this screams "youtube doesn't want to deal with your bad data" when it comes to sorting it out of the actual users. IE they don't want to deal with bots and now are putting the blame onto the creator who knows nothing on how to fix or remedy this.
RUclips's stance on this just doesn't make any sense; if they can detect the invalid traffic then why don't they just invalidate it from the final count? Also what about all the people that use RUclips premium? One of the major reasons I'm a premium member is because it helps pay creators more. How could premium users be invalid traffic? It also might be possible that the commenting bots are considered invalid traffic, such as the one that commented above me. This entire situation seems sketchy to me.
@@Grgmit I was thinking it was likely due to bot comment spam too, it's been terrible lately. And YT doesn't remove them from the final count because the still want the numbers to appeal to advertisers while managing to punish creators for something they can't control. They want their cake and to eat it too
@@TheFrenziedFlameYT good god, if that's their way of mitigating bot comment spam by fucking the content creators, makes sense of how they've been handling problems on RUclips lately, by choosing the stupidest, nonsensical option.
I’ve been creating RUclips content since 2008, and this channel since 2010. This situation happened to me a few month back in December! It was my biggest month ever with $3k+ in revenue. I lost about 50% because of invalid traffic. What frustrated me the most was not losing the money, that sucked, but RUclips support blamed me for the invalid traffic! They flat out said I caused the invalid traffic and refused to give any evidence even when asked multiple times. I doubt you’ll see this, but thank you for covering this!!!
I hope that your channel would be fixed soon. The problem is that it's either the creator should steer away from the things that invite "invalid traffic" or hope that the viewer doesn't do things such as save a video for a playlist or "watch later" as it is considered invalid traffic as no one would watch a video if they are saved for later or in a playlist. There are quite a few tutorials for invalid traffic, this one is for my local language but there's English subtitles: ruclips.net/video/qbtG2phiFM8/видео.html
Yeah. Even for small youtubers and including me. I lost my channel terminated last year. Now yesterday my second oldest channel has copyright terminated. Being YT hoping to be enough is enough.
@@Willerhide I don't get it, I see this kind of comment all the time So true "insert name" What are you trying to do, are you trying to be sarcastic or some shit
I experienced this back in June... Ever since, ad revenue on my channel has been the lowest in 11 years. The banner message "Ads have been limited on one or more of your videos due to invalid traffic" was present for a couple days, but went away. Ad revenue remained down and estimated monetized playbacks also remained down. I have tried disabling embedding. No result. A couple days ago, I disabled monetization on every single one of my videos (and privated my shorts), generating $0.00 for July 16th. Once earnings data for July 16th showed up in Analytics, guess what else showed up... the IVT message, AGAIN! So basically, it seems that *turning off monetization on all of your videos* can trigger RUclips's ad limiting protections. Definitely seems like a glitch to me!
or RUclips just doesnt want to pay people the money so they tell them something suspicious happened, refuse to elaborate and then refuse to give them the money
Wow, so RUclips is now blaming creators for the BOT PROBLEM? That's RUclipss responsibility not theirs. That's why RUclips needs to crack down on all the spam and bot comments too. Because I think it's related to this problem. This whole thing is stupid
@@AmaraQuest if you see a bot, don't reply to it, just report it. replying makes it seem more real and RUclips is less likely to do anything about it (that is if they would do anything in the first place because we all know they usually don't)
@@randomperson8375 thank you. I wasn’t sure it’s a bot but I did report it. Maybe I’ll keep my comment here just so other people can be informed. But I won’t reply to the others. Btw I like your username lol
There was a definite shift in the way RUclips used to be a website that paid people to create content, to a business that expected a thank you for allowing you to upload
Honestly people need to just union up and sue youtube for withholding on an agreed contracted pay. And just have a union fee to pay a lawyer to keep them in check same with amazon also funny enough recently found out Walmart employees (specifically in the fresh departments) tried to unionize, so they literally just got rid of the departments for a while since they legally cant fire them for unionizing but if there is “no job” then they were layed off indefinitely.
I went through this in 2015. They disabled my entire AdSense for “Invalid Click Activity” during the hype of Vidcon and a bunch of collabs. Lost all my ad revenue and 3-4 weeks later AFTER having an actual HUMAN look into it for me directly at AdSense - they’ve determined it was an “algorithmic change in their system that led to the disabling of MY AdSense” the president of AdSense at the time emailed me himself apologizing and reinstated me. Channel was honestly never the same after that though… they never would’ve looked into had I not known a much larger creator who had a POC at AdSense. Unrelated BUT fast forward a few years later I ended up getting my AdSense compromised somehow and they were no help. Went a whole year and a half trying to get help and couldn’t get any and it forced me to stop uploading bc let’s be honest, couldn’t do it for free nearly as much. It killed my channel. Not pointing fingers but it’s a shame how a situation like this can derail an entire career on this platform. Since then I was able to create a new AdSense but audience done up and left and understandably so. This was all before the boom of streaming so it was tough to migrate an audience to another platform. Hard not to live with the “what ifs” my channel was growing rapidly at the time and it seemed to glitched everything. Hope Hutch gets it fixed asap and he can continue his dreams.
i have similar story in the beginning of 2016... same thing happened to me. i literally just commented my story and then read urs....it made me feel like sh*t tbh... it made me wonder how many others like us are out there? i lost around 21k subs.. nothing major but to me, i was just a dude playing clash of clans.. that was huge, my channel drove a deep passion and want to continue being the best at the game... so i was bummed when it was all taken away. i literally quit videography as a whole since. my twitter still has all the links from Clash of clans and my CWL MVP season but the game isnt the same to me anymore nor is creating YT videos.. truly hope the best for ya man.
I assume they don't reimburse you for the time that you were losing out on this income, so is there any legal recourse considering your loss was due to a failure on their end?
Yeah, the problem is that it's either the creator should steer away from the things that invite "invalid traffic" or hope that the viewer doesn't do things such as save a video for a playlist or "watch later" as it is considered invalid traffic as no one would watch a video if they are saved for later or in a playlist. There are quite a few tutorials for invalid traffic, this one is for my local language but there's English subtitles: ruclips.net/video/qbtG2phiFM8/видео.html
It's literally impossible for a content creator to control how users are getting to their channels. This is just RUclips trying to get out of paying creators... again.
You are correct, but Adsense is used for other platforms as well. The FAQ page is just a general FAQ page for Adsense, but it makes no sense for RUclips ads
@@lordnatu no one's contesting that. If youtube can tell which traffic is bad and which traffic is good, why don't they just block the bad traffic instead of fucking over the creator? If they have proof the creator did something bad, why don't they show it?
Check your RPM though - is your RPM affected? There are 1000's of channels affected by this bug right now - RPM goes down to about $2 - driven by the fact that they stop showing targeted Skippable ads on the channels
@@CaffeinatedBlogger yeah basically mine atm are video-based. So few videos get he error and tank the RPM. Then it recovers. But its happened twice and now my fear is if it keeps happening RUclips will demonetize it
I think this problem is even greater than RUclips and spans up the ladder to Google itself. I started getting into game development as a hobby and uploaded my game to the app store/google play store for my friends and family to play. I signed up for google ads for the fun of it to try it out and I made literally just pennies off of the couple hundred downloads my game got. somehow though, I got my entire google ads account terminated with no chance of getting it back for the same “invalid traffic” garb. my game had like 200 downloads so I don’t see how I could possibly be a threat, yet somehow I got hunted down and banned without warning
Thank you for making this. This has DESTROYED my channel. Making 80% less ALL of a sudden. RUclips support is absolutely terrible. NO one is taking accountability. RUclips is failing us creators. They don't give a ____
Do you really think VPNs is the only way RUclips keeps track of who you are? You're fingerprinted in so many ways from your hardware to a ton of multifarious cookies, to RUclips having your account and likely also being able to tell you're routing through a VPN. They're not at all confused about who is watching what.
