God knows what’s happening to YouTube. Channels are getting taken down or demonetized, and YouTube is doing nothing about it. If you own a YouTube channel and are making good money out of it, you are standing on a thread that can break any moment. Because anyone can claim a copyright strike on any channel and get it in trouble.
And the worst part is that there’s no human to verify the legitimacy of the claim; everything is decided by an automated bot. If a channel gets three strikes, it is taken down and the money stops flowing in. It has been happening to a lot of YouTubers lately, and the latest victims to this stupid system is a channel named SRbrosentertainment run by Shukran and Roshan. Their channel had 100,000 subscribers with lots of great videos, until they got taken down after they refused to cough up a $1000 as a bribe.
SRbrosentertainment has been online for four years, so just imagine the amount of time and effort the two YouTubers must have put in creating a fan base for themselves. Just a few weeks back, another channel named ZM Productions filed two copyright claims on an iPhone giveaway video that was posted by SRbrosentertainment. Even though the video in question did not have any stolen content, two strikes were applied.
Now comes the part where the two YouTubers got helpless. ZM Productions emailed SRbros asking for $1000, which if not paid, would result in the third and the last strike. Of course, Roshan and Shukran didn’t pay the money, and you can imagine what happened next. Their main channel, SRbrosentertainment, got taken down by YouTube. ZM Productions claimed that they weren’t the ones who applied the strike or sent the mail asking for the bribe.
It’s a tough time for Shukran and Roshan, who desperately tried to reach out to YouTube authorities in order to get their channel reinstated. But YouTube, as expected, has not responded, except those automated responses that say the problem will get resolved in 10-14 business days. Scarce, the famous news and gossip channel, reported the story on his channel on Saturday night, and the video made it to the top of the Reddit front page.
And it’s really not YouTube’s fault. There are millions of videos on the website, so checking every copyright claim individually is almost impossible. This automated bot system does not help at all, and it’s really easy for anyone to take down a channel they have grudge upon. All the years of hard work into becoming a YouTube gone in a second.
Let’s just hope Shukran and Roshan are able to resolve this issue successfully. YouTube, if you are listening, please, find a way out of this.