Three months ago YouTuber PkmnMasterHolly had her channel hacked, which has been a common occurrence for a lot of YouTubers over the past two years. Some get their channels back, others are straight out of luck. While Holly managed to get her channel back, it wasn’t restored with all the glitz and glamor she expected, resulting in her newer videos no longer showing up in the search, her channel being hidden from trending, and subscribers no longer receiving notifications. Recently she announced that she was heading to Twitch.tv.
She tweeted out the announcement on March 18th, 2020.
RIP MY YOUTUBE CHANNEL. ☠
F YouTube, see you on Twitch March 20th! https://t.co/jCx3LzA4GD@TeamYouTube please help me fix this. I’ve got an open help ticket right now but I’m playing email tag with the associate forever; this is ridiculous, YouTube is how I pay my bills! pic.twitter.com/gpHumaeQdd— PkmnMasterHolly (@PkmnMasterHolly) March 18, 2020
While asking for help from YouTube to restore her channel, she attached a message via image that read…
“My YouTube channel was hacked ~3 months ago. I didn’t tell you because YouTube was “fixing” it. But now I NEED to tell you this is the reason you can’t find my channel right now. You are NOT getting notifications when I post a new video [right now]. You can’t even SEARCH my channel on YouTube, and the last 30 days of videos have been hidden by YouTube, so they aren’t getting any views.
“The only way you can find my recent videos is via the links I post on Twitter! Also due to the hacker, my bank account got F’d so I haven’t been paid from YouTube in 3 months. Scraping together living off of Patreon and Samsung money right now.
“Thank you to everyone who is currently supporting me on Patreon, I couldn’t keep doing this without you. All that being said, F YouTube, I’m starting on Twitch March 20th with Animal Crossing. Please follow & support me on Twitch:
https://m.twitch.tv/pkmnmasterholly/”
This is neither unique nor an isolated incident. We reported on several other YouTubers having their accounts hacked back in 2019. The significance of their hacks was that the hackers were making money off of their accounts with advertisements and crytopmining scams, yet YouTube was sloth-footed in getting their accounts restored and the hackers off the platforms.
In Holly’s case, she managed to get her account back, but the channel is basically shadowbanned. She saw a massive dip in views and earnings after March 10th, 2020 following a video she posted thanking her fans and talking about mental health.
If you check Social Blade, you’ll note that from March 12th onward the daily average views dropped drastically, going from 50k – 100k down to 9k – 20k.
You can check the stats to see how there’s been a drastic drop-off in views.
However, her livestreaming seems to do decently.
Holly decided that it wasn’t worth the effort, though, and moved over to Twitch.tv as a result.
Expect to see more of these cases pop up as YouTube defers support and video management over to their bots, as they announced back on March 16th, 2020.
A lot of YouTubers are likely going to find themselves out of work and money in the coming weeks, and there’s practically zero recourse for the downturn.
(Thanks for the news tip Ebicentre)
