YouTube is Changing in 2026 (Do THIS Before February)

Hey, happy New Year. It is 2026. I cannot believe it. And YouTube is going to change a lot this year. And that's the reason I'm making this video. And I'm going to show you all of the changes that are coming and what you personally can do before February of this year in order to grow like crazy on YouTube, make a real business out of doing YouTube, and avoid getting banned and avoid a lot of the pitfalls that are coming to YouTube. Because a lot of things are changing. There's a lot of things you need to know about, and that's what I'm here for. And so I'm going to go over the changes first and foremost, and then I'm going to show you exactly what you need to do before February. So let's get straight into the changes. And the biggest thing that everybody's freaking out about right now is that a lot of channels are getting banned and a lot more are going to be getting banned going into 2026. But there are some nuances to this that a lot of people are missing that's not giving them the full picture as to what's actually going on on YouTube. So I found this tweet the other day and it's this guy who had his channel banned, unfortunately. And he posted this tweet saying that this number should terrify every creator on YouTube, showing all the channels that got removed and everything else. And YouTube replied to this saying, you're right that 12 million channels have been terminated this year, but it varies because 20 million channels were terminated in Q4, for example, of 2023 alone. And channels terminated does not mean creators terminated. Sometimes a scammy account can have hundreds of channels. So one of the biggest things that's going to be happening this year is that YouTube is going to be using AI to moderate AI. And that's really the only way that they're able to do that. There is no possible way on earth that you'd be able to hire enough people to moderate the thousands of different spammy AI channels that are going to be popping up in 2026. So they have to resort to AI, and AI can sometimes make mistakes. And later in this video, I'll tell you exactly what to do if your channel ever does get wrongfully banned or anything else. It's actually pretty simple what to do. I've helped some students out who have been in that situation and they've gotten their channels back. But I see so many people freaking out about this and I see people even like Moist Critical right here, who's a huge reaction YouTuber who called the YouTube CEO delusional for letting AI ban channels. And he basically said that this should not be happening and you need to be hiring more people to do all the moderation and everything else. What I think a lot of people, though, are failing to account for is the fact that the only way to fight AI is with AI, because If you have a targeted attack with thousands of different channels that are being mass generated by one person, do you expect to hire, you know, thousands of different people to just combat that one person? And then as there gets more and more people using AI, you have to use AI to combat that. That's really the only way, in my personal opinion. Yes, it's going to make mistakes. Yes, there are some unfortunate situations where channels are wrongfully banned, but there's some things you can do. I'm going to show you a little bit in this video of how to avoid that. But the AI tools are only going to get better, and it's going to get better at detecting if somebody is a bot or not. And as you can see right here, it says this quarter the spike in terminations was largely due to a specific financial scam out of Southeast Asia that led to millions of terminations. Now, I'm not just trying to defend YouTube here. YouTube has done a lot of things throughout my 10 years on YouTube that I completely disagree with. They make a lot of mistakes, but I think the general direction that YouTube wants to go in is the right one in allowing AI to a certain degree if you use AI as tools. And if we take a look right here, Neal Mohan, the CEO of YouTube, recently gave an interview to Time magazine. He was listed the 2025 CEO of the Year. And a lot of people disagree with this guy. Some people like him. He has unbanned a lot of creators somewhat recently who were banned off of YouTube in the past. But if we go down right here, he says that AI is going to create an entirely new class of creators that today can't do it because they don't have the equipment. So AI is a tool. It'll allow a 13-year-old kid in their parents' basement to essentially generate a full movie in the near future. That looks incredible. But as with any tool, there are good and bad things about AI. People are going to use it to spread scams. People are going to use it to make people say things that they never said that could potentially get people into legal trouble. These things are going to happen as a result of these tools. But there's no denying that these tools are coming and it's a really good idea that we understand how to use them. And again, I'm going to show you how to do that a little bit in this video. But he says that the same rule will apply, which is there will be good content and bad content, and it will be up to YouTube and our investments in technology and algorithms to bring that to the fore. He also believes that YouTube will be able to handle the misinformation, scams, intellectual property theft, and AI slop likely to be unleashed. We have a track record, he says, and he thinks AI will help. AI will make our ability to detect and enforce on violative content better, more precise, able to cope with