YouTube Terminates Kurdish Channels Over Shared AdSense Accounts
Despite the setbacks, the creators have managed to restore one channel with over 147,000 subscribers after discussions with YouTube. Talks are ongoing in the hopes of recovering more accounts.
ERBIL (Kurdistan24) – YouTube has terminated at least 20 channels from the Kurdistan Region in the past week, citing their connection to a shared monetization account. The move has sparked outrage among local content creators, who argue the action is unfair.
The first termination occurred on Sept. 17, when a channel was shut down after receiving a copyright strike for posting a video about solving a Rubik’s Cube.
This channel was linked to numerous other Kurdish YouTubers through a shared AdSense account—Google’s advertising platform that allows creators to earn money by displaying ads on their content. In the days that followed, between 20 and 25 additional channels were terminated for their association with the shared account, despite not having committed any copyright violations themselves.
Kurdish YouTuber Mabast Bahaadin, known as Mabast King on YouTube, where he has over 300,000 subscribers, described the termination to Kurdistan24.
“YouTube has closed 20 channels because one of these channels received three copyright penalties, while the others were terminated due to their connections with the offending channel,” Bahaadin told Kurdistan24, stressing that the terminated channels produced diverse content.
Collectively, the removed accounts had more than two million subscribers, with the largest channel boasting over 400,000 followers and the smallest around 100,000.
Despite the setbacks, the creators have managed to restore one channel with over 147,000 subscribers after discussions with YouTube. Talks are ongoing in the hopes of recovering more accounts.
They are hopeful that additional channels will be reinstated as they continue to engage with YouTube's support team. The incident has raised concerns about the platform's policies and the potential for collateral damage when enforcing copyright rules.
YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform owned by Google. Founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen—former employees of PayPal—YouTube is headquartered in San Bruno, California. It is the second-most-visited website in the world, following Google. As of January 2024, YouTube boasts over 2.7 billion monthly active users, who together watch more than one billion hours of video each day.
