So YouTube has cancelled me.  Your friendly neighborhood ex-Muslim.  What do I mean by that? I mean that I have been permanently kicked out of the YouTube Partner Program. So this means no more ad income.  Not on any of my old videos, nor on any new videos. Forever.  And there is no way to get it back.

I would be lying if I said I didn’t care.  I am extremely disappointed that this happened.  I got a strike back in October. I waited 90 days and the strike has now been removed.  But when I asked YouTube yesterday, they said that the type of strike I received makes me de-eligible to reapply to the program. The ad income, superchats, all of it was part of the dream to make this full-time.  This is a huge setback. 

So you might think “Okay, I get why they are doing no ads as they don’t want to offend any advertisers.”  Even though this isn’t the case considering most of the videos I upload are manually checked for ad sensitivity and approved, and that a lot of my content is pretty vanilla, we can at least understand this thinking. But guess what?  No more donations i.e. superchats.  No more channel memberships. The members I had supporting me had their memberships cancelled. So even fans who want to support the content financially are not able to On this platform

That really stings.  It stings because I have been very careful over the last 5 years to be the friendly guy, the one who especially ensures to fight against bigotry consistently so that my videos are not used to demonize anyone unfairly, especially Muslims.  

Not only that, if you compare my channel to what we find on Islamic channels, where they are “proud of that”, meaning proud of the fact that apostates should be executed, that its okay to beat your wife under certain conditions, that slavery is perfectly moral, marrying a 9 year old, hell even that is okay, and that women’s intelligence is half of men and so on.. my content is pretty mild. I stand up for the rights of all people, even people who want me dead.  

Where does that leave me?  It means my 300 or so videos I have already posted over the last 5 years will receive no ad income. No ads on any of them.  Thousands of hours of effort.  And the ad income is important you know why? Because not everyone can afford to donate. This is one way to support your content creators. By watching the ads on their channel and buying the products advertised.  It’s an important source of income that’s gone now.

I have requested YouTube to reconsider this decision but unfortunately they will not as I deleted the video in question.

If you didn’t follow the story, this happened back in October when I uploaded a short 2minute clip “Tribute to Ghazi Zaheer Hassan Mahmood Attari” that had a nasheed and hearts and a picture of the Pakistani man who stabbed two people in France to test the song for copyright.  This was a mistake on my part but the bigger mistake was then deleting it. I was not aware that when you delete a video, any strike you receive becomes permanent and cannot be undone.  This sealed my fate.

At this point, there is nothing else I can do to challenge the decision from YouTube. They frankly don’t care, even if you have 50,000 subs.  There is no way to appeal this. 5 years of effort in building a channel down the drain.  

I cant sue them either as some of you have suggested.  In order to get into their partner program, you have to agree to their conditions. Which means they can kick you out for any reason whatsoever and there’s nothing you can do.  You just have to accept it.  It’s truly messed up that so many years of work can be destroyed in one second like that. And that there’s nobody that can help you fix it. 

I’ve never bothered putting the videos on another platform as for the most part YouTube has been good to me and never took down any of my content. Even if I do mirror the content elsewhere, it still doesn’t solve the monetization problem, as only YouTube can really do this ad thing well because their content is heavily controlled.  Having a more open platform conflicts with the goal of getting advertiser income. So that’s the dilemma. 

So now I have really only one option:  Focus on building my new channel – Abdullah Sameer Clips.  I’m at 5000 subs already, so that’s a good start! 

And for my patrons, especially the ones donating every month, I am extremely grateful. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. My team also thanks you for making it possible to hire them. We will keep bringing out quality content together despite this setback.

And to my dear subscribers, please subscribe to the new channel. I will be uploading all my new videos to that channel going forward until further notice. This is the only way forward now.

This really sucks, but it’s not the end of the world. I will not let this kill me. I will move forward with growing the team, producing quality content, and grow the new channel to not just 55,000 subscribers but 100,000.

This is your friendly neighborhood ex-Muslim signing off.