Ridiculous GOTCHA setting up corporate YouTube channel

Social Media
1

Here’s a great GOTCHA courtesy of YouTube when you try to set up a Channel for corporate use.

Owners Google, despite being an enormous company full of supposedly clever people, haven’t got round to the concept that companies don’t have a Date Of Birth or a Gender, or a Mobile Phone, etc.

They explain that there is no dedicated procedure for setting up a company YouTube Channel, you just use the ordinary ‘Individuals’ process. You need to sign in with a Google Account, and then you can set up a YouTube Channel.

What could be simpler?

My client already has a Google Account used (for several years) only for corporate matters (Adwords and Analytics), so we logged in with that and then started setting up a YouTube Channel. We entered our desired Username, then Location, no problems there. It asked for our Date Of Birth, so as it is a company we put 1st January 2011 (ie easy to remember 1/1/11, should it be required in future). Then it asked for Gender, and the options were Male, Female or Other. We put Other.

Clicked Next and guess what happened? Wham! In big bold letters:

[INDENT]The Google Account for xxxourname@xxxourcompany.co.uk has been disabled.
You will not be able to sign in to this account or use it to access any Google products or services.
You do not meet the age requirements for a Google Account. This account will be deleted in 29 days unless the birthday you entered was incorrect and you submit proof that you are 13 years old or older. Learn more.
If you are 13 years old or older, click here to start the account unlock process.[/INDENT]

No ‘Are you sure?’. No second chance. Clever, clever Google has cleverly discovered that we are ‘under 13 years old’. How clever. Not.

So the entire Google account has been instantly DISABLED. This is the account we use to manage the client’s Adwords account, spending a budget of $42,000 per year. Plus Google Analytics. Chopped dead in a millisecond because these Google/YouTube people can’t be bothered to provide a sensible sign up procedure for the Companies who provide their income.

How on Earth could we be reasonably expected to guess that this would happen? Franz Kafka is alive and well, and working for Google.

Now, according to their next procedure, to recover the Google account someone has to provide a credit card number and pay $0.30, or send a ‘Government Document’ to prove that ‘someone’ is over 13 years of age. Then the account can be re-enabled and we can regain control over our $42,000 per year Adwords campaign. Very tempting to review that budget and chop it right down in retribution, since its effectiveness is frankly far from certain…

This is a ridiculous and unnecessary situation, I think. The trouble with the Google propeller-heads is that they lack COMMON SENSE!

Further searches of Google reveal a truly amazing variety of complicated problems people experience trying to set up corporate YouTube accounts. You couldn’t make it up… :mad: :smiley: :mad:

Paul

2

Hey Paul, It’s good to see you back here again. I haven’t seen you for awhile.

You know, Google is a US company and our Supreme Court recently ruled that corporations are people. So, in that case, that “person” is under thirteen! :lol:

Not funny really. You’d think it would be an easy thing for the big G to add a simple question to their sign up as to whether you are signing up as a business or an individual and tweak it accordingly. There seem to be plenty of businesses that have You Tube accounts, though. Wonder how they got around the birth date thing?

3

That sounds like a really poor experience :frowning: However, paying the 0.30$ is something that is does seem like a fairly quick? solution although the situation itself is rather idiotic of course :slight_smile:

4

I think it’s likely that quite a few businesses get their entire Google account instantly disabled like this. Just got to suck it up and sort it out, I suppose! :smiley: Next time we’ll make up a more acceptable Date Of Birth!

With hindsight, I suppose, I should have been more suspicious about the consequences of entering a DOB, but I don’t think anyone could reasonably anticipate that the entire Google account would be instantaneously disabled as a result of innocently trying to set up a YouTube channel.

I won’t be wasting time giving feedback to Google because they don’t take a blind bit of notice of anything anyone says. They always know best. :headbang:

Paul

5

Ironically, the 30 cents charge (to prove we’re over 13) will be charged to the same card that Google already take $3,500 off every month!

Paul

6

I have had my Adsense abruptly stopped on two separate occasions, both referencing the same web page. The second incident I replied and mentioned the previous occasion and that no changes had been made to the page since it was accepted six months ago.

The automated (?) reply received was words to the effect “Thank you for making the changes your account will take time before it is active…”.

Adsense was inactive for about ten days :slight_smile:

7

I guess there’s a lot to consider in setting up such a big system, but still, it does seem incredible that such basic things are not worked out properly. Another example is the whole G+ thing, which they want to be the next big thing… so why are their URLs so ugly? I mean, c’mon, wa it too hard to allow neat URLs like plus.google.com/mybusiness?

Anyhow, many of these big companies seem to have broken systems like this, so I guess it goes with the territory … too many people in the mix, and no one with enough power to take a proper overview and make sure everything makes sense.

8

Wait! How old is Google itself? I’m pretty sure it’s too young to have a Google account.

9

The entire YouTube create-a-channel process is incredibly counterintuitive. Similar to your experience, I’ve had a hard time setting up a business channel; I’ve had my account locked because I, like you, entered a random age because a business isn’t a person and shouldn’t be treated like one.

Seems to me that Google would do well to listen to some of its customers and make an improved sign-up experience. It certainly wouldn’t take much work to improve on what is there.

10

I think you’re right! :lol:

11

Update: Google’s Help files say that a disabled account will normally be restored within minutes of them charging a credit card 30 cents to verify that someone is ‘over 13’.

Actually, the account was not re-enabled for a full 4 days after the 30 cents payment was made. Maybe it varies depending on location. But 4 days is not ‘a few minutes’. And of course there is no way of knowing how long it is going to take.

So we were unable to monitor or manage our active Adwords account for 4 days. Adwords continued to work normally (though uncontrollably) during this time.

I guess we could have got hold of someone at Adwords and asked them to sort it out, if it had been really urgent for some reason. But what a palaver that would be, no doubt… :wink:

Paul

12

@Unit7285 ; [ot] Clicked your signature link. “The uploader has not made this video available in your country.” :bawling: [/ot]

13
Off Topic:

Strange … it works down her in OZ.

14

[ot]

Well that ain’t my country. :p[/ot]

15

Strange, works here in Land of Smiles where “FreeProxy” servers are usually necessary to hide the country location.

https://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=free+proxy&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&channel=suggest

I like the singing as well :slight_smile: