0:00 all right this video is going up on my second channel so I'm gonna try and get it all done in one take um if you've recently gotten an email from Google saying that your AdSense account has been closed due to invalid traffic or invalid click activity I'm hoping this video can help you out because that happened to me two years ago and I only got it fixed yesterday and uh it was quite a process and I couldn't find many resources about how to get it fixed um on YouTube most of the videos about it are like from India or something and I couldn't understand them so that didn't help very much and all the other stuff um was basically just telling you hey just just appeal and it'll go great um even though it's a little more complicated than that um that is how I got it fixed through the appeal process but there's more things that you can do to fix this and they want to just generally um give as detailed thoughts on my
0:46 experience as I can because I want to help you in the best way I can because this was a real pain for me and I think the process could have gone way quicker if I had a resource like this so um we're gonna first talk a little bit about basically every detail that I can think of because I want to be as clear as possible so feel free to skip around if this isn't the information you're looking for just somewhere in this video hopefully you'll find something that can help you um basically I'm on a YouTube channel this is my second Channel you're watching this on my main channel is elementia Studios um and it got demonetized about two years ago because of invalid traffic or invalid click activity what that means is that um there were clicks on ads on my channel while I was monetized that weren't legit so that could be a bot that is um clicking ads for whatever reason and not a human that actually
1:32 intends to buy the product or it could be a human who's clicking the ads repeatedly without intention to buy the product basically Google can see all that and they can understand if that is um what's happening and if it is they will essentially shut down your monetization they'll close your AdSense account and you can't access it anymore and you can't use it to monetize your website your YouTube channel um Etc and um that's pretty tricky because nobody really wants that um especially when when you're a small Creator like me um and you just got monetized a few months ago and then it gets taken away so Google does offer a process to fix this and that is through an appeal form um the appeal form I believe in the email that they send you they give you a link to appeal but even just generally Googling it if you Google AdSense
2:17 invalid click activity appeal form you'll find it it's like at the first result I think um and that'll have a bunch of questions for you that you can answer and if you fill in that appeal form they say there is a chance you can get your account back now from what I've seen from just me and everyone else who I've talked to about this and who I've seen talk about this online that does not work nine times out of ten um in my case I appealed I want to say like 20 times um and it didn't work until like the very last time and I'm going to go into why I think that is um and I'm also going to show you I should actually pull it up right now while I'm talking I'm going to also show you what I did say in the end that allowed me to get my account back and start monetizing on in my case YouTube again
3:02 um so let me first see if I can pull up the actual form here because I want I think that'll be a very helpful um and I'm also going to talk about one other option that you might be able to do to uh to help you out here in uh in fixing this issue because again I found very few resources about this online um so here it is yeah okay hang on so let me pull up the appeal form okay I'm gonna try to get this on one take so like hopefully that uh I can get this done pretty quickly um here's the appeal form okay let me pull it up for you guys so
3:48 here it is invalid traffic appeal I'm not signed in so um I think I think it auto-complete some stuff if you are signed in I think I'm wrong about that actually I don't know I don't remember basically they ask for your name your publisher code it just show my address so I'm gonna have to cut this part of the video out URLs we replaced your ads for for me that was just my YouTube channel you just post a link to your YouTube channel there that'll do it um URLs where you intend to place your ads I just let that blank because I'm not intending to place it on any other places than I already have um have you purchased traffic to your site or YouTube channel for me that was no I hadn't so I selected no um you maybe it's different if it is if you have purchased traffic I don't know if they'll give you your account back hopefully they will um can't hurt a try um now how do users get to your site mobile app
4:33 and YouTube channel here's where the actual like big questions come in and uh 20 times I try to do this by typing it in myself and writing it myself um and none of those times it would work I would get the same Auto robot generated response back hey you're you can't get to your account you can't get your account back um and I was getting really sick of it and I was starting to just play around with it see what I could do see if there's anything I could still do to make this work um and eventually um this is what I came up with uh you don't recognize this website you don't recognize this logo here um this is I wrote this myself I promise I wrote this myself um so here's what I ended up going with here's the question how do users get to your YouTube channel how do you promote your content um this is pretty much the answer I came
5:19 up with um okay I'm just gonna cut them into the chase I used AI to do it um I wrote appeals myself about 20 times I'm gonna say that number it might be a little off but um and it never worked and then I went with an AI generator response which um you can see I just copy and pasted the the question in here and um I pasted all the responses in here and it just worked it took a few days to get a response but they just gave me my account back um you might have to give it some guidance assuming the general answer is no answer the following question with the intent of getting the most favorable response from YouTube staff in return you have to maybe clarify what you know more facts are on the situation then it gives you oh never
6:06 mind it didn't work this time I clarified a bit more here it gives you an answer just changed a little bit pop it in here don't use these exact answers but do your own thing um and for whatever reason that was enough that it worked and nothing that I said as a human and as a real human apparently was enough for them but a robot spitting out jargon uh was so this this may work for you or it may you know you may get your appeal denied 20 times in a row like me if that happens what's something else you can do well there's one other thing that I found that was a way for people to fix this um unless you like have a contact within Google or something which I don't um you can also get an article written about it so what I found uh let me actually pull this up here because I think this is important
