Or maybe I could title this I woke up to find my five-year-old and twenty thousand sub youtube channel deleted?
I’m not sure where to really begin as I write this. Honestly, I’m still shaking from the news, and to top it off I’ve never been a decent writer. Armed with Grammarly I’ll do my best to at least leave out too many spelling mistakes.
My name is abrownbag… Well okay, my name is Christian Bachik but for the last five years or so I’ve donned my head with some paper and assumed the character of abrownbag on both twitch and youtube. Bag is a pretty over-enthusiastic, extremely loud, and dangerously cringy extension of my personality. As a character streamer, I’ve had moderate success playing mobile games. I’ve been able to travel to places like London to cast mobile games such as Clash Royale for Supercell or go to Korea to play Arena of Valor professionally for Team Liquid. All of that craziness is a tale for another time though.
To understand what happened I think we need to flashback and then jump forward so bear with me. Before becoming a streamer I worked as a software developer. It started with a Bootcamp and then some time spent doing freelance for an agency in colorado. Before I knew it I was working full-time and an amazingly fun startup centered around helping students study abroad. You can still find my very old and un-updated linked in at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gagebachik
Yep not changed in seven years… yikes. What I’m trying to get at is that I come from a tech background. I just kind of fell into and in love with content creation. While content creation doesn’t even make near half the money I made programming it was enough to get by and I always found ways to incorporate it into my content. From automated chatbots to custom-triggered live events on stream coding has always stayed a part of my process. Which is where the trouble comes in.
Flash forward to the beginning of this year and my agency AMG told me about this amazing new thing on YouTube called: Shorts. If you’re unfamiliar shorts are sub sixty second videos shot in horizontal format. Basically, they’re TikToks on YouTube and YouTube was pushing them HARD. With some quick tests, I figured out that a channel with no subs was getting more short video views than my main channel by over ten-fold.
This is exactly where my tech mind jumped in. I obviously had the first thought any developer has. Can I automate it? I mean countless clips were just freely available on twitch. Heck, they were even sorted by most viewed. I’d seen many successful top clip channels on youtube. All I had to do was edit them into short-form content and bam free real-estate right? Armed with google colab, which is way too powerful to be free by the way, I was well on my way to my demise.
Honestly, it was easier than I even expected. In the beginning, I had dreams of grandeur. I was doing lots of machine learning in my free time and so I was imagining fancy ml algos that automagically found the webcam and edited the video the clips into amazing short-form content. Of course after about an hour I just settled on the easiest shit that worked. Use a headless browser to rip the clips from twitch, some FFmpeg magic to format them, and then another headless instance to upload to YouTube (on a side note did you know YouTube’s own upload API won't let you PUBLISH videos unless you have a fully-fledged approved app and even then you can’t even choose the game title when uploading). I learned so many cool tricks about web automation, authentication, and video editing here but again a story for another time.
All you really need to know is that at the end of the day I had a working system. It would take the top x number of twitch clips for any given game in the last 24hrs and edit them into shorts. It would then go and upload them to YouTube and TikTok. Once I had it set up I made twenty different short channels. It worked even better than I expected. Short-form content was pushed so hard that some of the channels even passed my main channel in subs. The Minecraft Shorts channels specifically hit 30k subs and Call Of Duty Shorts hit 40k follows on TikTok! It was honestly really cool to see it work out so well but nothing good lasts forever.
I made the whole thing mainly just to see if I could and after a few months when everyone on YouTube caught up to the shorts hype the channels stopped growing. With no way for me to really monetize them, I stopped running the scripts (which would be around the beginning of this month). This is why I was in shock when I received this email today
But it wasn’t just my main account that was terminated it was all twenty accounts. I had never had any copyright strikes before so I was extremely confused at first. The only thing I could think happened is that one account received all three strikes overnight. I don’t have any emails linked to the accounts as they were just made in the youtube account switcher section. Somehow I still get notifications on the accounts to my main abrownbag email (gabnworba@gmail.com which is just abrownbag backwards for the heavily confused). I was able to narrow it down to the League Of Legends Shorts channel as it’s the only account that didn’t get the above email.
Here’s the thing though… That account reviewed NO emails. In fact I never received ANY emails about copyright strikes. Just bam poof all your accounts are terminated and here’s the kicker. When I try and fill out the form in the email this is the response I get
Google is telling me that my account is DELETED and cannot be recovered even though I filled out the form the same day I was notified about the strikes.
So here I am. Sitting here writing this. I have no way to contact YouTube or Google about whats happened. I don’t even have a way to appeal the strikes. I don’t even know for sure if it was the league channel that caused it.
I honestly don’t mind if I lost all twenty shorts accounts if I could recover my main account. I’m 27 and without my main YouTube account, I won't be able to make enough to do content creation full time anymore. Considering my linked-in hasn’t been updated in 7 years for dev work my prospects aren’t looking to promising there either.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if there’s even anything I can do.
Honestly, I don’t know why I even wrote all this down.
Maybe just to cope with what’s happened.
At the very least I hope you all are having a better Monday than me.
Peace.