This^ Competition is the only way to stop these companies from screwing people over by hanging the threat of leaving them and going to another site with our money above their heads for them to shape up and stop screwing everyone over like this
I just got hit with a 30 day suspension for “invalid traffic”. No idea why. I have been doing RUclips nearly 11 years. Why would I risk my hard work and a decade of my life for any reason? The only thing I’ve been told by support is “fix it”. Fix WHAT? I can’t fix something I never did. Very frustrating and I hope RUclips takes a look at this. Thanks Lud for hopefully bringing this to their attention.
At which point will people weaponize bots against channels where someone bot floods someone's channels just to trigger invalid traffic or is that what we're dealing with rn
I'm glad this story is gaining some traction. Hutch posted two videos on this topic months ago and has lost around a years worth of revenue. I hope all the creators find representation.
I was struck with this same "issue" just two weeks ago, THE DAY right after my Adsense was all sorted out and verified. Now, I am a relatively small channel compared to most, but what really felt like a kick in the balls and hurt me the most was that the email that notified mde of this was basically sent to me THE DAY BEFORE my birthday this year (June 19th). I remember just feeling so devastated and hopeless.
I used to work for a company that had a mantra that unless a new feature, update or rework of an old feature could earn them at least $20m it wasn't worth the time and costs. RUclips is significantly larger and I could imagine that they look at this problem as so miniscule compared to their other 'problems' or projects that they won't bother looking into it, but rather parry away or ignore the attention it is getting until people stop complaining, saving the time and costs associated with fixing the problem. Very sad situation though and I feel for all the small creators especially who rely on AdSense for survival.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the intended features of this policy. As cable slowly dies, mainstream media, Hollywood, television and streaming networks are all bleeding viewers to independent content creators.
I assume that either it isnt weaponized or big youtubers arent affected by it, because those are more likely to have haters or idk, maybe the botting needs to be bigger to count as invalid traffic
This is exactly what happened to my channel about 5 weeks ago. Went from making over $1k/month to just $50 this past month. No idea why it's happening or how to fix it. I have never done anything shady like buying clicks or views, I barely even share my videos anywhere.
I actually had this issue with my channel from May 2022 - September 2022. It all started when my channel started getting more views from browse. I was averaging about 5k per video to then being like 70-120k views per video. Over June, about 90% of my videos got demontized because of invalid traffic, but only the short videos that were about 1-2mins length were effected, and also only the videos that got about 70k views or more, I never had a video effected that had less than 70k views, so my sollution to try and fix this was to just private my videos after 65k ish views and hope it wouldn't get demotized, then public them again later. It was such a stressful and annoying time as there was nothing I could do to fix the proiblem, I changed NOTHING, and 6 months later the problem was fixed, despite me making no changes and everything being the same. My theory was that somehow making videos while in a different location had caused this, but I'm not sure.
As a Software Engineer, there is likely an algorithm that is checking for this. My guess would be that this algorithm (whether or not AI) has a bug in it where it’s wayyy too sensitive. Likely it’s seeing if the clicks are greater than a specific amount. But sense they aren’t giving any explanations I am also guessing that it’s a known problem, that is on someone’s backlog or that it’s AI that they don’t know how to make it less sensitive or a combination of both. Anyways it’s their problem and they should be be handling this better on the customer service side.
In a way, somehow i felt that we too depended on AI (or other automatic system). As long the output is something they expected on what they put into as input, they will rely on it without understanding what happened inside the "black box". I probably wrong, but the overall vibe of social media give me this feeling
Another problem is that the creator needs to hope that the viewer doesn't do things such as save a video for a playlist or "watch later" as it is considered invalid traffic as no one would watch a video if they are saved for later or in a playlist. There are quite a few tutorials for invalid traffic, this one is for my local language but there's English subtitles: ruclips.net/video/qbtG2phiFM8/видео.html
If it was overly sensitive, I'd asusme big ass channels like LTT, MKBHD, PewDiePie, etc would have a much worse problem of "invalid traffic" but they get a pass from youtube cause they're too big.
Could this possibly be due to the use of a VPN? I know it sounds too simplistic but I thought I'd ask a software engineer. I heard some people got their Etsy stores shut down out of nowhere after many years just because they started using a VPN to log into their accounts. Does a VPN create the impression of invalid traffic? I use a VPN and sometimes Twitter tells me they have detected unusual traffic, Google does the same, I can't log into Facebook when I use it, and I was trying to create an account on Etsy but couldn't even log into the website with the VPN on. Then I saw a thread on VPN and Etsy while investigating online
@@eleonoremarymadone9859 You got a point, but for me I don't use VPN but still get the unusual traffic but only sometimes in google search, like I'm being flagged as a bot. It might be a really bad internet connection etc. on my end.
The timing of this whole situation feels so odd to me. At a time where we’re seeing massive tech layoffs we’re not seeing youtube starting to tighten their wallet to paying people money they deserve while saying, “its your fault figure it out”
Now that you say it, I do think like you too, but there is a problem, how does youtube choose who to demonetize, according to the video all of the people seem to be small content creator, but there are some creator with big paycheck like 25k ones, how does youtube know who to fuck up so that they don't get in trouble in the future?
@@anhkhoa2172 they don’t, they just using math and a graph to figure it out. My assumption would be they won’t target the lower 20% since it will cause a stink with how many they would need to do it to to make a profit and they don’t know who could make it big and becomes a cash cow, i assume they would leave the top 30% to 40% alone or even give special exceptions to their “standards” depending that leaves about 40% from there they determine “how old is the account, and does it see foreseeable growth? Are people watching older videos? If so just demonetized them now and profit of their old videos” or something along those lines this is all an assumption though i would probably make more strict check marks and gaging for it if it were “me” with a bunch of checks and balances to make it extra scummy and very profitable
@@shawnhiggins1005 I see, I think they are doing some trick using graph and what not to determine who will be success and who will not in their early career in YT. If that's true that kinda f up, imagine you are a content creator on YT and YT refuse to pay you because they predict you to be unsuccessful in the future, so it's not worth the YT money to invest into them in the long run.
Hey Lud, I’m a creator who is also going through the exact same thing as Hutch and I’ve been without my monetization for a year now because of this kind of targeting. It’s extremely demotivating to be in this situation so thank you for making this video. Im hoping something good can come of it for people like us who have been affected.
I would be devastated to experience something like this. I work with a few folks that are pushing hard for monetization and I'd be beside myself if it all disappeared with absolutely no path towards resolution. It means a great deal when someone in Ludwig's position not only takes a stand, but does so at the risk of catching heat for it on the back end. Kuddos and appreciation.
Definitely a little disheartening... Thank you, Ludwig, for putting this together and using your platform to bring more attention to this. Hopefully it can get it resolved
This reminds me of an issue I had with Amazon. I self-publish, and have my books exclusive to Amazon for people who use their subscription service. I did an ad once that got a lot of those subscription reads, then 3 months later they said it was bots and that if it keeps happening then they would ban my books. I did everything I could to stop it, removed the ad, etc, but it kept happening for some reason and I had to take myself off the subscription program. I think it happened to enough people though, and enough authors removed themselves from the subscription service, that they eventually changed the wording in their policy that they'll just remove the bot reads and the revenue from it, but won't affect your account. It'd be impossible to do the same here, especially for bigger creators who have employees that rely on the revenue, but it would sure get their attention if some of the biggest creators turned off monetization for even a brief period.
I wonder if this has something to do with accounts that are 13 yrs old. You’re the third person I’ve seen in this comment section have this issue and all of the acts are like yours, joined 13yrs ago.
It happened to me and my channel- due to “invalid traffic” … I have appealed 3 times every time I am asked to state what I “think” I did wrong. I state the only thing I can think of, that I have significantly more followers on instagram and maybe that flagged the issue. We are told nothing! I can’t help but think it is a machine replying. It’s so disheartening that I have stopped posting on RUclips and I’m instead giving my all to other social media platforms. All I ask if you are going to strip my from my income, as the very least tell me what I can fix! If any other creators want to together launch a group complaint to get more attention I’M IN!
