1094 – Don’t Make These Mistakes: Tom talks YouTube Mistakes That Get You Banned

SUMMARY BY CLAUDE

Main Topic: Ways to Get Banned on YouTube
Policy Violations:
• Hashtag abuse – Using more than 60 hashtags causes YouTube to ignore all of them
• Tag stuffing – Loading your video description with excessive tags can get videos or your whole channel removed
• Trading subscribers – Swapping subscriptions to artificially inflate counts is no longer allowed
• Dangerous/hateful content – Self-explanatory violations of community guidelines
Security Risks (that can lead to bans):
• Don't use your public email as your channel login — hackers can exploit it
• Never open PDF attachments from sponsor inquiries — they can contain malware that steals your credentials and hijacks your channel
Content Niches Getting Banned:
• AI slop / faceless AI voiceovers – Low-quality, AI-generated content with no real value is being aggressively removed
• Celebrity gossip – Specifically fake quotes or fabricated stories using celebrity likenesses
• Compilations – Simply stringing others' videos together isn't enough; you need substantive original commentary (fair use)
• True crime – Fictional crime content must be clearly labeled as fiction
• Fake news / political misinformation – Made-up stories that mislead viewers
• "Make money online" content – Channels making false income claims (e.g., "make $1M with no work") are being taken down, likely due to FTC pressure
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Other Mentions
• Tom promoted an AI Summit featuring 75 AI hacks in his session, with a free 48-hour listening window
• He played an AI-generated song promoting his Internet Marketing Training Center (IMTCVA.org)
• Plugged his free automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree

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Episode 1094 – YouTube Mistakes That Get You Banned
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1094 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today I'm going to talk about YouTube mistakes that could get you banned. And some of them are so innocent you wouldn't even think anything of them, but they're against the terms of service. And then I'm also going to give you a bunch of niches that are getting banned like crazy. So that's what's coming up. Hope you didn't miss episode 1093. That was five additional AI hacks. And we have other episodes on that 1085 and 1088. So if you listen to all three, you get 15. But here's the thing. Today at 9 a.m. this morning is the opening of the AI summit, where for free, you can listen to 20 different people talking about AI. Now, I don't know what they're going to tell you, but I can tell you that I'm the number one session and I have 75 hacks that you don't need any technical skill that can make you money, save you time. Do your research. I mean, schedule things for you. Oh, just crazy stuff. So sign up for that at AI. And if you get their premium pass, that's where you get permanent access to all the sessions. So you can listen to the sessions for free for 48 hours. And then the next day, those sessions you can listen to for 48 hours for free and so forth. But if you want all. I mean, it's kind of hard to absorb all this information. You're probably going to want to watch my session ten times because it's, it's just so full of stuff.
[00:02:12] And then you, um, I have this handout that's got all these prompts that you need to have and bonuses on how to optimize your site for AI and all this stuff. You know, how, how to set it up to help you with your YouTube videos. So, so anyway, now what I want to do now is, of course, I want you to grab my automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. Oh, and by the way, it's screwthecommute.com/aisummit. We'll get you signed up for the free stuff. And my session is the first one being released at 9:00 this morning. Okay. Now I'm going to play a song for you now, I had a song the other day on this podcast that I created for free. Now, when you use stuff commercially, you got to pay the $10 a month or something that they to, to create these things, but you don't have to pay $10 a month forever. You could create your songs and then don't you know, you get a commercial license for it. If you're on their paid service, but you don't have to stay on the paid service forever. You just create the songs and then quit if you want. All right. But it's a lot of fun and it's fairly easy to do. So right now I'm going to play the My School song for Internet Marketing Training Center. Of course, the actual address is IMTCVA.org, but that didn't fit as good as the song that you're going to hear right now. So. So let me play a song for you that I generated for free off of this AI site. So check it out. Here we go.
