YouTube Account Terminated

Today, I noticed that the YouTube Channel associated with ManlyMovie was terminated in recent days.  I found this odd, since I was careful to avoid copyright strikes and until the end of the channel, there were none (three and you’re out).  Most of the videos uploaded were exclusives, with express permission from the studio to promote.  A few others, such as a clip from Extreme Prejudice, were online for years without acknowledgement by the owners.

Fearing an unlikely event of three strikes in one weekend, I logged into the email associated with the account and noticed the following;

So the account was not terminated due to copyright violation, but because of ‘spam, scams or commercially deceptive content’.  It didn’t take long to figure out what had happened.  About a month ago, the channel received an unwanted ‘gift’ from a spam service called ‘Dream Digital’.

I am going to disclose the emails sent from these pests below.

EMAIL 1;

This email was ignored.  Although it did worry me slightly and I considered reporting it to YouTube.  A second email came through.

EMAIL 2:

And now the third and incriminating email.

EMAIL 3:

As you can probably glean from these messages, this ‘service’ was entirely unsolicited and they were wondering why they were being ignored.  They used the ManlyMovie YouTube Channel to ‘test’ their ‘service’ and ‘quality’.  The video in question was an exclusive clip from Nicolas Cage’s Arsenal.

Now, I have to check deeper into the inbox history to see if there are anymore of these ‘services’.  I rarely look at the email associated with that channel, YouTube was something I pretty much neglected.  This is what seemingly torpedoed the channel:

Artificial traffic spam

Anything that artificially increases the number of views, likes, comments, or other metric either through the use of automatic systems or by serving up videos to unsuspecting viewers, is against our terms. Videos and accounts that are found to be in violation of our terms may be closed down and removed from YouTube. If you are going to hire someone to help promote your content, it should be someone you absolutely trust, as you may be putting the fate of your channel (and your business on YouTube) in their hands. If they are using methods that violate our terms of service, you may be the one to pay the bigger price, as it will be your videos and channel that get taken down. Check out this blog post and this article if you want to learn more.

Anyway, I’ll be launching an appeal, but I’m not massively bothered by it.  Firstly because I have local copies of the important exclusive stuff that ManlyMovie retains the rights to publish such as our recent clip from one of Steven Seagal’s new movies, or the interview with Bill Goldberg on the USS Iowa.  Second, I didn’t put much effort into YouTube.

Our channel was small (it had just broken 2,000 subscribers) and I’m sure if it was one of the bigger channels, YouTube would’ve been more thorough before launching an arbitrary execution.