RUclips doesn't understand how this is someone's livelihood, and the effect that can have on a modest-sized creator from an economically challenged area. Thank you for standing up for those without the voice to stand up for themselves.
Their statement about how to prevent invalid traffic sounds like passive aggressive business language for, "stop paying for clicks, we aren't going to directly accuse you because then you can argue it, but we are accusing you."
DUDE SAME! I have had my channel struck down for "invalid traffic" when youtube drives 90%+ of the traffic to my channel?! They just auto-denied me and didn't give me any info on the issue at hand.
I'm a big fan of how M.M. takes time and enunciates his words. I can still understand exactly what he mean when playing the video at 1.5x speed to digest the daily slop faster!
RUclips trying to have Hutch figure out why he has invalid traffic is like leaving your grandpa to figure out why his phone isn’t connecting to the Wi-Fi. He had no way to figure it.
My Adsense is disabled for almost 3 months now. My traffic is 100% organic and I never clicked on any ads. I have appealed several times -- all rejected.
I think over the last few years youtube has been shifting all the moderation to AI without doing the effort to actually properly train their AI bots to not make these simple misstates. That's why there have been so many bs demonetizations, terminations, age restrictions, and strikes over the last few years
Interesting that this started happening to multiple creators in April of 2022. Almost every case I've seen of this started happening at the exact same time. That should be a pretty big sign to RUclips that something they did to their website in April of 2022 caused this.
Yeah, nobody is saying anything about this but I find this to be a very important detail makes this look very much like an error on RUclipss end that is hurting so many creators
Yeah, I'm too lazy right now to sift through the YT subreddit but I remember a number of people posting about this about a year ago. Perhaps I'd post this video there and see what comes out of the woodwork.
It would be! RUclips needs to be regulated in a much stricter way, as well as all social media sites. Completely unnaceptable, and this is literally RUclips stealing money from creators. Wage theft.
They can get away with all kinds of things and blaming into things that cant be proven, so Id say its not too far off to for example, firing/discriminating because of racism or whatever, but putting any excuse because they'd get consequences if they said it out loud
Please do more than just post this video. You have a lot more pull than you probably think, and this needs to be elevated to the highest levels. What RUclips is doing with “invalid traffic” is not just unfair and incomprehensible, it’s evil
How is this still a thing? Dude I remember 10 years ago people in the CoD scene would view bot people's channels or banner ads to get their channel closed. How is this not resolved 10 years later
@@Ryzrr 6 - 12 months is quite being generous. I've been employed by two multinational corporations in my career before - without naming, one was a BPO company handling BCBS and FedEx contracts among other things and the other one was a Japanese electronics company and based off my experience as middle management for both, there were issues you would think they would have resolved quickly or at least not let balloon to what the problem originally was, but internal bureaucracy, managers not wanting to rock the boat, temp fixes that proved ineffective in the long run, and even leadership turnover and attrition, next thing you know, years have passed and the thing that was just an itch in the beginning is now a pus-filled, rotten wound.
Props for shining the light on this. The way Hutch got cornered and shut down should be put to an end in some kind of policy. They're the ones need to be investigating.
Thank you so much for using your platform to give us smaller creators a voice 💛 Our channel was demonetised in 2021 for this exact same issue and most interestingly, it happened straight after our channel blew up via Browse Features i.e. traffic sent to us by RUclips themselves - just as you highlighted at the end of your video. We will keep re-appealing and thank you again for shouting out about this.
Thanks for making this video. I’ve lost 70% of my revenue since November 16, 2022. RUclips claims invalid traffic and it’s my responsibility to fix it.
@@ComandanteYT Yeah and the idea that issues with the platform has to be called out by bigger RUclipsrs first to get some reaction from YT is just whack
Haven't watched the video yet, but a RUclipsr by the name of Hutts went through something like this. RUclips incorrectly demonetized him, but they were still playing ads on his videos and they just took the money.
A relative's channel just got hit by this. Their revenue was cut by 80% overnight and has not come back up in about 3 days so far. I hope you can make a followup video on this at some point because it's definitely still destroying people's livelihoods. RUclips support just copy-and-pastes the "here's what you shouldn't do" link if you ask for help, but they don't seem interested in actually fixing the issue.
Would love to see a video on this whole MagnatesMedia situation, a million subscriber channel where someone filed three copyright strikes against him for like 7 seconds that is complete bs and now his channel might be deleted for nothing. Since you have connections to RUclips maybe you can spread the word on this situation or help out!
Thank you for voicing this situation. I have been creating educational content for about three years. This happened to me in April. So far, without even the slightest warning, RUclips has unnecessarily shut down my monetization completely. This situation shakes the trust in this platform.
You ever notice how when RUclips fucks up, or something automated (that's DEFINITELY NOT AUTOMATED, NUH UH WE HAVE HUMANS HITTING BUTTONS) their best response seems to be "it's not my fault" or "we don't know"? Almost like they've completely lost control of the website due to all the automated processes they've baked into daily ops? Interesting.
1:58 I think Hutch explained the issue best himself: "they seemingly do not believe that I could have been targeted". The RUclips support page also reflects that kinda assumption ("stop working with sources that appear to be sending bad traffic", at 7:17), which is not reasonable (just because someone is getting "bot views", that doesn't mean they were responsible for them). If RUclips is able to identify which views are bots, then all they have to do is discount that from the total number of views (and make youtubers' ad payment be proportional to the real number of views, instead of completely demonetizing them).
youtube also accused me of invalid traffic on my dashboard page, but wouldnt say what videos they limited it for. super odd. never bought a subscriber or view in my life. never had the need to do that with any of my videos.
It is either: 1). RUclips deciding to use it's power over the creators to just hold all the advertising dollars to improve profits for Wall St. or 2). The advertisers are effectively accepting the uber eats order from the driver then reporting they didn't get their food via the app and getting a refund, screwing the driver. This could be done by the advertiser creating a bot that performs the actions to get the channel labeled as unverified traffic so that the advertiser gets their ad money back on the channel it's ads are being shown on. or 3). It's just a bug and RUclips has automated everything to the point that no one that works there knows how to identify it much less fix it. or 4). It is a problem with an A.I. Google created and tasked with improving company profits by "X" year over year and the A.I. is finding ways to acheive that by doing this.
Wait so this means if there's a RUclipsr I really don't like, I can spend a small amount of money to buy bots to watch their channel. And then it will be demonetised and ruin their career/hobby. This is FANTASTIC news. Even better I could blackmail them, threatening to do it! What wonderful news.
Wow, so RUclips is now blaming creators for the BOT PROBLEM? That's RUclipss responsibility not theirs. That's why RUclips needs to crack down on all the spam and bot comments too. Because I think it's related to this problem. RUclips has allowed the spam bots and bot accounts to go out of control. Like a wildfire left unattended. RUclips needs to step tf up and somehow figure something out to target the spam bots.
@@cheesers2084 not to out myself here, but I think there's ludbuds younger than my RUclips account lol. Like C'mon RUclips, you should know what I want to see by now!
A couple of comments mention the scenario of the channel viewers' use of VPN or ad block being behind the invalid traffic clicks... If that were the case why wouldn't YT just come out and say it? I'd guess because the use of VPN and particularly ad block are so widespread and difficult to stop, it would scare off advertisers if they knew the true scale 🤔
This exact reason i why I stopped making RUclips videos over 10 years ago. Barely had any views at all just got into the partner program maybe had 2k views after joining account disabled for invalid clicks after looking at the stats page all of the views were from search/subscribers. Even after appealing still disabled to this day over 10 years later they will not unban my account or look any further into the issue.