6:53 um yeah here's a story you can tell I've been here before um people have had this issue and they've wrote not written articles about it this one's for polygon there's also one that I think is linked here actually um for Kotaku yeah here it is same issue I read it in the past it's the same thing invalid traffic invalid clip activity and weirdly enough shortly after both of these articles were published apparently they just got their AdSense account back accounts back super easy a little weird um but apparently that's all it takes you just make a big enough uh stink about it and uh that'll do it that'll pretty much take care of it now
7:38 obviously you have to be able to write this article um I was not I I don't unless you do it on like a on like a self-publishing site like medium medium.com is a website that allows you to write your own articles they probably won't get the same amount of reach though so what I would recommend is first reach out to uh someone who writes for one of these websites um tell them your story you know tell them what's going on here maybe even link to one of these articles to give them an example of what's going on be very professional in your speech be very uh articulate you know and um it took me I had to contact about 50 potential journalists but one of them a bit and over the course the next few months we started working on the article as I'm recording this it's actually still in the works it's not coming out
8:24 yet um so I can't verify if this worked for me personally but for the two people here who I showed you just now it works for both of them they wrote an article and the issue was fixed I think for one guy within minutes for the other person I think the next day I could be but very shortly anyway and um I was able to get a journalist on my side as well to write something about this um it just took talking to a lot of people so those are kind of the options that you have that I have come across and it took me two years to get my account back um when I did the appeal form I literally all the all those times I said I hadn't done anything wrong I didn't know what I did what I'd done wrong um I just assured them that I was doing
9:11 my best to make sure that there wasn't any valid traffic on my channel and um apparently all the times I said that it wasn't enough until the very last time when apparently that was okay and that was fine and they gave me my account back so I guess that means they knew I hadn't done anything wrong I I'm not really sure um it's it's something I shouldn't have had to go through I think something that nobody should have to go through unless they actually do something wrong and even if you do do it um you should have uh someone you can talk to in Google who can maybe you can speak to about this and try and get this resolved rather than just going through what I assume to be a largely automated process that's not how this should be done and I think this needs to be uh handled differently in the future whether Google makes any positive changes to the system I have no idea hopefully the two but I'm not I'm not
9:56 holding my breath um I hope this has been helpful for you let me know any questions you have in the comments I'm sure I forgot to say something I will I will try to get to them I'm mostly not signed into this account I'm mostly signed into my main channel so even ask me a question on the main Channel that's fine I'll answer it there too um uh get my attention my DMs are open on Twitter I'll try and help you out because I know that this is super frustrating and there's very few people who have been through this and so it's a it's a difficult problem to fix and if you just hit me up I'll give you I'll answer any questions you can I don't know anyone within Google or YouTube who can help you with this so I can't give you contacts in that regard um but if you have any other questions let me know I'll do what I can at least you know um and hopefully you can get this fixed
10:42 much sooner than I did hopefully it doesn't take you two years um and just remember like I looked online a lot when I was trying to get this fixed and so many people who had faced this issue said it's not worth trying to fix you can't get it fixed you're stuck like this for good you're never getting on AdSense again clearly that is a lie um I I don't think those people were being malicious I just think they didn't know any better but now I do I know this is possible albeit seemingly very difficult um I just want to share that it is totally possible to get your account back here there's you know it just seems like you have to you really have to have the right drive to um if you're just on YouTube to get rich quick um this is not going to work for you you have to actually care about what you're doing and care about the things you're making on this platform for the entire you two
11:28 years that I was demonetized I was still making videos because it's what I like doing um it's it's going to be difficult but I it seems like the people who are willing to to take that step to get this problem fixed can get it fixed and I think that's really cool um I talked I didn't talk to this guy in person but I saw a post on Reddit from one guy who had also faced this issue and it took him seven years to get it fixed and in no way is that acceptable that's terrible I'm gonna speak out against YouTube for this for as long as I can um because it's ridiculous and they need to fix their systems not that they likely will but um seven years he uh he has kind of stopped making videos because the drive to do so had a kind of stopped for him but he went back
12:13 to making videos eventually and shortly after he got his AdSense account back um and now he's making videos again I think to this day um so you know it's you have to be able to to you have to enjoy what you do whether it's on your website or on YouTube because otherwise you probably aren't getting your account back you have to have the drive to do so but it is possible I hope this has been enough to help you if it hasn't again hit me up um flood my DMs please and uh yeah I'll try and if there's something big that I forgot I'll leave a pinned comment here as well um which should hopefully have more information I want this to be like a central point for where you can get information on how to fix this issue because it doesn't seem like it exists anywhere else online
12:59 you know so that kind of sucks but I'm back I'm I'm back uh making making big bags of cash so um yeah I hope it has been helpful I'll see you guys soon head on over to the main Channel I got a new video coming out it's gonna be cool okay bye