[00:04:00] I am t c is where you should be. Waste your money on college and you will see. Mom and dad are brainwashed for 100 years when all they will be paying for is my food and my beers. Student debt will help me till I'm nice. Maybe then I'll know what I want to be. The main skill I'll learn is how to properly test the whole deal. And the instructors are a giant scam fest. The books they sell me are quite worthless. One more fee and I'll be homeless, they say. My degree will bring me big bucks. But I see all the grads working at Starbucks. I. Guess that's what employers teaming with these BS courses. I may as well join a band. I am. Tech is where I'm gonna be. I'm g. C is where I'm gonna be. I am t, C is where I'm gonna be. I'm t. C is where I'm gonna be. The books they sell me are quite worthless. One more thing and I'll be homeless. They say my degree will bring me big bucks. But I see all the grads working at Starbucks. I. Need to employers demand where these BS courses. I may as well join a band. I. Need a skill. That's what employers. Demon with BS courses. I may as well join a band. I. Mean it's Discuss what employers demand when the PS courses. I may as well join a v I MTC is where I'm gonna be. I MTC is where I'm gonna be. I'm t.
[00:06:24] Okay, what'd you think of that? That was the first try, folks. It was free. The service that I'm using for this, which could change by the time you listen to this, gives you eight songs a day. A day for free. Alright, so, so. And there's some ungodly amount if you pay there. I think it's ten bucks a month. All right, so let's get into today's topic on getting banned by YouTube. Accidentally. There's quite a few different ways this could happen to you. Now a lot of you have heard about hashtags. Well, there's a thing called hashtag abuse. And right deep in the terms of service, YouTube said, if you use more than 60 hashtags, we're going to eliminate all of them. We're not even going to look at all of them, any of them. All right. So, so don't go crazy on hashtags. And a lot of people that are high up in YouTube are not even using hashtags much at all. All right? So just don't put too many of them. Okay? Next thing is channel security. And this means that you need to lock down your channel because the more successful you are, the more chances that somebody's going to hack it. And so one of the things you can do is to make sure that the email address you used to get your channel is not the same one that you list publicly, because these hackers are slick and just getting your email address is half the battle.
[00:08:07] All they have to do is hack your password and then they can get in there, make you look bad, do really rotten stuff, and you lose the whole channel. And the appeals process is long and arduous and may never even happen because, you know, I heard somewhere that I don't know, 500 hours or 600 hours of content is uploaded every minute on YouTube. So they have to automate this stuff. And if they take you down because it looks something looks bad. Getting to talk to a real person and appeal it is iffy at best. All right, so be careful. Lock down your channel. Okay. Another thing is dangerous content. So if you're promoting stuff that's absolutely could get people killed. That'll probably get you thrown off. Okay. Hate kind of speech will get you thrown off. Another term they have called AI slop. If you're just generating a bunch of crap on AI and throwing it up there and it gives no value to people there, YouTube is is just canceling those channels like crazy. So anytime you put into it was wasted. Now another thing that can happen, this is back to the security thing a little bit. If you get successful, you'll start getting people emailing you to be a sponsor of your channel. Here's the thing. If they send details and attach something like a PDF file, do not open the attachment, email them back and say, hey, could you put all the details in the body of an email? Because a lot of they can fake a PDF file.
[00:09:53] You think PDF files are safe, right? No, they can fake that. And it it infects your computer with bad stuff and then they take over your channel. They download all your Credentials and take over your channel and screw you and you'll get banned because they're not going to do good stuff. Trust me. Okay. There's another thing that you can do is put tags on a video, and supposedly these help YouTube and the algorithm know what your thing is about. But people have been doing what's called tag stuffing in their description by just putting tons and tons and tons of tags in there. Now this can work over at Amazon on a book description. At least in the old days, everything changes folks. So don't do that in your description because you will get that that video could get shut down. And if you do it enough, they'll just kill your channel and ban you. Okay, now be careful of the trading subscribers. See, this used to be a legitimate thing and you'd say, well, that's good. We're you know, we're community. We're helping each other out. Well to YouTube. That's no good anymore. They're you're artificially increasing your subscriber count because like I said, it used to be you could say in a comment, hey, anybody that subscribes to my channel also subscribe to yours.
[00:11:24] And so that's easily detectable now that you're just trading. It's like trading testimonials and, and trading links. That's all been out the window for a long time, but people still have not been taught not to do it. Okay, okay. I told you about hashtag abuse. Um, all right, so let's talk about some niche niches or niches. If you live on the good side of the tracks that can get, uh, you banned, well, these faceless AI voiceover videos that are just crapola, uh, YouTube is canceling them like crazy. You still. Now there's legitimate faceless videos out there, but if you're just generating everything on AI with some kind of voiceover and just a bunch of crap visuals, then that's getting, you know, getting kicked out. Uh, I told you about AI slop, right? So if you're just lazing out and trying to automate everything and just throwing up a bunch of AI crap, no, that's not gonna fly. Let's see. Um, celebrity gossip. Now, there's nothing wrong with celebrity gossip, but there's been so much where they're just lying about what the celebrity said. They're faking putting the celebrity's picture and making it say things that they didn't say, so that those sites are getting canceled like crazy.