My revenue went down by around 80% since August 9th because of invalid traffic & it's stayed that way since then (today is August 30th). I created a 2nd channel after getting hit with this, but it seems like it'll take months to be able to monetize it. Talked to creator support & they basically couldn't give me any additional information about the invalid traffic apart from the basic information that I can already find online. It seems like there's nothing I can do to fix this problem at the moment. There are many people in the r/PartneredRUclips subreddit who've been facing the exact problem & you can find new posts about it there almost every single week.
@@HeisenbergTM Look for a RUclipsr called PainDomination, he has a video on this. It's his 2nd latest video that was posted 7 months ago, I hope it helps
I personally think that ad-block probably causes the 'invalid traffic' on all these accounts. RUclips most likely detects that there is a large amount of views on an account that are not being served ads even though they fit within the target audience for ads, and then flags it as so. The gaming space sees this more frequently because of 'gaming' browsers with built in ad-block and people in this space being more knowledgeable about tech in general.
Isn't it the opposite problem, though? There are too many clicks on ads, not too few. My theory is that click farms are clicking on random stuff so as to not get noticed when they boost a separate channel, but they're inadvertently making real channels seem like they're engaging in fraud. Veritasium talked about the issue on Facebook before: ruclips.net/video/oVfHeWTKjag/видео.html
RUclipss telling the creator that they are responsible for figuring out the illegal traffic is like the American IRS knowing exactly how much you need to pay for taxes but making you figure it out and penalizing you if you get it wrong 😅
RUclips needs to step tf up and figure something out to at least try to clean up the bot problem. Especially the spam bots. The spam bots and this problem seems related. Definitely agree it should be some sort of class action
They're not stealing money, they're kneecapping their own revenue sources. They are losing money out of some weird, worship-like devotion to the algorithm. They trust their algorithm more than they trust people, they back their algorithm up even at the cost of revenue. It's actually insane.
@@noisepollution4473 no, they are bleeding potential revenue by sharing ad time with channels they deem repetitive or socially unnecessary. They want to take back the ad money because they believe there are too many shit videos making money.
Just a hunch here could it be, because viewers actually got VPNs after the non-stop constant wave of NordVpn, ExpressVPN, and SurfShark adds that everyone has been doing and now it looks like a huge chunk of viewership looks like its bots as, bots tend to use VPN to avoid getting flagged ...
Hey lud, just wanted to say its pretty cool that you're using your platform for good. Been really happy with how mogul mail has been conducted. Keep it up!
I Dealt with a Similar problem for over 6 months last year. Instead of "Invalid Traffic" they hit me on "reused content" even though I Record all of my footage myself and it is uploaded nowhere else before hand. I was Slighted well over $25K due to this issue. RUclips absolutely Refused to show me where I was reusing the content from or even what content of mine was allegedly being reused. The problem is RUclips BENEFITS from wrongful demonetization. All that money now goes to them instead of splitting it with the creator. Ads Still played on my Videos While i was demonetized. RUclips needs to end this BS and Solely dedicate people to Monitization support.
The problem is the creators are too chicken shit to develop their own platform. I make content on a different channel and I never expect yt to pay my bills.
As a long time Hutch fan from cod4 days It's so devestating to see him have to deal with this. He is actually the reason I discovered Ludwig because when I was watching Hutch's coverage of the 2020 election he recomended & praised Ludwigs commentary on the election. Crazy how much has changed since then. Hutch deserves a spot in the RUclips HOF imo.
my friends and i have been having the same problems on instagram. they're blocking our ability to like things because of "buying fake likes/followers" when we havent bought likes or followers at all
same thing happened to adsense publishers, instead of a yt creator, folks who created content on their own site, provided content, etc... many got rekt by adsense. this is why you shouldnt rely on a single revenue stream.
The fact you have to wait 3 MONTHS, losing potentially thousands of dollars until you can appeal again is terrifying, glad ludwig is calling this out
Who's Ludwig? This is mogul mail
@@kellenthemelon226 😐
@@kellenthemelon226 i know right???
ludwig???? you mean mogul mail what the heck is a ludwig
this is so based KingSammelot
this screams "youtube doesn't want to deal with your bad data" when it comes to sorting it out of the actual users. IE they don't want to deal with bots and now are putting the blame onto the creator who knows nothing on how to fix or remedy this.
RUclips's stance on this just doesn't make any sense; if they can detect the invalid traffic then why don't they just invalidate it from the final count? Also what about all the people that use RUclips premium? One of the major reasons I'm a premium member is because it helps pay creators more. How could premium users be invalid traffic?
It also might be possible that the commenting bots are considered invalid traffic, such as the one that commented above me. This entire situation seems sketchy to me.
@@Grgmit I was thinking it was likely due to bot comment spam too, it's been terrible lately. And YT doesn't remove them from the final count because the still want the numbers to appeal to advertisers while managing to punish creators for something they can't control. They want their cake and to eat it too
@@TheFrenziedFlameYT good god, if that's their way of mitigating bot comment spam by fucking the content creators, makes sense of how they've been handling problems on RUclips lately, by choosing the stupidest, nonsensical option.
Doesn't matter if they know or not, they have absolutely no remedies because as a youtube you can't do anything to filter out traffic.
@@nizamrahman4665 that and destroying the UI on every update
Doing Hutch dirty, respect your people that helped make your platform popular.
@Oppp Lol Lol, mmm pizza.
@Cheesers youtube themselves are losing out on money by not allowing them to run ads, its a stupidity thing
Hutch is one of the OG professional RUclipsrs too. He's been here since the beginning
@@samfunfun646 Facts, he's part of what made gaming popular content on RUclips.
@@20eyesmisfit yes him, apl, sark, seananners too.. dont get as much recognition and respect as they deserve.
I’ve been creating RUclips content since 2008, and this channel since 2010. This situation happened to me a few month back in December! It was my biggest month ever with $3k+ in revenue. I lost about 50% because of invalid traffic. What frustrated me the most was not losing the money, that sucked, but RUclips support blamed me for the invalid traffic! They flat out said I caused the invalid traffic and refused to give any evidence even when asked multiple times.
I doubt you’ll see this, but thank you for covering this!!!
I hope that your channel would be fixed soon.
The problem is that it's either the creator should steer away from the things that invite "invalid traffic" or hope that the viewer doesn't do things such as save a video for a playlist or "watch later" as it is considered invalid traffic as no one would watch a video if they are saved for later or in a playlist. There are quite a few tutorials for invalid traffic, this one is for my local language but there's English subtitles: ruclips.net/video/qbtG2phiFM8/видео.html
Hey question could it be people using a diffrent app like vanced to watch videos wich blocks adds and what not? Idk just something that came to mind
@@blazechaos212do ppl not use the watch later function?? i use that all the time lol
@@mattmattga I dunno. It's weird that the video pointed it out but if it's true, damn. I do rarely watch vids in "watch later" tho
Gaslight Gatekeep Google Bosses.
Wish RUclips actually did their job of communicating and listening to their creators. RUclipsrs should not have to worry about this
This is so true "Mello Melt"
Yeah. Even for small youtubers and including me. I lost my channel terminated last year.
Now yesterday my second oldest channel has copyright terminated.
Being YT hoping to be enough is enough.
@@Willerhide I don't get it, I see this kind of comment all the time
So true "insert name"
What are you trying to do, are you trying to be sarcastic or some shit
@@Willerhide omg its the person that earned tubbos respect and vitalasys favorite creator
RUclips removed "broadcast yourself" years before the parent company Google removed "don't be evil" from their ToS
I experienced this back in June... Ever since, ad revenue on my channel has been the lowest in 11 years. The banner message "Ads have been limited on one or more of your videos due to invalid traffic" was present for a couple days, but went away. Ad revenue remained down and estimated monetized playbacks also remained down. I have tried disabling embedding. No result. A couple days ago, I disabled monetization on every single one of my videos (and privated my shorts), generating $0.00 for July 16th. Once earnings data for July 16th showed up in Analytics, guess what else showed up... the IVT message, AGAIN! So basically, it seems that *turning off monetization on all of your videos* can trigger RUclips's ad limiting protections. Definitely seems like a glitch to me!
