For reference, here is the last post I made on this matter.
I have collected data based on some YouTube channels I have managed to (mostly) archive over the year. Specifically, I started archiving at the start of March 2025. Judging by this initial data I can more confidently say that either YouTube is performing some seriously shady shit, or an extremely high number of active YouTube creators have chosen to unlist an extremely high number of their videos in the past couple months.
About my data:
- The column titled ‘Uploaded’ is the number of uploads as shown on the creator’s homepage.
- The column titled ‘Public’ is the number of uploads for each creator that are currently listed as of midnight, Fri 3 Oct 2025. This is shown via yt-dlp’s count for the entire channel, and the videos visible on the channel’s Videos tab.
- While the slight difference in number may seem unsuspicious, yt-dlp gathers a count of all listed videos, whether public, private, membership only, marked as NSFW or age restricted.
- I can safely say, given my current archive, that the significant deindexing by creator or by YouTube must have happened to each channel within the last few months. The difference between channels whose upload count matches my archive count, but is far higher than the public count, is suspicious to me.
- Each creator’s entire upload set is purely vlog-style with minimal edits, and are not in the habit of breaching the Community Guidelines.
The stats:
The action:
- I am currently contacting creators who have several hundred unlisted videos for confirmation, if they were the ones to delist them.
The conclusion so far:
- While I am suspicious of sneaky behaviour, it is also possible that every missing video was actually unlisted by the creator.
I wouldn’t have thought so, as none of these creators in my first test have used these methods for editing - their content is all vlog style, with the only edits involving audio effects and cuts between footage. I’m ruling nothing out until it’s proven irrelevant, however.
what i have seen it on so far was pure slop, some random images from photobank, sometimes even with the watermark, accompanied by generated voice, so these are the ones that should really go.