Twitter isn’t the only social media service that you can get verified on — it’s also possible to get your YouTube account verified. Verification can be a great way to establish yourself as a creator, influencer, brand, or business. Verification badges don’t get you exclusive access to extra features on YouTube, but it is more of a way to make sure that you’re watching videos from the right person.
It’s difficult to “spoof” an already established account on YouTube, but there are folks out there who will try to steal videos and pose as other accounts. In an extreme case, someone could download PewdiePie’s videos and upload them to their own spoof account of PewdiePie to try and make money, but with that verification badge, you can tell which account is real and which is fake.
So if you think verification could be useful to you on YouTube, follow along below and we’ll show you how you can get that verification badge on your YouTube account.
Do you need verification?
The first question to ask yourself is whether or not you need verification. Verification is there to prevent people from impersonating or spoofing established accounts. A verification badge next to the channel name indicates that you’re watching content from the correct account. However, not everyone can submit a request for verification.
In order to even be able to submit a request for verification, you need to have at least 100,000 subscribers on your YouTube channel. Once you do, you can submit a request for verification, YouTube will review your request, and may or may not deny it. You’ll have to provide them with a bunch of information, such as supporting documents to prove your identity.
How To Get Verified
So, you’ve decided that you need to get verified on YouTube. How exactly do you that? It’s a fairly easy process. First, you need to be logged in with the proper Google account attached to your YouTube account. This is how Google automatically determines if you’re even eligible to make a verification request.
You can learn all about the verification badge on the Google Support page here. This is also where Google will give you a link to start the verification form, that is, if it sees your account has 100,000 subscribers or more.
Before you start the verification process, you need to make sure there is strong evidence that the channel is yours.
- First, there must be NO copyright content on your channel. If your channel is found to have copyright content — even after verification — the verification badge is removed and you have a strike against you.
- Your channel can also contain no spam content.
- There should also be no content ID issues on your channel. Content ID is a way for copyright owners to essentially watch their content that is uploaded to YouTube. If strict copyright content is uploaded on your channel, there’s a copyright issue, and a dispute is usually automatically started to get it taken down.
- Public Videos — your videos need to be public. YouTube will not start the verification process for channels that keep their videos private.
- 100,000 Subscribers — as we already mentioned, you have to have at least 100,000 people subscribed to your channel before you can even put in a request for verification.
Once you have all of this in order, all you need is your custom ID and the channel that you want to verify. You can start the process over at the Google Support page we linked earlier.
Keep in kind that only Google/YouTube can approve/deny verification requests, and thus, they have the final say.
Revoking Verification
In some cases, YouTube will revoke your verification badge after being approved. This can be for a number of reasons, but they’ll usually notify you why.
You can keep your verification badge, even if the people subscribed to your channel increase or decrease. However, if you violate community guidelines or have a strike against you for some reason or another, that badge can be removed. If you change your channel name that badge is removed, although YouTube automatically starts the re-verification process again, and if they deem that there’s strong evidence that the channel is yours, they’ll re-verify it.
Verdict
As you can see, the process to get verified on YouTube is actually quite difficult. It’s pretty hard to obtain 100,000 subscribers, so there’s not going to be a whole lot of people actually submitting verification requests. However, once you reach that 100,000 mark, YouTube makes it fairly easy to submit the form to have your channel verified.