RUclips seriously needs to fix these issues, it's so sad to see so many creators coming out with this struggle.
@ Oppp Lol Stop trolling and your comment sections is full of copy-paste bots comments
or RUclips just doesnt want to pay people the money so they tell them something suspicious happened, refuse to elaborate and then refuse to give them the money
Wow, so RUclips is now blaming creators for the BOT PROBLEM?
That's RUclipss responsibility not theirs.
That's why RUclips needs to crack down on all the spam and bot comments too. Because I think it's related to this problem.
This whole thing is stupid
@@AmaraQuest if you see a bot, don't reply to it, just report it. replying makes it seem more real and RUclips is less likely to do anything about it (that is if they would do anything in the first place because we all know they usually don't)
@@randomperson8375 thank you. I wasn’t sure it’s a bot but I did report it. Maybe I’ll keep my comment here just so other people can be informed. But I won’t reply to the others.
Btw I like your username lol
There was a definite shift in the way RUclips used to be a website that paid people to create content, to a business that expected a thank you for allowing you to upload
Honestly people need to just union up and sue youtube for withholding on an agreed contracted pay. And just have a union fee to pay a lawyer to keep them in check same with amazon also funny enough recently found out Walmart employees (specifically in the fresh departments) tried to unionize, so they literally just got rid of the departments for a while since they legally cant fire them for unionizing but if there is “no job” then they were layed off indefinitely.
Read Cory Doctorows Enshitification article.
Were in the early part of that later stages of shut up and buy things platform rot.
I went through this in 2015. They disabled my entire AdSense for “Invalid Click Activity” during the hype of Vidcon and a bunch of collabs. Lost all my ad revenue and 3-4 weeks later AFTER having an actual HUMAN look into it for me directly at AdSense - they’ve determined it was an “algorithmic change in their system that led to the disabling of MY AdSense” the president of AdSense at the time emailed me himself apologizing and reinstated me. Channel was honestly never the same after that though… they never would’ve looked into had I not known a much larger creator who had a POC at AdSense.
Unrelated BUT fast forward a few years later I ended up getting my AdSense compromised somehow and they were no help. Went a whole year and a half trying to get help and couldn’t get any and it forced me to stop uploading bc let’s be honest, couldn’t do it for free nearly as much. It killed my channel. Not pointing fingers but it’s a shame how a situation like this can derail an entire career on this platform.
Since then I was able to create a new AdSense but audience done up and left and understandably so. This was all before the boom of streaming so it was tough to migrate an audience to another platform.
Hard not to live with the “what ifs” my channel was growing rapidly at the time and it seemed to glitched everything. Hope Hutch gets it fixed asap and he can continue his dreams.
that is so disheartening man, i hope ludwigs exposure of this issue can help out some creators
i have similar story in the beginning of 2016... same thing happened to me. i literally just commented my story and then read urs....it made me feel like sh*t tbh... it made me wonder how many others like us are out there? i lost around 21k subs.. nothing major but to me, i was just a dude playing clash of clans.. that was huge, my channel drove a deep passion and want to continue being the best at the game... so i was bummed when it was all taken away. i literally quit videography as a whole since. my twitter still has all the links from Clash of clans and my CWL MVP season but the game isnt the same to me anymore nor is creating YT videos.. truly hope the best for ya man.
I assume they don't reimburse you for the time that you were losing out on this income, so is there any legal recourse considering your loss was due to a failure on their end?
man youtube is such a clusterfuck
Yeah, the problem is that it's either the creator should steer away from the things that invite "invalid traffic" or hope that the viewer doesn't do things such as save a video for a playlist or "watch later" as it is considered invalid traffic as no one would watch a video if they are saved for later or in a playlist. There are quite a few tutorials for invalid traffic, this one is for my local language but there's English subtitles: ruclips.net/video/qbtG2phiFM8/видео.html
Thank you for posting about this! Ive had this issue since December. Ive submitted dozens of support tickets but RUclips/Google has been zero help
It's literally impossible for a content creator to control how users are getting to their channels. This is just RUclips trying to get out of paying creators... again.
You are correct, but Adsense is used for other platforms as well. The FAQ page is just a general FAQ page for Adsense, but it makes no sense for RUclips ads
I mean you can buy bots
@@lordnatu then provide evidence? Its yt platform, they should have all the data and capable to prove the invalid traffic but nahh.
@@lordnatu no one's contesting that. If youtube can tell which traffic is bad and which traffic is good, why don't they just block the bad traffic instead of fucking over the creator?
If they have proof the creator did something bad, why don't they show it?
@@louisbrill891cause they want to keep the appearance up for advertisers.
Been having the same invalid traffic issues across a few of my new channels. Nothing demonetized yet though but it's a fear for sure. How annoying
Check your RPM though - is your RPM affected? There are 1000's of channels affected by this bug right now - RPM goes down to about $2 - driven by the fact that they stop showing targeted Skippable ads on the channels
@@CaffeinatedBlogger yeah basically mine atm are video-based. So few videos get he error and tank the RPM. Then it recovers. But its happened twice and now my fear is if it keeps happening RUclips will demonetize it
I think this problem is even greater than RUclips and spans up the ladder to Google itself. I started getting into game development as a hobby and uploaded my game to the app store/google play store for my friends and family to play. I signed up for google ads for the fun of it to try it out and I made literally just pennies off of the couple hundred downloads my game got. somehow though, I got my entire google ads account terminated with no chance of getting it back for the same “invalid traffic” garb. my game had like 200 downloads so I don’t see how I could possibly be a threat, yet somehow I got hunted down and banned without warning
Yeah I’m convinced they are doing this on purpose just so they don’t have to pay others
Im thinking it’s people with Adblock or something similar causing invalid traffic because they want to make sure their greedy ad buyers are happy
Thank you for making this. This has DESTROYED my channel. Making 80% less ALL of a sudden. RUclips support is absolutely terrible. NO one is taking accountability. RUclips is failing us creators. They don't give a ____
did your appeal got accepted?
Mogul Mail is the type of guy to make a video yelling at RUclips who is basically his employer, Ludwig would never.
Fr
And then go live 2seconds later 😂😂
The joke is over he legit came out and said he's mogul mail.
Mogul Mail is the guy Ludwig wishes he could be
Also Mogul Mail is just as great as Ludwin
Could the issue be the rise of VPNs? RUclips sees the same IP clicking an ad 20,000 times and gets suspicious.
Do you really think VPNs is the only way RUclips keeps track of who you are? You're fingerprinted in so many ways from your hardware to a ton of multifarious cookies, to RUclips having your account and likely also being able to tell you're routing through a VPN. They're not at all confused about who is watching what.
Wowwww you’re smart!! This would make a lot of sense actually.
Hutch is a RUclips OG, so sad the situation he's been put it
Always loved Hutch. Didn't like his switch to politics, but man is still a legend.
@@ManOfParody It's quite easy to palate him if SeaNanners is around. He keeps the fun and positivity around.
@@justjuniorjaw Or Sark. Maybe if Hutch screwed with politics a little less, he'd also be a dad by now hehe. Still love him all the same of course.
RUclips just straight up needs competition at this point. Without competition, they cam do as they please.
This^ Competition is the only way to stop these companies from screwing people over by hanging the threat of leaving them and going to another site with our money above their heads for them to shape up and stop screwing everyone over like this
Honestly, I’m ready for a new video hosting platform. RUclips has gone down the shitter and it has been for a while now.
it's good to see ludwig still makes his opinions clear even if he has a contract/bias with company at hand
wdym ludwig, mogul mail killed him months ago
Mogul mail killed that dude a while ago
Who is Ludwig?
