How to get access to an old YouTube account
June 9, 2023 11:40 PM   Subscribe

I have a YouTube account that I last uploaded video to 8 years ago - dmaportal.

Somehow, I created a new YouTube account that I didn't realize wasn't that original account, and to which I've been uploading videos since then. The original account still exists but when I realized I had two accounts and tried to move videos from the newer one to the older one, I couldn't get access to the older one. I also couldn't download videos on the older account so as to move them to the newer account. I'm kinda stuck and my older videos are on a kind of zombie account I can't access. How can I get access to the older account, either to move videos into it or move videos out of it? Is there anything I can do? I can't seem to find a customer service number for Google.
posted by CollectiveMind to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)
 
You may want to have a look at the answers to this question regarding downloading the videos.
posted by juv3nal at 12:58 AM on June 10, 2023


If the videos are still public you can at least download them with a tool like yt-dlp and reupload them to your new account. This doesn't require you to have any special access to the old account, and is probably the easiest way forward here. The new videos obviously won't carry the old view counts or comments, and links to the old videos will still point to the old videos.

Regaining access to the old account would likely involve some sort of account recovery process. If the old account was a legacy Youtube account instead of a Google account, you may be able to link that account to your Google account to recover it, assuming you know your old Youtube username and password. Once you regain access to the account, you may be able to transfer the old channel to a new brand account, but I believe it would still show as a separate channel; you would still have to reupload the videos to the other channel to have them grouped there. Still, at minimum you could edit the video descriptions to point to your new channel I suppose.

If the videos are part of a series or grouping, you could add them to a playlist associated with your main channel. There is no requirement that playlists only contain videos from one channel.
posted by Aleyn at 1:18 AM on June 10, 2023 [4 favorites]


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