scale. Now, I would agree with some of these people who are calling Neil out, saying that there needs to be more human teams. Yes, there probably does. I think that YouTube probably should invest a bit more into hiring humans to oversee a lot of these bans because it does make mistakes. And I see every single week there's things on Twitter, there's people DMing me about channels getting wrongfully banned. And that's wrong. That should be very rare, but it's happening more than it honestly should. So I do think YouTube should invest more in humans. In moderating the moderation that the AI does before a channel is officially banned, unless you have really good reason to suspect. But I do think this is going to be getting better and better, and it is good for commentative YouTubers like this to call out when things like this are happening. So now a lot of people have kind of a dark view of what's coming from this with like AI commoditizing stuff. Like a lot of people are thinking, okay, so if AI can allow anybody on earth to generate the best content that they could ever imagine, and they can do it faster than they've ever done before, isn't YouTube just going to get full of incredibly great quality videos that just provides way too much competition and makes it so that's almost impossible for me to grow on YouTube? And I have a few predictions regarding this, and I'll tell you what I'm personally— I'm going to be doing as a response to all of this, because I've invested millions of dollars into my YouTube channels over the years and they've made me tens of millions of dollars. So this is incredibly important to me, and I'm really trying to stay at the forefront of this, and I'll tell you what I'm doing so hopefully you can benefit from it as well. So while a lot of types of content are going to become commoditized, you have to realize that most people are not going to be using the tools. There have been tools that have allowed people to generate amazing videos for a long, long time, and they've become cheaper and cheaper to the point that we have now full video editors with timeline-based editing on our phones, and that's incredible. But do most people use those tools the right way? Do most people, even though they have access to the internet, they have access to the best video editing software that's free, they have access to everything else, do most people use them? And the answer is no. Now you might be saying, okay, Matt, but what about if someone can literally just type in on Google Gemini and they can just say, make me a full video about this, and it just produces a video and they can upload it to YouTube? Isn't that going to produce too much competition? And I do think it's going to be more. I think the bar is going to go up, but I don't think it's going to go up as much as people think it's going to. Yes, there's going to be a lot more content, and the only way to stay competitive in this landscape is going to be using AI yourself. So if you're running a channel, don't do everything yourself. Don't be sitting there writing every script word for word. Don't be running a faceless channel and doing every voiceover yourself. Sit down on ElevenLabs and clone your voice once. That's a 2-hour investment, and then you can use that infinite times in the future, and it'll save you so much time. You'll be able to start more channels and stay competitive in this landscape. So yes, the landscape is going to become more competitive, but it's up to you now to use AI yourself as the tool that it's meant to be. Now, the sentiment from YouTube has been AI is a tool, so it's okay to use AI as a tool, but don't use it to produce spammy stuff that's going to get banned on YouTube. And you might be saying, Matt, what is scammy stuff? Well, here's one. For example, YouTube shuts down channels using AI to create fake movie trailers watched by millions. So this is a channel producing things and movie trailers that are going to be competing with the actual movies that are coming out. And there's all kinds of copyright infringements and everything else that major studios are going to have an issue with. So obviously they're going to take legal action against YouTube and YouTube in a self-preservation act. Is going to ban channels like this. So you want to stay away from doing channels that have real people in them and portraying them doing things that they didn't do. Now, the one exception to this might be if you're making a comedy-based video or a comedy-based thing based off of this, but otherwise you're going to have so many different copyright concerns and everything else. I don't even recommend doing that. And as you can see, it said that Disney sent a cease and desist letter to Google last week claiming its AI training models and services infringe on its copyright on a massive scale. There's going to be all kinds of stuff like this happening going through 2026. So it's really important that you don't run channels like this. Now you might be saying, okay, Matt, but what types of channels should I run and how do I know which channels to avoid? I actually recently did a video on my channel right here about niches that are now banned on YouTube. So I highly recommend you go through, watch this video. It's going to give you a ton of valuable information so you know exactly what to do and what not to do. And now another thing that AI doesn't do is it doesn't produce trust, so to speak. Having trust in your videos is going to be a huge theme going into 2026. Now you might be saying, okay, Matt, having trust, that sounds great on the surface. However, how do I ensure