I just got hit with a 30 day suspension for “invalid traffic”. No idea why. I have been doing RUclips nearly 11 years. Why would I risk my hard work and a decade of my life for any reason? The only thing I’ve been told by support is “fix it”. Fix WHAT? I can’t fix something I never did. Very frustrating and I hope RUclips takes a look at this. Thanks Lud for hopefully bringing this to their attention.
At which point will people weaponize bots against channels where someone bot floods someone's channels just to trigger invalid traffic or is that what we're dealing with rn
Super dope of you to make a video about this Lud. This issue is definitely something that needs more awareness and hopefully a fast fix.
I'm glad this story is gaining some traction. Hutch posted two videos on this topic months ago and has lost around a years worth of revenue. I hope all the creators find representation.
I was struck with this same "issue" just two weeks ago, THE DAY right after my Adsense was all sorted out and verified. Now, I am a relatively small channel compared to most, but what really felt like a kick in the balls and hurt me the most was that the email that notified mde of this was basically sent to me THE DAY BEFORE my birthday this year (June 19th). I remember just feeling so devastated and hopeless.
I used to work for a company that had a mantra that unless a new feature, update or rework of an old feature could earn them at least $20m it wasn't worth the time and costs. RUclips is significantly larger and I could imagine that they look at this problem as so miniscule compared to their other 'problems' or projects that they won't bother looking into it, but rather parry away or ignore the attention it is getting until people stop complaining, saving the time and costs associated with fixing the problem. Very sad situation though and I feel for all the small creators especially who rely on AdSense for survival.
wouldnt be suprised if this is just a new way for YT to not have to pay their creators
Don't they realize that this can be weaponized really badly
i assume it already is being weaponized
They will keep doing it until someone takes them to court and wins. That's how capitalism works.
I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the intended features of this policy. As cable slowly dies, mainstream media, Hollywood, television and streaming networks are all bleeding viewers to independent content creators.
I assume that either it isnt weaponized or big youtubers arent affected by it, because those are more likely to have haters or idk, maybe the botting needs to be bigger to count as invalid traffic
This is exactly what happened to my channel about 5 weeks ago. Went from making over $1k/month to just $50 this past month. No idea why it's happening or how to fix it. I have never done anything shady like buying clicks or views, I barely even share my videos anywhere.
Same for me.
There's the possibility that someone else did it, but youtube will put all the blame on the creator
did you fix it?
RUclips competing with Twitch and Twitter on who can make worse choices in a single year.
I actually had this issue with my channel from May 2022 - September 2022. It all started when my channel started getting more views from browse. I was averaging about 5k per video to then being like 70-120k views per video. Over June, about 90% of my videos got demontized because of invalid traffic, but only the short videos that were about 1-2mins length were effected, and also only the videos that got about 70k views or more, I never had a video effected that had less than 70k views, so my sollution to try and fix this was to just private my videos after 65k ish views and hope it wouldn't get demotized, then public them again later. It was such a stressful and annoying time as there was nothing I could do to fix the proiblem, I changed NOTHING, and 6 months later the problem was fixed, despite me making no changes and everything being the same.
My theory was that somehow making videos while in a different location had caused this, but I'm not sure.
As a Software Engineer, there is likely an algorithm that is checking for this. My guess would be that this algorithm (whether or not AI) has a bug in it where it’s wayyy too sensitive. Likely it’s seeing if the clicks are greater than a specific amount. But sense they aren’t giving any explanations I am also guessing that it’s a known problem, that is on someone’s backlog or that it’s AI that they don’t know how to make it less sensitive or a combination of both. Anyways it’s their problem and they should be be handling this better on the customer service side.
In a way, somehow i felt that we too depended on AI (or other automatic system). As long the output is something they expected on what they put into as input, they will rely on it without understanding what happened inside the "black box". I probably wrong, but the overall vibe of social media give me this feeling
Another problem is that the creator needs to hope that the viewer doesn't do things such as save a video for a playlist or "watch later" as it is considered invalid traffic as no one would watch a video if they are saved for later or in a playlist. There are quite a few tutorials for invalid traffic, this one is for my local language but there's English subtitles: ruclips.net/video/qbtG2phiFM8/видео.html
If it was overly sensitive, I'd asusme big ass channels like LTT, MKBHD, PewDiePie, etc would have a much worse problem of "invalid traffic" but they get a pass from youtube cause they're too big.
Could this possibly be due to the use of a VPN? I know it sounds too simplistic but I thought I'd ask a software engineer. I heard some people got their Etsy stores shut down out of nowhere after many years just because they started using a VPN to log into their accounts. Does a VPN create the impression of invalid traffic? I use a VPN and sometimes Twitter tells me they have detected unusual traffic, Google does the same, I can't log into Facebook when I use it, and I was trying to create an account on Etsy but couldn't even log into the website with the VPN on. Then I saw a thread on VPN and Etsy while investigating online
@@eleonoremarymadone9859 You got a point, but for me I don't use VPN but still get the unusual traffic but only sometimes in google search, like I'm being flagged as a bot. It might be a really bad internet connection etc. on my end.
This is actually really smart. Create a solutionless money saving problem and target those too small to defend themselves
The timing of this whole situation feels so odd to me. At a time where we’re seeing massive tech layoffs we’re not seeing youtube starting to tighten their wallet to paying people money they deserve while saying, “its your fault figure it out”
Now that you say it, I do think like you too, but there is a problem, how does youtube choose who to demonetize, according to the video all of the people seem to be small content creator, but there are some creator with big paycheck like 25k ones, how does youtube know who to fuck up so that they don't get in trouble in the future?
@@anhkhoa2172 they don’t, they just using math and a graph to figure it out. My assumption would be they won’t target the lower 20% since it will cause a stink with how many they would need to do it to to make a profit and they don’t know who could make it big and becomes a cash cow, i assume they would leave the top 30% to 40% alone or even give special exceptions to their “standards” depending that leaves about 40% from there they determine “how old is the account, and does it see foreseeable growth? Are people watching older videos? If so just demonetized them now and profit of their old videos” or something along those lines this is all an assumption though i would probably make more strict check marks and gaging for it if it were “me” with a bunch of checks and balances to make it extra scummy and very profitable
@@shawnhiggins1005 I see, I think they are doing some trick using graph and what not to determine who will be success and who will not in their early career in YT. If that's true that kinda f up, imagine you are a content creator on YT and YT refuse to pay you because they predict you to be unsuccessful in the future, so it's not worth the YT money to invest into them in the long run.
Hey Lud, I’m a creator who is also going through the exact same thing as Hutch and I’ve been without my monetization for a year now because of this kind of targeting. It’s extremely demotivating to be in this situation so thank you for making this video. Im hoping something good can come of it for people like us who have been affected.
I clicked on your page and it said “joined 13 years ago.” Wow. Sorry you’re dealing with this dude.
I would be devastated to experience something like this. I work with a few folks that are pushing hard for monetization and I'd be beside myself if it all disappeared with absolutely no path towards resolution. It means a great deal when someone in Ludwig's position not only takes a stand, but does so at the risk of catching heat for it on the back end. Kuddos and appreciation.
Definitely a little disheartening...
Thank you, Ludwig, for putting this together and using your platform to bring more attention to this. Hopefully it can get it resolved
This reminds me of an issue I had with Amazon. I self-publish, and have my books exclusive to Amazon for people who use their subscription service. I did an ad once that got a lot of those subscription reads, then 3 months later they said it was bots and that if it keeps happening then they would ban my books. I did everything I could to stop it, removed the ad, etc, but it kept happening for some reason and I had to take myself off the subscription program.
I think it happened to enough people though, and enough authors removed themselves from the subscription service, that they eventually changed the wording in their policy that they'll just remove the bot reads and the revenue from it, but won't affect your account. It'd be impossible to do the same here, especially for bigger creators who have employees that rely on the revenue, but it would sure get their attention if some of the biggest creators turned off monetization for even a brief period.
