How to get your Youtube channel unbanned…
As you can see the Limitless Mindset Youtube channel and my videos are back!
First of all, I want to thank everyone who lobbied Youtube to get my channel unbanned and I want to thank the people at Youtube for doing the right thing and reinstating my channel!
I wanted to make a video explaining what happened about how we got the channel unbanned.
Update: What I described here did work, but Youtube has done away with the three-strikes system. They subsequently terminated my channel with no warning or explanation.
Hopefully, this will help other people in the same predicament that they spend years of their lives working on a Youtube channel, they invest thousands of dollars in audio-visual equipment and they spend an ungodly amount of time cutting and splicing segments in the video editing software and then out of the blue they get three community strikes and their Youtube account is terminated and they can’t even export the videos they uploaded.
It’s kind of like setting up a shop in a neighborhood, you spend years serving customers, making a really great shop, and then one day out of the blue the mafia comes in and burns down your shop, steals all your merchandise and you have to start over from scratch in a new neighborhood where nobody knows about you.
For those who might not know what happened; Youtube targeted Nootropics, mindset, health, and Biohacking related channels for termination. They shut down, I think, about five highly related channels the same week. In a podcast with Steve Cronin and Ryan Michael Ballow of Cortex Labs, we go in-depth analyzing why this might have happened but to be concise my channel suspension likely occurred because Youtube is trying to make itself more friendly to the mainstream advertisers and they have poorly articulated and inconsistently enforced community guidelines.
All of my educational videos were about advocating responsible use of legal supplements or drugs but several of my videos’ thumbnails featured white powder because some of the very healthy, very legal supplements I use are white powders. People who don’t know better just assume that you must be doing something very naughty when there’s white powder involved.
The main thing that got my channel unbanned is persistence.
I kept submitting appeals to Youtube through their appeal form
https://support.google.com/accounts/contact/suspended?p=youtube&hl=en
I think I submitted them four or five times, making cogent arguments for reinstatement.
The Media
The hated mainstream media, I think, actually helped us get our channels back! A New York based journalist for Vice Media (which is more or less mainstream now) did two articles on the #BiohackerBan
If your channel is banned try to find a journalist that covers your industry and reach out to them. They’ll likely be interested in censorship of your industry and will write a story on the matter.
Then include links to those stories in your appeals to Youtube, if the decision-makers at Youtube see that the termination of your channel is causing some scandal they’ll reconsider.
For better or for worse the media is feared, use that to your advantage.
Start a hashtag like #BiohackerBan
Urge your followers and supporters to rally around a hashtag and pester @TeamYoutube to reinstate your channel.
Obviously, if Youtube sees that people care about your channel they’ll be more likely to reinstate it.
YT Contributors on Twitter
@Contributors_YT is a Twitter account with some kind of loose affiliation with Youtube. They are very responsive and knowledgeable about Youtube flagging system and rules.
I believe that dialoguing with them respectfully and explaining the educational mission of my channel helped!
Finally, it’s really important to…
Build your own website and email newsletter
When my Youtube channel with 13,000 subscribers was banned I was honestly not all that bothered because I have a popular website that gets about 20,000 readers monthly and I have several thousand subscribers on my email newsletter. My channel was suspended for about 2 weeks and I didn’t see my website traffic dip by much during my Youtube channel’s suspension because my website gets so much organic traffic.
But a lot of people don’t have their own list and website. They just have a Youtube channel and Youtube can pull the rug out from under you at any time for any reason. Don’t be stupid, don’t put your livelihood in a vulnerable position of being at the mercy of the whims of Youtube flaggers and censors.
If your Youtube channel was just suspended and you didn’t have an email newsletter list or a website there’s no better time than now to set them both up because your most loyal fans and followers are probably noticing right about now that your channel has been terminated and they are going to Google search you.
If you set up a website, a blog, or just a landing page on your own domain name they’ll find you and you can start to rebuild your following. You won’t recapture the whole audience that you once had on Youtube but those who search you out are likely your superfans, they are the people that really matter.
I recommend setting up a website with Hostgator OR Squarespace, they have quite good DIY options for building a website and their services are very affordable starting at I think, like $10/monthly.
Also, I also recommend Aweber which is an excellent and very affordable email newsletter service.
To my subscribers, thanks again for making some noise online about the #BiohackerBan and please engage with me on some of the free speech platforms, I look forward to a continued conversation with you there!