[00:12:58] There's even ones with police body cams that people were editing them to make the result of whatever happened in that incident? Not really what happened? You know, with fake editing. So, you know. Nothing wrong with police body cam footage as long as it it's not fraudulent in that the deceptive editing part of it. So don't do that. Compilations. This is where you just grab everybody else's video, put them together and add your own. Now there is a, a type that's very popular and where you can get away with compiling other people's stuff is by giving your own unique commentary and not just playing things for 20 minutes and then saying, oh, that was something, wasn't it? That's not good enough. You have to stop it, comment on it, put your own take on things, ask for people's feedback, what they think about it, you know. So that's called fair use. But if you just use other people's stuff and then just say two words about it. That's not going to fly. That's getting taken down. There's another one called True Crime, which if it is true. Fine. No problem. But if it's fictional, you must make sure people know that it's fiction. You got to put disclaimers on it and stuff, because people are just making up stories like revenge stories and all these stories, and people think that they're true and that's that's fraudulent.
[00:14:37] You're misleading the public. And the same thing with celebrity gossip is like fake news and political stuff where it's clearly you. Well, it might not be clear that's why they're taking them down, because you can make up a piece of news, which used to be, oh, geez, that's really something that was believable. But nowadays there's so much thing that's just made up. Google and Amazon, not Amazon, but YouTube, they want they have to keep their quality up or their advertisers will go away and then the money goes away. So that's why they're not creating. They're knocking this stuff down. And some of these channels have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, but that literally is a drop in the bucket to YouTube and Google. If it makes them look bad and they lose advertisers. So no one person can get away with this stuff. And the other one, which is funny for me because it's to make money stuff, make money online stuff especially. And there's nothing wrong with teaching people how to make money online. But we, you know, we kind of suspect or I suspect that the Federal Trade Commission, you know, years ago came out with, you know, putting financial figures in and saying that, oh, you'll do this and make $300 an hour, You know. So these sites have been getting canned like crazy and very popular ones with lots of subscribers and lots of views.
[00:16:17] But it's they may, you know, Google and YouTube may be getting pressure to, you know, get rid of them or get fines from the Federal Trade Commission. So, I mean, I don't know that for sure. I'm just that's something that I would think is happening because, you know, the more, you know, the more views and the more subscribers is all good for Google. So like I said, it has to be something important that hurts them or might hurt them for them to take stuff down. And so it doesn't mean you can't teach people how to make money online. It just means that you can't in the titles and the descriptions say, make false claims and that kind of stuff of, uh, no work and make $1 million a year, you know, so it's just that's going to get, get you shut down in a hurry. So there's a bunch of niches and of course, anything sexual. You know, there's they have their rules on what can be seen on a YouTube video. And, and you've got to be really careful with anything with regard to kids because that's, uh, you know, that's a no no there. It's really, really cracking down on anything for kids. Even when you upload a video, you have to say, is this made for children or not? You know? So I say no, and I have nothing to do with creating content for children.
[00:17:39] Uh, not that you can't and make a lot of money at it, but like I said, you've got to be extremely careful of what you do for children. All right. So there's some things that will get you banned. Hope you like the song and, uh, sign up for the AI summit. And like I said, my session alone is going to give you 75 things you could do with no technical skill. That'll just, you'll just be amazed. You'll see examples of, uh, I just thought up an idea and there it turned into a picture and a video, all super high quality for sometimes pennies like book covers cost me $0.03 and about 30s to create book covers. I mean all kinds of stuff like that. So, um, and then if you get that premium pass where you get everything for that, you can watch forever. If you get it through my link, you get a $500 consultation on anything that I'm qualified to talk to you about in a website and social media critique. All right. So and remember, folks, I've been in it since the beginning 32 years. Okay, 32.5 now really. So just might, just might know a few things. All right, well, that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Go to screwthecommute.com/aisummit and I will see you on the next episode. See you later.