Sarah Kimmel

The Silent Crisis on YouTube : Invalid Traffic Revenue Clawbacks Decimating Small channels blog.lon.tv/2023/09/13/the-s…

The "invalid traffic" issue that creators are experiencing on YouTube seems really bad. YouTube hasn't said much about it. YouTube is quite simple: Creators make videos and follow guidelines. YouTube handles the platform side. That's it. However, with this issue, YouTube claims it's the fault of the creator... or if "fault" is a word they would take issue with... let's use the word "responsibility." YouTube thinks that, after a creator uploads a video, they need to obtain the god-like ability of knowing what's happening under the hood with each and every person viewing their videos, so that then they can file individual reports on what is perceived to be "invalid traffic." Why can't YouTube simply detect invalid traffic and build some sort of infrastructure to disallow page loads to be successful if it reaches a certain threshold? That's a great question for the multi-billion-dollar company that has a lot more resources than a single creator who is experiencing this issue. Instead of building infrastructure to handle this problem, YouTube has instead decided to penalize the accounts of the people they claim to value: the creators. They then ask creators to contact something known as YouTube Creator Support – a team of people living somewhere in the world who are tasked with providing little more than copied and pasted messages and links to knowledge base articles. These support team members don't have any way of providing real guidance that would fix the "invalid traffic" issues for honest creators. Meanwhile, YouTube maintains that "invalid traffic" is "not a bug." I agree. It's not a bug. Instead, it's a problem that YouTube has allowed to bloom. They decided they won't resolve it from their end, even though they likely have the ability to do so. Instead, creators must read minds and self-report invalid clicks and invalid traffic. It remains to be seen if anything will happen to fix this issue. Fix your platform, YouTube. Creators want to be inspired to keep making videos... not depressed that the hours they spend away from loved ones while making those videos will go down the drain when they publish.

we understand how important this is to you! you can prevent it in a few ways, per this HC article: goo.gle/3EnSCZ4 also, you can flag this to the AdSense team through this form here: goo.gle/45VAIIz

our Creator Support team can help you dig into this, here's how to reach out 📲 goo.gle/3OYMsDh if you haven't already, would also recommend reading through our Help Center article about invalid traffic to get the full scoop: goo.gle/3qXpWmk

#FixTheInvalidTrafficBug Got a pop of invalid traffic on my channel arround July 11 and my revenue is down by 80% since. There was no invalid traffic (97% of traffic from YouTube and other from Google search and etc). Contacted support but no help. @TeamYouTube @YouTubeCreators