UPDATE (12/17/2024)
I forgot to update this, but during the start of November MinMax was actually banned on YouTube (why? we’ll never know). Thankfully in the middle of the month they unbanned my channel, so that’s good.
Also apparently my first Graphify channel with over 90 subscribers was unbanned recently? Yeah I have a strange relationship with YouTube… I guess it’s because they thought that channel was linked to MinMax and because they unbanned that they unbanned this one too? I don’t know honestly.
Hopefully this means the bigger channels get unbanned as well, but we’ll see. I’ll keep you all updated in case that happens.
On June 7th at 2:34 PM UTC, my YouTube channel with over 14,000 subscribers was terminated off of the platform. Why? Because of “circumvention of a ban”. But to understand why this happened, we need to rewind back in time a bit…
Chapter 0: Important Info
Before we start, if you’re reading this as a fan of Graphify, please make sure to subscribe to MinMax. It’s our new channel. We had to rebrand to avoid this situation happening again. Hopefully it doesn’t.
Chapter 1: The First Termination
Back in December 16th, 2022, when I only had 1.2K subscribers, I was a naive little child. I trusted anyone with my YouTube channel, and allowed them to stream on my channel. This one mistake caused the outcome that would later change the course of my YouTube career.
Just a few days prior, I had hired a new stream host. Their name was ZyboStats. Little did I know that this was actually an alias for two community members working together to target my channel and others like it, Ummerate Madness and Theolikee.
Just the name “Theolikee” already gives off shivers to the stats community, but if you’re not shaking in your chair already, let me explain who he is. Theolikee, better known as just Theo (no not Theo Browne, he’s cool), or Lily, had a bit of a reputation in the community for targeting people’s channels, tricking them into letting him stream on their channel, and then playing TOS-breraking content on their channels (for moral reasons I shall not state exactly what it is).
At the time, I was just one of many targets. And they had tricked me successfully. Ummerate started streaming on my channel just as normal, and I went to bed because it was getting late.
This was when they struck. They started playing inappropriate content on my stream, and mass-reporting the stream to get the channel banned. Everybody was freaking out, my moderators, the viewers, literally everyone. And I was just sleeping, dreaming about what to do when I wake up.
When I woke up, I was in shock. My channel with 1.2K subscribers was terminated. I didn’t even know what to say. I just stood there, on my Discord client, just staring.
But I didn’t give up, I made a new channel and started grinding.
Chapter 2: The Rise (again)
Immediately after I created the new channel, I started posting videos, making livestreams, all that fun jazz. The channel would grow slowly until what I will now call the “K-Pop Incident” happened.
Basically, one of the BLACKPINK members was about to drop a single, and I was like “oh this could get me some views,” so I started streaming the statistics. And oh boy did it get views. If I remember correctly it got like… 3K viewers at peak? I don’t know, I can’t check anymore. And I gained a little over 6K from it.
After that, I started streaming MrBeast vs SET India. It got decent views I guess, and it got me to around 8K subscribers. And then a few months after I streamed MrBeast vs T-Series (which would become my longest stream ever, at over 2,025 hours), but during 200M the stream got over 600 viewers! Not the 3K it had during the K-Pop Incident, but still a lot for my channel! And of course, with this amount of viewership, a lot of them subscribed, and with that boost it pushed me over to 10K subscribers!
I continued streaming and kept gaining subscribers! But this was when the tides started to turn…
Chapter 3: The First Signs
On March 22nd, 2024 (yes it was during the Matheus incident), Graphify+ (our second channel) and Archiveify (our archive channel) was terminated on YouTube. The reason stated in the emails and on the channel pages was “violation of the Terms of Service,” with no actual clarification on what rule we broke. After we asked TeamYouTube on Twitter (cough, sorry, X), they said it was because of “circumvention of a ban.” Very weird, but we assumed it was because of the previous termination and moved on with our lives.
Until we realized we couldn’t access the main channel. This was because, in the naiveness that I had, I made the Graphify+ channel part of the actual Google account instead of as a brand account, and since Graphify+ was terminated, they wouldn’t let me access any of my channels.
But hey at least we could get one of my managers to give me access to the channel, and THEN we can move on with our lives. But of course, Matheus (who was a Manager at the time) had to make this harder and basically held the channel hostage. But more about that in my other blog post.
Later on, Graphify Shorts was also banned. Still the same “violation of Terms of Service” vague reasoning, but we all assumed it was the same reason.
But this meant something. This meant that the main Graphify channel could also get banned, and that’s exactly what they did.
Chapter 4: The End
On June 7th, 2024 at 2:34 PM UTC, Graphify was terminated from YouTube for “violating the Terms of Service.” It finally got to the main channel. The channel had 13.9K subscribers before it was terminated.
When my friends told me that the channel got terminated I denied it, thinking that they were just pranking me (not uncommon when you’re friends with Matheus). Turns out, they weren’t. When I went to go to the channel, it was gone. I just stood there, on the YouTube 404 page. I didn’t know what to say or think, so I just stood there looking at it.
This was insanely sad for me. I worked so hard on this channel to get it to where it is now, just for YouTube to terminate it because of the first channel being hacked.
I didn’t mention this either but I actually got monetized on Graphify, but we had some ID issues so it was paused for a bit. We never got it resolved.
Chapter 5: The Aftermath
But I didn’t give up. I made another channel (subscribe btw) and started grinding again. I restarted my 24/7 livestream, re-edited my last timelapse and posted it onto the channel. And that’s where we are today.
Later on, my friend, Graphify team member, and member of the MrBeast Stats crew, Charlie (you might remember him from the Matheus incident, he helped out a lot with that), talked with YouTube Support about the terminated 14K subscriber channel and the 1K channel. They told us to fill out a form of what happened to the 1K channel and said to wait at least 3 working days for a response. As of writing this, we have not recieved a response. I’ll update this blog post when we do, though.
Before we wrap up, I’d like to say thanks to everyone for joining the #SaveGraphify movement and tweeting #FreeGraphify, along with also subscribing to the new channel. We got to over 122 subscribers in only 24 hours after we released the new channel. The support you guys give really means a lot to me. Back when my first channel with only around 90 subscribers got terminated (that is it’s own separate can of worms that we won’t get into), I had no one to help me or support me. I just had to rebuild my channel from scratch, without anyone there to help or support me, or even promote the channel. So thanks everyone <3.