that if I'm running a faceless channel specifically? It's easy to say if you're running a personal channel, but let's say I'm running a faceless one and most of my channels are faceless. And I'll tell you what I'm doing in a second when I talk about what to do before February. But just know that AI does not produce trust. And now the next big change that's coming to YouTube in 2026 is that the extremes are becoming more and more prevalent. People are flocking to longer videos and shorter videos. Our attention spans are paradoxically becoming shorter and longer. People are spending hours a day scrolling through mindless shorts of just complete AI slop. But you might see these channels and videos getting like hundreds of millions of views and you might be like, wow, I got to do a channel like that. That's not where the money is going into 2026. While all of that is happening, long-form content is also blowing up on YouTube. You're seeing videos now that are hours long going mega viral on the platform. And why is that? Well, it gets a lot of watch time and it keeps people on YouTube, number one. But number two, TV viewing is exploding. YouTube has to compete with platforms like Netflix and other long-form streaming platforms. And the way they're doing that is by prioritizing TV viewing. So super long videos are doing incredibly well right now on YouTube, and that's going to continue going throughout 2026. And now let me tell you about how to benefit from all of these changes for your own benefit. So you're not one of those channels that gets banned and you can look back at the end of 2026 saying, wow, that was my best year ever on the platform. And I want that for you. I really genuinely want that. So I want to show you exactly what to do through 2026 and what to do right now before February in the next month to set your channel up for the biggest success it's ever had. And I know that sounds crazy. It might sound hard given all these changes, but it's really not. Let me explain. The first thing you need to do is to post an ultra long video on your channel. This is going to help TV viewing as we discussed, but also it's going to do something else, which is going to explode your channel like crazy. Well, you'll notice in the description of all of my YouTube videos and at the end of all of my YouTube videos, I link to this video right here in the description. Now let's click this link and check this video out. This is an hour-long video on my channel, and this is a very strategic move, what I'm doing here. Essentially what I'm doing is I treat that video as my pillar video. My whole channel is about how to make money on YouTube and how to make YouTube into a business. So I made a pillar video condensing everything I knew into a completely free course, essentially. That's an hour long, and I made an incredibly amazing free guide that people can just go to get a ton of value from. And then I drive all of the traffic to that video via end screens and also via links in the descriptions of every single new video that I upload. And this is very strategic because it, number one, prioritizes TV viewing, and number two, it links all of your videos together in the algorithm. So when one video blows up, YouTube sees the stream of people who come to that video a lot of them get funneled down into watching your ultra-long video. And when people watch the ultra-long video, that racks you up a ton of session time, which is how long people spend on YouTube after watching your content. Everybody prioritizes watch time. They prioritize views. Session time really matters a lot more. And this is a statistic YouTube doesn't give us. However, we can get insane amounts of session time by doing this strategy. And now you might be saying, okay, Matt, but what if my channel is about entertainment subjects? How can I benefit from this strategy? Let's say you're doing a scary story channel. You would do a compilation of all of your best scary stories into an ultra long video that you might title something like Top 100 Scariest Stories, and then you would drive all of your traffic to that video to do the same strategy. So this works for entertainment or educational channels. The next thing I highly recommend doing if you're running a faceless YouTube channel is to create an avatar for that channel. Now you can do this using tools like Google Gemini and using Nanobanana Pro within that. I know it's a funny name, but it is the absolute best image generator in my opinion to generate an avatar similar to what this channel is doing right here. Zinni Studio. She's a faceless channel. She does tutorials, but she has an avatar as the face of the channel. So as content becomes more and more commoditized, having something that people have a connection with, even if it's an AI character, It sounds crazy. You might be saying, how does someone have a connection with an AI character? Well, she's making $15,000 per month from a community that she sells from that channel. And then it's probably triple that if you're also including your ad revenue and also affiliate marketing on top of that. So she's basically got a huge business using an AI avatar and people definitely trust it if they're gonna be willing to join a paid community. And then I would recommend animating it using InfiniteTalk. It's the best for the price for getting lip synced talking along with whatever is being talked about in the video. But if that's cost prohibitive for for you, then I just recommend having the character pop up. It doesn't even need to necessarily be talking, but even just having a character pop up in the corner