Had something very similar happen to me and it makes me sad to see it's not just me that had to go through this
Thank you so much Ludwig for covering this story!!! The invalid traffic issue has been affecting my channel as well!
I wonder if this has something to do with accounts that are 13 yrs old. You’re the third person I’ve seen in this comment section have this issue and all of the acts are like yours, joined 13yrs ago.
It really feels like youtube just sits around and comes up with new ways to ruin the website
It happened to me and my channel- due to “invalid traffic” … I have appealed 3 times every time I am asked to state what I “think” I did wrong. I state the only thing I can think of, that I have significantly more followers on instagram and maybe that flagged the issue. We are told nothing! I can’t help but think it is a machine replying. It’s so disheartening that I have stopped posting on RUclips and I’m instead giving my all to other social media platforms. All I ask if you are going to strip my from my income, as the very least tell me what I can fix! If any other creators want to together launch a group complaint to get more attention I’M IN!
RUclips doesn't understand how this is someone's livelihood, and the effect that can have on a modest-sized creator from an economically challenged area. Thank you for standing up for those without the voice to stand up for themselves.
This is so annoying… Bless the creators that are having to deal with this monstrosity.
Their statement about how to prevent invalid traffic sounds like passive aggressive business language for, "stop paying for clicks, we aren't going to directly accuse you because then you can argue it, but we are accusing you."
And the way it was worded doesn't actually mean anything or helpful at all, it's just a word salad.
DUDE SAME! I have had my channel struck down for "invalid traffic" when youtube drives 90%+ of the traffic to my channel?! They just auto-denied me and didn't give me any info on the issue at hand.
I'm a big fan of how M.M. takes time and enunciates his words. I can still understand exactly what he mean when playing the video at 1.5x speed to digest the daily slop faster!
Honestly at this point I doubt RUclips will do anything after everything they've done to their creators. Unless people actively leave the platform
RUclips trying to have Hutch figure out why he has invalid traffic is like leaving your grandpa to figure out why his phone isn’t connecting to the Wi-Fi. He had no way to figure it.
My Adsense is disabled for almost 3 months now. My traffic is 100% organic and I never clicked on any ads. I have appealed several times -- all rejected.
I’m glad you’re covering this. Been watching hutch since like 2014
I think over the last few years youtube has been shifting all the moderation to AI without doing the effort to actually properly train their AI bots to not make these simple misstates. That's why there have been so many bs demonetizations, terminations, age restrictions, and strikes over the last few years
When Mogul Mail guy said "Main Channel", I flinched. Did not realize this is a second channel! He must be popping off on his main channel!!
Thanks for talking about this. I hate seeing hutch go through this. That man deserves way better than how RUclips is doing him right now
Why has RUclips not addressed this ? It’s happening to more and more creators
Similar thing happened to my second channel. I appreciate you making this as I thought it was just me.
Damn, they better not fuck with your content bro! Its to good!
Interesting that this started happening to multiple creators in April of 2022. Almost every case I've seen of this started happening at the exact same time. That should be a pretty big sign to RUclips that something they did to their website in April of 2022 caused this.
Yeah, nobody is saying anything about this but I find this to be a very important detail makes this look very much like an error on RUclipss end that is hurting so many creators
Yeah, I'm too lazy right now to sift through the YT subreddit but I remember a number of people posting about this about a year ago. Perhaps I'd post this video there and see what comes out of the woodwork.
There have been a few “waves” November 2022, December 2022 (when I was hit), January 2023, and another around late March/early April 2023
I’m so glad you covered this. I made a twitter specifically to tweet this to you a couple months back.
This honestly feels like it would be illegal in every other job context
It would be! RUclips needs to be regulated in a much stricter way, as well as all social media sites. Completely unnaceptable, and this is literally RUclips stealing money from creators. Wage theft.
They can get away with all kinds of things and blaming into things that cant be proven, so Id say its not too far off to for example, firing/discriminating because of racism or whatever, but putting any excuse because they'd get consequences if they said it out loud
Please do more than just post this video. You have a lot more pull than you probably think, and this needs to be elevated to the highest levels. What RUclips is doing with “invalid traffic” is not just unfair and incomprehensible, it’s evil
How is this still a thing? Dude I remember 10 years ago people in the CoD scene would view bot people's channels or banner ads to get their channel closed. How is this not resolved 10 years later
The bigger a company is, the slower they move.
@@RandalReid that would be a fair assessment if it was 6-12 months. 10 years is negligence
@@Ryzrr 6 - 12 months is quite being generous. I've been employed by two multinational corporations in my career before - without naming, one was a BPO company handling BCBS and FedEx contracts among other things and the other one was a Japanese electronics company and based off my experience as middle management for both, there were issues you would think they would have resolved quickly or at least not let balloon to what the problem originally was, but internal bureaucracy, managers not wanting to rock the boat, temp fixes that proved ineffective in the long run, and even leadership turnover and attrition, next thing you know, years have passed and the thing that was just an itch in the beginning is now a pus-filled, rotten wound.
So messed up
Props for shining the light on this. The way Hutch got cornered and shut down should be put to an end in some kind of policy. They're the ones need to be investigating.
Props to you bro for being completely unbiased and risking ur contract with RUclips
Thank you so much for using your platform to give us smaller creators a voice 💛 Our channel was demonetised in 2021 for this exact same issue and most interestingly, it happened straight after our channel blew up via Browse Features i.e. traffic sent to us by RUclips themselves - just as you highlighted at the end of your video. We will keep re-appealing and thank you again for shouting out about this.
Hutch is as OG as it gets, he deserves better.
Thanks for making this video. I’ve lost 70% of my revenue since November 16, 2022. RUclips claims invalid traffic and it’s my responsibility to fix it.
As an incredibly small channel, this is terrifying…
@@drowsiiggI just barely got monetized. It’s scary to think something so stupid could ruin any chance for me making it
@@ComandanteYT Yeah and the idea that issues with the platform has to be called out by bigger RUclipsrs first to get some reaction from YT is just whack
@@RandalReid exactly. We small creators would be completely f*cked
Haven't watched the video yet, but a RUclipsr by the name of Hutts went through something like this. RUclips incorrectly demonetized him, but they were still playing ads on his videos and they just took the money.
What a genius system - put the responsibility on the creator even though he's got zero control.
A relative's channel just got hit by this. Their revenue was cut by 80% overnight and has not come back up in about 3 days so far. I hope you can make a followup video on this at some point because it's definitely still destroying people's livelihoods. RUclips support just copy-and-pastes the "here's what you shouldn't do" link if you ask for help, but they don't seem interested in actually fixing the issue.
Would love to see a video on this whole MagnatesMedia situation, a million subscriber channel where someone filed three copyright strikes against him for like 7 seconds that is complete bs and now his channel might be deleted for nothing. Since you have connections to RUclips maybe you can spread the word on this situation or help out!
Thank you for voicing this situation. I have been creating educational content for about three years. This happened to me in April. So far, without even the slightest warning, RUclips has unnecessarily shut down my monetization completely. This situation shakes the trust in this platform.
what happened then?
Sounds like they've got a machine learning model they don't understand.
You ever notice how when RUclips fucks up, or something automated (that's DEFINITELY NOT AUTOMATED, NUH UH WE HAVE HUMANS HITTING BUTTONS) their best response seems to be "it's not my fault" or "we don't know"? Almost like they've completely lost control of the website due to all the automated processes they've baked into daily ops? Interesting.
1:58 I think Hutch explained the issue best himself: "they seemingly do not believe that I could have been targeted". The RUclips support page also reflects that kinda assumption ("stop working with sources that appear to be sending bad traffic", at 7:17), which is not reasonable (just because someone is getting "bot views", that doesn't mean they were responsible for them). If RUclips is able to identify which views are bots, then all they have to do is discount that from the total number of views (and make youtubers' ad payment be proportional to the real number of views, instead of completely demonetizing them).
that mannequin in the back stays freaking me out every time i watch a mogul mail.
youtube also accused me of invalid traffic on my dashboard page, but wouldnt say what videos they limited it for. super odd. never bought a subscriber or view in my life. never had the need to do that with any of my videos.
