Why We Shouldn’t Worry About YouTube’s Inactive Accounts Policy

From time to time, YouTube users and archivists worry that, because of YouTube’s Inactive Accounts Policy, YouTube channels will be deleted if they are left inactive for more than six months. The policy reads:

Inactive accounts policy
In general, users are expected to be active members within the YouTube community. If an account is found to be overly inactive, the account may be reclaimed by YouTube without notice. Inactivity may be considered as:
- Not logging into the site for at least six months
- Never having uploaded video content
- Not actively partaking in watching or commenting on videos or channels

This policy is not new. Much of the text of this policy actually dates back to at least June 17, 2009, when the policy was originally introduced as part of YouTube’s username policy for username squatting. At the time, the policy was designed to prevent inactive users from holding valuable usernames or usernames that match brand names. This is because, from YouTube’s launch in 2005 until March 2012, every YouTube channel had to choose a unique username that would form its permanent /user/ URL. Additionally, from 2012 until November 2014, all channels could optionally sign up with or create a permanent username without having to meet any eligibility requirements. Because usernames were in such high demand, the original policy stated that the usernames of reclaimed accounts may be “made available for registration by another party” and that “YouTube may release usernames in cases of a valid trademark complaint”, though the former passage was removed by October 9, 2010.

Since November 24, 2014, YouTube’s username system has been replaced by a custom URL system with minimum eligibility requirements that are more difficult to meet using inactive accounts or accounts created just for squatting usernames. As of July 2021, accounts need to be at least 30 days old, have at least 100 subscribers, and have uploaded a custom profile picture and banner in order to claim a custom URL. Additionally, with the new system, YouTube is able to “change, reclaim, or remove” these custom URLs without otherwise affecting the associated channel. As such, the Username Squatting Policy was no longer necessary for its original purpose.

At some time between February 2013 and March 2014, the Username Squatting Policy was renamed to the “Inactive accounts policy” and the sentence about releasing trademarked usernames was removed. As of July 2021, the policy has not been revised since then. It also appears that the policy has fallen into disuse: in March 2021, a Reddit user posted “As a trusted flagger I can tell you that YouTube hasn’t used that policy in years.”

Additionally, at some point between September 2014 and March 2015, YouTube created a new support article which stated that “Once a username was taken by a channel it could never be used again, even if the original channel was inactive or deleted”, which directly contradicts the purpose of the original Username Squatting Policy.

Some archivists fear that the large amounts of video data being stored from inactive accounts may be lost if YouTube decides to delete those accounts. However, it appears that YouTube has found a way to help offset some of the cost of storing these videos. On November 18, 2020, YouTube announced that they would enable advertisements on videos posted by channels that are not members of the YouTube Partner Program. While no explanation was given for this change, it was announced during the same 3 months in which Google announced several major changes that would reduce the amount of storage being used across the company’s products [1] [2], so it can be inferred that this policy change was made for the same reason.

So, why does the policy still exist? One possible reason is that the policy is simply forgotten. YouTube’s support site is large and contains many articles, and many of them have outdated passages and describe discontinued features that were removed long ago [1] [2] [3] [4]. Many pages also contain references to the old version of YouTube, which has been inaccessible to the public since December 2020 [1] [2] [3]. Also, as of 2021, the text of the Inactive Accounts Policy hasn’t been updated for at least 7 years, though the surrounding page was updated in September 2020 to remove the policy on vulgar language, which had been given its own page. So, YouTube could have simply forgotten that the Inactive Accounts Policy exists, and the people responsible for updating the support pages could have just left the policy because they weren’t specifically instructed to remove it.

Another possible reason the policy still exists is that, while unlikely, YouTube could be preserving the policy for possible use in the future. However, YouTube would provide advance warning to users, likely via email and updated support articles, before enacting this policy, and since we have seen none of those shared online, we have no reason to believe this policy is being enacted at the current time.

So, while YouTube has an Inactive Accounts Policy, it hasn’t used it in years because URLs on the service can now be changed and removed without deleting and recreating accounts, and it appears it has found a way to help offset some of the cost of storing the videos uploaded by these channels. At this time, users and archivists shouldn’t worry about this policy, but should instead focus on specific content removal announcements such as annotations, liked videos lists, draft community contribution closed captions and metadata, playlist notes as well as older unlisted videos.