occasionally throughout your videos is a really good idea. I've seen multiple finance channels doing this as well where they just have this really easily drawn AI character and it does incredibly well. The next thing you need to do before February is to stop producing slop. AI slop, meaning videos that don't provide any value. Now you might be saying, okay, Matt, but why does YouTube, for example, put Google Veo into YouTube Shorts. I can just generate them all day and eventually one will blow up, right? And that's how I'm going to become super rich off of YouTube, right? That's not the way it's going to happen because you barely make any money from Shorts, first and foremost. And second of all, they're not really providing that much value aside from a little bit of entertainment and a little bit of a dopamine spike when people scroll past a video like that. That's not how to make millions off of YouTube. You need to produce valuable videos that actually give a lot of value. And you're probably saying, okay, value, everyone talks about value, but how do you quantify value? And it's actually pretty simple, especially in the age of AI that we're in right now. And the way to do it is to take the top videos in your niche that you're recreating. So let's say you're making a video about the top 10 fastest cars. You would find all of the top videos on that subject, and then you would take the best aspects from those videos and then write it into original script. That way you're not just getting information from one video, so it's not a direct copy, and then you write it in an original way. Now you could go ahead, download the transcripts from those videos, type it in your own words and everything. I also built an AI called TubeMagic that does this automatically for you. And essentially you just go to context right here, you drop in a context link, click that, and then you give your thing a title and it'll write it according to all of these best practices that's trained on all of the most viral scripts. Plus you can choose a word count, which you can't do if you're using a foundational AI model, and this will write god-tier scripts for your channel. And as we mentioned, focus on long-form videos if you wanna make money. That's where it's at. So for the rest of January, only focus on long-form videos if you wanna make YouTube into a business. And if you really wanna make YouTube into a business, one thing that I really want you to consider doing before February is to sell something from your channel. Now, not every channel's gonna be able to do this. If you're in an entertainment-focused channel, there might not be something perfect to sell. However, if you're in an educational niche, it is imperative that you sell something from your channel. It doesn't even have to be your own thing either. This can be an affiliate product, and an amazing way to find affiliate products is to go to something like Google Gemini and ask it, "Find me the absolute best affiliate products for a channel that's about this subject." It'll give you a huge list. You can also use the deep research feature to find even more. So do that right away before February, but long-term, think about selling something that you actually own from your channel as well. And this is so important, having your own business and having your own basically corner of the internet that you own. You don't necessarily own your YouTube channel. You don't own any social platform channel or anything else. Having something that you own is so important that my team and I are building a platform called Moon. Now, Moon is essentially going to be a platform where people can have their own moons, which are essentially their own corner of the internet where they can have a community, their courses, sell digital products, sell AI versions of themselves, sell software and coaching programs all directly from Moon. So having something that you own is incredibly important. This is going to be launched in the next few months. I don't want to talk about it too much before it's actually out, but this is something I'm super passionate about and something that, that my team and I are working really hard on, on launching in the next few months. We're going to also try to make it completely free. But in the meantime, at the very least, be an affiliate for something from your channel. A lot of changes to YouTube are coming. Stay positive. YouTube is only gonna be getting bigger over the next few years. It's just really important that we understand how to stay on the platform because most people aren't gonna do this. But the fact that you personally are watching this video right now up until this point tells me that you honestly care about this. This is something that you wanna do and you're gonna be just fine. If you follow all the rules and everything, I'll update you if there's any changes or anything else. Keep an eye on my channel if you want and I'll make sure I'm always giving you the best information. Feel free to leave a comment saying yes down below if you affirm that 2026 is going to be your year on YouTube. Now's the time to make it happen with more tools than ever at our disposal. Now is the time. And if you want to take that next step and you want to take that leap of faith with me, feel free to check out this video right here, which is essentially a free course for doing YouTube the right way and more importantly, making a real business out of doing YouTube. This video right here is going to give you everything you need. My name is Matt Parr. Hope you got a ton of value from this and I'll see you in the next one.