What is the deal with youtube???
 

Has anyone noticed that Mark's channel has been banned off of youtube?

What's going on? Does anyone have any info on this?

If anyone on here didn't notice, it would be kind of weird as there is a big notice on top saying it. ;)

I'll try to keep it short.. or rather.. as short as possible:

First, Google Adsense banned us because we were attacked by a click-bomber. We had been attacked before and we know it's our task as publishers to report any invalid activity, so we did. But apparently since they now allow absolutely everyone to make money with their videos, they didn't care about us reporting it this time. So from then on our channels were seen as a threat to advertisers, only because of one idiot, and Google knows it wasn't us so they would be the only party to fix it. This also means that the YouTube partnership we have worked on for a long time (and got when partnerships were still something special and very uncommon here in the Netherlands) was taken away.

Three months later, YouTube suddenly suspended us, in a time of inactivity which made it even more of a surprise. They still haven't been able to give any clear reason for it. After asking about it, they said we violated the term of service section 4H regarding the use of robots, spiders and/or offline readers, never stating exactly what we did to get suspended, just what general rule we apparently broke. I can only think of one instance in which we actually did use these, which was when making a public search engine for our upcoming video platform, and the YouTube terms literally state that it is allowed to use such in that instance. However, I suppose the click-bomber also used a bot, but I doubt YouTube would blame us for that like Adsense did. It now seems as if they might because during our inactivity we didn't do anything on or with the site, let alone breaking the rules.

So I ended up writing them a signed letter instead of an e-mail as these only led to the same automated message of what rule we apparently broke, never clarifying anything. In the letter, I told them why we were suspended incorrectly. I also included the fact that I have helped them behind the scenes quite often and with quite some success. Guess what I got as reply to it? The exact same semi-automated message saying we violated section 4H of the terms of service, not replying to anything I actually wrote in my letter which still was copied and added as an attachment to the e-mail.

So it seems like we have to start all over, which is what we will be doing, mainly because of the insane lack of a Google support system. Way to be rewarded for years of hard work.

At least all of the videos (at least 99.9% of them) are safe and ready to be reposted. It will take some time though so we might as well finish our video platform first, before doing that.

Sorry Mark that you have to deal with all that BS. I'm frustrated just reading it and seeing there is no opportunity given to a "user" (and one whom helped the organization) to voice clarity of the situation. However, I'm not surprised that this is the action they would take. :crossed:

Sorry to hear about that, Mark.
It really seems hypocritical to have a strict system in one direction (punishing, and banning certain actions, probably based on just some recognition software, not even a real person making the decisions) but not in the other (acknowledging and correcting mistakes).
I hope you the best of luck and success with this new enterprise.

Good luck in the near future and look forward to whatever brilliant ideas that you and your team have come up with (whether willing to share or not!).