YouTube to agencies like the FTC, for example, in the United States who go after those types of claims. So practically what this means is that if you run a channel in the make money online space, or if you're even making any claims at all on your videos, make sure to do it in a way where you're not putting it in your title and your thumbnail, like, "Make $100 a day," because I think YouTube is automatically going after those types of content. And instead, think about how you can word it a little bit differently, like, "How to build a business," 'Full Tutorial.' That's a much better title that's going to make sure that your channel is a lot safer. So I'm changing the strategy on my entire channel here on Make Money Matt. You might have noticed it. I'm doing different titles, a little bit different of a strategy, but overall I'm still trying to provide as much value as I possibly can to you when it comes to building YouTube channels and businesses. And like I mentioned earlier in this video, this is not just an isolated incidence with my channel. There are tons of different make money channels that are facing the same thing. And in fact, I even had a playlist of a bunch of the top make money videos on YouTube. I had hundreds of videos in that playlist. And when I opened that playlist earlier this month, I noticed something shocking. Almost half of the videos were gone. That means that those videos were either privated, they were taken down by YouTube directly, or they got warnings or even direct strikes from YouTube, and then they had to take those videos down. So be very careful if you are doing the make money niche. Just make sure to do it in a way where you're not gonna be breaking any YouTube guidelines. What I like to do as well is to make a custom GPT of all the YouTube guidelines. You can do this by just putting them into ChatGPT and making a custom GPT on there, and then you can run potential titles through them to see if there would be any issue. This is what I've been doing lately and it's been working really good. And so make money online content, mass-produced AI content, and content that overall just doesn't give much value are all types of content that are being targeted and taken down by YouTube. And I don't think this is necessarily YouTube's fault either, because YouTube has to abide by certain laws and depending on the countries that they're operating in, And so it's our responsibility to also follow those laws. But at this point you might be saying, Matt, this all sounds terrifying. How do I actually protect my channel? Well, this is where the successful creators separate themselves from everybody else. The successful creators use what I like to call the Systematic Prevention Framework. And the first step of implementing this framework is to implement a content review system before you publish anything on your channel. What this practically means is using something like a custom GPT to look through your titles and your scripts potentially, especially if you're within a very high-risk type of content like make money online content. And also make sure to use YouTube's built-in systems check, which will scan your content for any automatic copyright violations or any other violations that there might be in your videos. Maybe it'll be a certain word that you say or something else that could potentially trigger that. When you upload videos, YouTube will run those checks on there, and then it'll show you if there's any problems with it. So I typically recommend setting your videos to private and letting those checks run until you see checkmarks across everything, and then only from there publish the videos if there's no problems. If there's potential problem, then run your scripts on a custom GPT trained on the YouTube policies, and then try to target what the issues were, and then remove those. The second step is having a real copyright compliance strategy. What this means is that if you do use other content out there online from YouTube or anywhere else, make sure that you have an original voiceover on top of it, that you're following the fair use guidelines, which means making it transformative from the original piece of content, and make sure you're giving value. Don't just re-upload a video. Instead, if you're using a video, make sure it's used in the context of being a very small part of your video and you're using a lot of other videos as well, as well as using assets from stock footage websites like Storyblocks, for example, which is what I personally use on a lot of my channels. And there's a lot of types of channels where you actually never have to even worry about copyrighted material. These are channels where you are either doing animations on your channel. A lot of channels are succeeding hugely with that, or they're channels that are using only stock footage-based content. But you wanna make sure you're putting your own spin on the script and not relying entirely on just AI. Step number 3 then is to make sure that your videos actually give value. And the biggest way you can do that is by making sure your scripts actually give value. And instead of just using an AI like ChatGPT to generate your scripts that are gonna be the same as thousands of other videos on the platform, cuz thousands of other people will be doing the the exact same thing. Instead of doing that, write your scripts originally yourself or pay somebody experienced to do so for you. Or if you are insistent on using an AI, which I personally do on a lot of my channels, make sure that you use one like TubeMagic in which you can put in context videos from YouTube that will train your scripts to be based on that particular type of content, which will make sure that your content is unique compared to all of the other types of content that are out there on YouTube. You won't just be making duplicate content. Plus, it'll give a lot of value because it'll extract the best insights from all of those videos that you input as context scripts, and it'll be trained on all of the best strategies for writing scripts, such as the best hook strategies, the best re-hook strategies to keep people hooked throughout the entire video, and advanced psychology techniques that will keep people watching. Now let's say, God forbid, that your channel does get terminated. If that ever happens to you, you need to understand the reality of submitting an appeal. YouTube's appeal appeal process heavily favors automated decisions, with human review remaining limited and inconsistent. But here's the secret that most creators don't know. There are alternative appeal routes that are a lot easier and a lot more effective than the standard process that most people go through. For example, if you @TeamYouTube on Twitter, they maintain less than a 5% success rate, but other alternatives like YouTube support forums provide public visibility that can pressure a human review. And basically, if this ever happens, you just want to explain what happened and explain why you don't think that your Your content breaks any policies. And you can try to find the policy that your channel was terminated for. And then you can specifically write a documented take on why you think that that was wrong and give specific examples of why your videos were not breaking any rules if they weren't. Another really good resource you can use is the YouTube live chat feature, especially if you're a YouTube partner, you'll have access to that. So if any problems arise, you can simply log in with the Google account that you're using under the YouTube help section, and then under that you'll be able to choose to talk to a live agent, and typically these live agents aren't really able to help with anything. However, they typically can connect you with somebody who is. So I'd highly recommend using that if you ever have any issues. Now, the smartest creators right now are treating compliance as a core part of their business and not just an afterthought like 99% of people have done. And also, the smart creators are creating backup systems outside of YouTube as well. For example, setting up email lists to collect emails from their viewers so then if anything happens to your channel, you've still at least got that. Also having other social media, developing multiple revenue streams beyond just YouTube AdSense revenue. So if you do that, and on top of that you're also abiding by all of YouTube's rules, it's gonna help you a lot. So implement this systematic prevention framework that I've given you in this video. And if you are interested in my entire system for running YouTube channels, exactly how I'm able to run a ton of different channels that are completely faceless that abide by all of YouTube's rules, that actually get a lot of views, and that have made a huge business out of doing, then you might want to check out Tube Accelerator. This is not just a course, it's basically all of my systems that I've developed over my past 10 years on YouTube. Plus you get access to my entire YouTube content creation team. We'll make your first video for you and we'll make sure that you're doing things the right way. So if you're serious about building a sustainable business on YouTube that can survive policy changes and enforcements then feel free to click the link down in the description to book a call with my team. But whether you work with us or not, please make sure that you implement these protection strategies. I really want to make sure that your channel that you have out there is able to operate for a long time, and so you can make a real business out of doing this, because YouTube has completely transformed my life, brought me from a broke high school student to making millions of dollars in my early 20s. Now obviously I can't guarantee you're gonna make millions of dollars or anything else, but I really just want your YouTube channel to be protected, and the creators that are prepared are gonna be the ones that succeed. Succeeding. So you got this, keep up the good work. Feel free to check out this video as well, which is basically a free course for how to do YouTube without ever showing your face. The new way of doing this, also known as YouTube automation, and I show you how to build a real business out of doing it and everything else in this video right here. My name is Matt Parr, thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.