by Arjun Walia, The Pulse:
Last time I wrote about an inside look into YouTube’s re-education program 😉
Essentially they offered me the opportunity to take a training course that would teach me about their “community guidelines“ program (as if I don’t already know). In exchange, they would remove the final warning on our YouTube account for The Pulse.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Long story short, we’ve never actually broken their community guidelines per YouTube’s admission, yet somehow our account was deleted, re-instated, and yet still has a warning. The full story is here.
Today I want to briefly talk about the next phase of exploration that I am doing for fun in my free time.
I’ve been engaging with a real person at YouTube, trying to find out why we were snubbed for our 100,000 subscriber creator award 3 years ago. My hope is through this inquiry, I will get more insight into what happens behind the scenes at YouTube to blacklist accounts. More on that shortly.
What Happened With Our Channel
Firstly, this story is about our Collective Evolution YouTube channel, not The Pulse.
For those who don’t know, since 2009 we operated primarily as Collective Evolution. In 2021, after 5 years of incredible smearing and censorship, we created The Pulse to try and escape the witch hunt.
Sticking to relevant details here, on our CE YouTube account, we had been stuck at 95K subscribers for years. Eventually, we put a little extra focus on YouTube and hit 100K on Oct 20, 2020.
At 100K subscribers creators are supposed to receive one of those silver creator awards that everyone gets. They are nice looking and grant social proof and credibility to a channel. You get one of these providing the channel meets YouTube’s criteria.
Things like no copyright strikes, 100K subs, no community guideline strikes, you are still active on your account etc. We easily met all of these guidelines.
Yet months went by and we never got our award. For months in 2020, I didn’t think about it. But in 2021 I became more curious to find out if someone would bluntly tell me what was going on with our channel. So for the heck of it in 2021, I put in a request for the award to see what would happen.
That request was ignored.
Now is the time to understand a bit more of history here. Two events occurred before being snubbed for our award.
- In 2019 YouTube sneakily removed us from their search results and heavily cut our video traffic.
- In May 2020 we were removed from Google search. (Google owns YouTube)
The 2019 Move: You can see in the graph below that when we used to make content on YouTube, it did well and got a lot of views. Then we woke up on Jan 1, 2019, and everything had been shut off.
Our video views were metered to the low dribble you see because CE stopped showing up in feeds, searches, and recommendations. Interestingly, on May 1st, 2020, you could no longer get results searching “collective evolution” on YouTube.
The 2020 Move: The graph below is Google search console data. You can see we were getting 25,000 to 35,000 impressions a day from Google searches. This was going on for YEARS. You earn this by being a high-quality website that produces content people want. We also happened to be ranked in the top 1000 websites in the world (that’s insane traffic), so we had a lot of authority to land in Google search. The crowd had spoken: people wanted our content.
