Do anything more these days on YouTube than video your cat's amusing antics, video your screen about how to use something like “How to Install WordPress”, or provide a “talking head” video of yourself on-screen and you will be banned – it is only a matter of time.

Dozens of videos which I have made with video creation such as Instant Video Wizard (IVW), Lumen5, and Content Samurai (now rebranded as Vidnami) have been banned without warning at all, and appealing against the bans has not made the slightest difference. None have been reinstated.

Articles both self-written and by others which were recorded as informational videos have been deleted for numerous channels on a wide variety of subjects, but always created in compliance with YT ToS and general legal international copyright requirements.

Whole channels of IVW videos made using PLR content straight from the highly reputable software “ArticleBuilder” have been banned and every single video removed! (Is YT really saying that Jon, Morin and Josh of the 100% White Hat “Prosperative” stable of online apps really provide unethical content – or that images supplied from their video creator Instant Video Wizard (IVW) provided content, are not YouTube ToS compliant and worthy of banning?) Similar has to be said about the other video creation platfoms.

The last straw was this week when 2 videos both 7+ years old and on YouTube all that time, have been just recently banned and the channel deleted from YouTube by YouTube.

I am an engineering consultant semi-retired and lately turned marketer. I am a civil engineer and fully qualified. In the past, I have designed and supervised the construction of more than a dozen “Methane Stripping Plants” in the UK. They are built for councils and landfill site owners and their purpose is in the industry terminology to “strip” (remove) methane from dirty water. Hence the waste management industry has always called them simply “Stripping Plants” – after all “stripping” is a technical term with a meaning totally unrelated to any “adult content”.

Needless to say, those banned videos didn't display any flesh at all, just images of previously constructed “stripping” plants. Nothing but pipes and pumps and tanks and bubbling water, to inform viewers what a stripping plant is. They are completely informational and contain no promotion, nor anything to do with affiliate links, in them either.

I am writing this simply to warn my readers here:

If you upload videos to YouTube nowadays, you risk wasting an enormous amount of time and energy when they are removed, and you won't be told sensibly in any propper and reasonable way, why they were removed either.

Any videos I upload now to YouTube I do very quickly and I don't bother optimising them for traffic on YouTube, because I assume that they will be banned sooner or later. Instead, I pay for a video service provider and upload to their dedicated servers. A service which I know isn't going to summarily ban my videos without warning or reason given.

I now use a video broadcasting service which I pay for, for all my embeds of video versions of the articles on my websites. I won't ever put my website user's experience at risk again by embedding YT videos on any of my pages – just to have them banned and my pages displaying that hideous image of a removed video.

My videos will never again get massive viewing numbers, but there it is. YouTube has no respect for its content providers unless and until you become a partner (probably not even then…).

I was on the verge of qualifying this time last year for YT partner status. That was before they embarked on a massive take-down of my 400 plus videos, without any warning, in total representing many hundreds of hours of work.

So, what I say is:

Don't expect YouTube to give a fig about how they treat you as a video creator on their platform! Be warned!

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