Apestyles loses his YouTube channel
10,000 subscribers and years of work are gone in an instant, with no explanation, for one of the biggest streamers in poker.
One of the most prolific poker players and streamers, Jonathan 'apestyles' Van Fleet, has seen his popular YouTube channel vanish seemingly into thin air.
He reached out to YouTube last week after the 10,000+ subscriber channel was deleted:
Hi @teamyoutube It appears the email associated w/ my YouTube acct (~10,000 subscribers) has been deleted. I have no path to recovery. Could you let me know what steps I need to take to rectify this and recover my channel.
Lots of hours of hard work has gone into that channel. pic.twitter.com/MmcEPbfo37
— Jonathan Van Fleet (@apestyles) February 8, 2023
I did not manually delete my channel. Can you have someone contact me in DMs to sort this out @TeamYouTube ? https://t.co/e57qa5DX23
— Jonathan Van Fleet (@apestyles) February 9, 2023
If you are an up-and-coming YouTuber you may find it very disheartening to discover how difficult it has been for a prominent poker streamer to get this addressed. Van Fleet has been banging his head against a brick wall publicly with YouTube support to no avail. He has also had a number of poker content creators appealing on his behalf with no success.
I'm pretty bummed. Got a message from @TeamYouTube that made it pretty clear that don't know what's going on with my YouTube channel nor have they spent much time looking into it.
Losing years worth of work really sucks. Halp!
— Jonathan Van Fleet (@apestyles) February 9, 2023
At the start of the year this writer predicted that YouTube would overtake Twitch as the main streaming platform for poker, following the Lex Veldhuis move onto the platform. This, however, is a very bad advert for the platform for any other poker streamer wanting to make the move.
Have you seen this happen to any other prominent YouTubers? Let us know in the comments:
