The YouTube "guru" crackdown

Over the past few weeks I’ve heard from multiple people that they’ve had some of their YouTube videos randomly get taken down overnight.

The first text was from one of my friends with over 100k subscribers who sent me this:

Since he’s pretty well known in his industry, I initially suspected this was a salty competitor who was mass reporting to try to get his channel restricted.

But then I took a closer look at the warning:

This was my first time ever seeing a community guidelines warning like this.

Within the next few days my Twitter feed was filled with stories of people who had videos removed for no apparent reason:

The common denominator between all these examples was that the titles followed the format of “how to make $x in y timeframe.”

My thesis is that YouTube isn’t so much bothered by the large numbers as they are with the "expectation” attached to it.

The warning above states that YouTube doesn’t like claims about getting rich FAST.

Regardless, it’s clear that they have some beef with the internet money space.

And if this trend continues, this could DRASTICALLY change the YouTube meta when it comes to titles/thumbnails.

We were already seeing a shift away from the obviously clickbait, non-believable claims about how this “new thing” is going to make you rich in 90 days…

But this might be the nail in the coffin.

In a world where you can’t compete on $ claims anymore, how to you differentiate yourself from everyone else?

After working with clients in pretty much every niche at this point, here’s my take.

1) Continue to lean into financial success, but avoid timeframes like “per day” or “per month”

Like I mentioned earlier, YouTube doesn’t really have an issue with telling people you make money, it’s the promises that they seem to hate

If they were issuing takedowns on the basis of “big numbers” then they’d have to start removing all business/finance content on the platform.

So one of your options is to simply continue leveraging your financial success, but in a more clever way

For example we made a “life story” video for a client a while back titled

“How TikTok Made Me Millions At 23”

IMO the claim here is too vague for YouTube to view that as a threat, and there’s no implication that the viewer is guaranteed to get these same results.

It would be significantly harder for them to take action on a title like this.

2) Focus on evergreen keywords/questions in your niche

Some of the lowest hanging fruit and your best performing videos are literally sitting in the “boring” topics no one in your niche wants to cover.

Most of the time these videos just start with “how to” and don’t require you to make crazy claims since you are just answering a frequently asked question

The videos that rip that hardest are going to be the ones that have high search volume relative to the amount of creators who have made content around the topic

In other words, high demand and low supply

This increases your odds of “ranking” in your niche drastically

Here are a few examples of videos we’ve made for clients that bring in views and calls every day thanks to YouTube search (notice how none have insane income claims)

3) Highlight metrics that you know are important to your ICP that don’t involve $

A few examples that come to mind here

For a trader, highlighting the win rate % of a strategy in your title

For an ads agency, hyping up your CPL/CPC from a certain strategy (ie how I book calls for $7 with IG DM ads)

For Amazon/retail arbitrage, showing the profit margin on an item you can sell for ridiculous markup

I’d argue that this type of packaging might even work better than the classic “make 10k/mo with this” because it’s way more tailored to your ICP and focuses on outcomes they actually care about, ESPECIALLY in sophisticated markets

4) LITERALLY JUST MAKE BETTER CONTENT

This one is pretty straightforward, don’t be a bot.

Most of what I see on my YT home page is uninspired slop or people just now copying stuff that worked 6 months ago

If you can craft a decent story around what it is that you do, learn the basic principles of storytelling, and actually show proof that you do the thing…

You’re already ahead of 90% of people.

But if you truly want to be top 0.1% on YouTube and have a monopoly on your entire niche, you know where to go already.

-Presley

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