As a little creator, this stuff is terrifying and I just wish RUclips would look after the people who make the platform
It is either:
1). RUclips deciding to use it's power over the creators to just hold all the advertising dollars to improve profits for Wall St.
or 2). The advertisers are effectively accepting the uber eats order from the driver then reporting they didn't get their food via the app and getting a refund, screwing the driver. This could be done by the advertiser creating a bot that performs the actions to get the channel labeled as unverified traffic so that the advertiser gets their ad money back on the channel it's ads are being shown on.
or 3). It's just a bug and RUclips has automated everything to the point that no one that works there knows how to identify it much less fix it.
or 4). It is a problem with an A.I. Google created and tasked with improving company profits by "X" year over year and the A.I. is finding ways to acheive that by doing this.
Wait so this means if there's a RUclipsr I really don't like, I can spend a small amount of money to buy bots to watch their channel. And then it will be demonetised and ruin their career/hobby. This is FANTASTIC news. Even better I could blackmail them, threatening to do it! What wonderful news.
The Invalid Traffic situation would make an interesting class action.
RUclips needs to fix their whole platform, actually.
And their new layout
The bots that steal comments and somehow is still one of the top liked comments. (Aria, we don't want you here!)
And stop recommending me videos I've seen before instead of the hundreds of channels I'm subbed to.
Wow, so RUclips is now blaming creators for the BOT PROBLEM?
That's RUclipss responsibility not theirs.
That's why RUclips needs to crack down on all the spam and bot comments too. Because I think it's related to this problem.
RUclips has allowed the spam bots and bot accounts to go out of control. Like a wildfire left unattended.
RUclips needs to step tf up and somehow figure something out to target the spam bots.
@@cheesers2084 not to out myself here, but I think there's ludbuds younger than my RUclips account lol. Like C'mon RUclips, you should know what I want to see by now!
A couple of comments mention the scenario of the channel viewers' use of VPN or ad block being behind the invalid traffic clicks... If that were the case why wouldn't YT just come out and say it? I'd guess because the use of VPN and particularly ad block are so widespread and difficult to stop, it would scare off advertisers if they knew the true scale 🤔
Can’t wait for the class action lawsuit that creators file when they get tired of Googles BS.
This exact reason i why I stopped making RUclips videos over 10 years ago. Barely had any views at all just got into the partner program maybe had 2k views after joining account disabled for invalid clicks after looking at the stats page all of the views were from search/subscribers. Even after appealing still disabled to this day over 10 years later they will not unban my account or look any further into the issue.
Hutch literally was one of the OG's that paved the way for all gaming channels and gets done dirty like this.
Amazing how all these big platforms seem to have "bugs" that conveniently allow them to not pay creators.
youtube needs a real competitor, nothing will ever get better until that happens
My revenue went down by around 80% since August 9th because of invalid traffic & it's stayed that way since then (today is August 30th). I created a 2nd channel after getting hit with this, but it seems like it'll take months to be able to monetize it.
Talked to creator support & they basically couldn't give me any additional information about the invalid traffic apart from the basic information that I can already find online.
It seems like there's nothing I can do to fix this problem at the moment. There are many people in the r/PartneredRUclips subreddit who've been facing the exact problem & you can find new posts about it there almost every single week.
what did you do then?
@@HeisenbergTM It went back to normal after exactly 2 months. I contacted support multiple times, but got no help, posted on twitter, nothing.
@@FlavioGaming my problem is my adsense account directly got disabled without any notice. I have appealed for it. I am scared
@@HeisenbergTM Look for a RUclipsr called PainDomination, he has a video on this. It's his 2nd latest video that was posted 7 months ago, I hope it helps
I personally think that ad-block probably causes the 'invalid traffic' on all these accounts. RUclips most likely detects that there is a large amount of views on an account that are not being served ads even though they fit within the target audience for ads, and then flags it as so. The gaming space sees this more frequently because of 'gaming' browsers with built in ad-block and people in this space being more knowledgeable about tech in general.
Isn't it the opposite problem, though? There are too many clicks on ads, not too few. My theory is that click farms are clicking on random stuff so as to not get noticed when they boost a separate channel, but they're inadvertently making real channels seem like they're engaging in fraud. Veritasium talked about the issue on Facebook before: ruclips.net/video/oVfHeWTKjag/видео.html
@@DTwoHS there are add-ons that actually block and click on the ads in order to obfuscate tracking. So, not an unreasonable theory actually
My theory is that it comes from Google wants you to use their ad service to gain traction so they can get a cut of your pie.
Translation: google gains no benefit from a channel/channels where folk aren't seeing ads.
@@DTwoHS social media is just bots.... you don't say
RUclipss telling the creator that they are responsible for figuring out the illegal traffic is like the American IRS knowing exactly how much you need to pay for taxes but making you figure it out and penalizing you if you get it wrong 😅
Sounds like it's time for a class action lawsuit. RUclips is stealing money.
RUclips needs to step tf up and figure something out to at least try to clean up the bot problem. Especially the spam bots. The spam bots and this problem seems related.
Definitely agree it should be some sort of class action
“Class action lawsuit” lol
Can't do anything legally, they're protected by terms of service. And how can they steal from themselves?
They're not stealing money, they're kneecapping their own revenue sources. They are losing money out of some weird, worship-like devotion to the algorithm. They trust their algorithm more than they trust people, they back their algorithm up even at the cost of revenue. It's actually insane.
@@noisepollution4473 no, they are bleeding potential revenue by sharing ad time with channels they deem repetitive or socially unnecessary. They want to take back the ad money because they believe there are too many shit videos making money.
Just a hunch here could it be, because viewers actually got VPNs after the non-stop constant wave of NordVpn, ExpressVPN, and SurfShark adds that everyone has been doing and now it looks like a huge chunk of viewership looks like its bots as, bots tend to use VPN to avoid getting flagged ...
Hey lud, just wanted to say its pretty cool that you're using your platform for good. Been really happy with how mogul mail has been conducted. Keep it up!
I Dealt with a Similar problem for over 6 months last year. Instead of "Invalid Traffic" they hit me on "reused content" even though I Record all of my footage myself and it is uploaded nowhere else before hand. I was Slighted well over $25K due to this issue. RUclips absolutely Refused to show me where I was reusing the content from or even what content of mine was allegedly being reused. The problem is RUclips BENEFITS from wrongful demonetization. All that money now goes to them instead of splitting it with the creator. Ads Still played on my Videos While i was demonetized. RUclips needs to end this BS and Solely dedicate people to Monitization support.
The problem is the creators are too chicken shit to develop their own platform. I make content on a different channel and I never expect yt to pay my bills.
at this point youtube is working HARDER than ever to find ways to NOT pay his creators and he is winning
As a long time Hutch fan from cod4 days It's so devestating to see him have to deal with this.
He is actually the reason I discovered Ludwig because when I was watching Hutch's coverage of the 2020 election he recomended & praised Ludwigs commentary on the election.
Crazy how much has changed since then. Hutch deserves a spot in the RUclips HOF imo.
Mogul Mail ALSO has a contract with yt?!?!
my friends and i have been having the same problems on instagram. they're blocking our ability to like things because of "buying fake likes/followers" when we havent bought likes or followers at all
So many integrity moves lately, just looking out for others for the sake of doing it. Love what you do!
same thing happened to adsense publishers, instead of a yt creator, folks who created content on their own site, provided content, etc... many got rekt by adsense. this is why you shouldnt rely on a single revenue stream.
No one hurts RUclips more than RUclips
I appreciate videos like this. Honesty is so few and far between nowadays.