Vihart channel, 2009 - 2025: History of a Partnership (Patreon)

The short version:

My videos aren't on YouTube anymore, and won't be coming back. But you can still find them on Vimeo for free, without ads and with no signup required. I may add other places in the future.

My vimeo page is here: vimeo.com/vihart

I think it's easiest to find stuff in this collections view: https://vimeo.com/vihart/albums/sort:date/format:thumbnail

Y'all here on Patreon have been covering the cost of this every year for almost a decade, which is about $400 a year for a channel of my size. During this time Vimeo has been reliably hosting over one hundred of my videos without trouble or drama.

In the past couple months I've also uploaded the rest of my backlog, including the weird vihartvihart ones and others people have let me know were missing. There's 158 videos on there now, and I bet there's at least one you haven't seen before!

Thank you for your support in making all of this possible.

The medium version:

I don't agree to YouTube's current terms of service, and when you don't agree to a website's terms of service the only legal and correct response is to not do business with that website, right?

Even if that means deleting a YouTube channel with over one million subscribers that you've labored over for 15 years, right?

Right.

And so I've done that.

To be clear: my channel and 2nd channel are not hidden or dormant. They're permanently deleted.

I know many of you hope for a deeper explanation, because you're invested in this too. So let me do my best to describe what a 15 year partnership with YouTube is worth.

1. youtube.com/vihart, June 2009 - May 2025

I started my channel in 2009 and was first accepted into the YouTube partner program in 2010. I remember reading the terms of service back in those days, and as I recall, the terms made sense to me. YouTube can't legally show your videos on its website unless you grant it a license that applies in a number of situations. The license is non-exclusive, it's revokable, everything looked good.

What I cared most about was making sure I was still the one that owned my content. In my life I've been handed more than one agreement that tried to decide that everything I made belonged to someone else, and I don't sign those. But with YouTube, worst case I just take my stuff off the site.

Sounded simple enough, in 2010.

That year I was putting most of my effort into a math blog people seemed to like. I went to math and computer science conferences, wrote papers and presented them like a normal academic, and sometimes people even paid me to give talks about fun math topics to more general audiences.

That seemed like a promising direction at the time, and I made the bulk of my living off of speaking fees for a while. But I was struggling.

In late 2010 I posted the first few videos in the "Doodling in Math Class" series, which I thought would only be of interest to the niche academic audience of my blog, just like the other videos I'd posted since June 2009. I vastly underestimated how many people secretly like math whether they know it or not---the series took off and became my first viral success.

In those days 100k views was impressive enough to get me a profile in the New York Times. They wanted to send out a photographer to take a picture of me in my studio. I did not have a studio. They wanted to interview me in my studio. I still didn't have a studio. I recommended we meet over lunch at a local restaurant instead, and I don't know how it all turned out so well, but probably Kenneth Chang is good at his job.

This article was a big deal for me. It's not just the New York Times, it's my local paper---the one me and my family grew up reading and doing the crossword in, the one we wrapped our birthday presents in, the one that could turn into anything just by tearing it into strips and dipping it in a big bowl of flour and water to create home-made papier-mâché.

I know the sound and smell and feel of that paper. I remember learning to be snobby about the fact that inferior papers like Newsday were in color to try to appeal to the masses, but the Times was a classy and respectable paper that only printed serious news and only in black and white.

In 2010 I remember looking at that paper and, out of all the thoughts and feelings I had about this whole surreal experience, being glad that my photo was printed in proper black and white on page 3, not in garish color like the border collie that beat me to the front page of the technology section.

Times change. Numbers go up. Enough doors opened for me that I eventually found one I was interested in walking through, and in late 2011 I moved to Mountain View where I eventually found a successful career as a technology researcher.

I don't remember when I reached one million subscribers. 2014, maybe? By then I was over the YouTube numbers game to the point that I didn't even want the golden play button (a big, heavy award given out to channels that reach the 1M milestone). To this day, I never asked for it.

Numbers go up. It is now 2025, and yesterday I had 1.5M subscribers, 150M views, 150 videos.

Today I have zero views, zero subscribers, zero videos.

In the real world, numbers have limits.

People do too.

2. The Camel's Back Isn't Broken Yet, So Why Is It Getting Slower?

There's been a number of YouTube policies I've disagreed with over the years, but usually only to the point of lowering my investment of time and energy. The more hostile the platform feels, the less sense it makes to spend weeks or months of my life to create another video to feed to it.

For an early example, remember Google+? The social network Google tried to make be a thing back in 2011, because Google wanted a facebook competitor?

People didn't want to use it, so in 2013 they forced integration with YouTube to make people use it. You could temporarily refuse the integration pop-up dialogue box every time you entered your account, but in the mean time you couldn't moderate your channel, post comments, use analytics features, etc, until you gave in and connected the accounts. Or accidentally clicked on the popup.

By that point I'd been posting videos for years! How can I trust a platform when they repay such a long-term investment by leveraging it to try to force me to use a terrible social media platform destined to fail?

I didn't delete my channel over it, but it sure made YouTube feel like a less good place to be.

Most people aren't stubborn to the extreme where they will spend years doing the things you needed to do to avoid that particular tech integration, and I'm not recommending anyone be like me. I'm the kind of person who, if I were in charge of the Times, probably would've had it stubbornly printing in black and white until I ran it into the ground.

But in this case, I was vindicated. I held out until Google+ finally admitted failure in 2015 and ended the integration.

I watched its demise with grim satisfaction. I was prepared to hold out for the rest of my life, but I did not expect to win.

You know what? Scratch what I said earlier about the value of stubbornness. They should've put me in charge of the Times.

For another example, around that time TED decided they were the copyright holder of one of my videos. They started putting advertisements on that video and collecting the revenue. This was because someone showed that video in a TED Talk, and TED owns the TED Talk, therefore TED owns my video, according to the logic of YouTube's ContentID system.

Fighting off TED's false copyright claim didn't return me the revenue TED had taken while they were advertising on my video. They kept the money, as is standard whenever this happens. Fighting the claim just made it so that I could once again have that particular video be ad-free, and not let TED grab even more money.

Doesn't exactly make me want to post more often, but I wasn't gonna delete my channel over it. And my energy and peace is worth more to me than whatever pennies I could make trying to chase down TED to threaten legal action if they don't send me the ad money they took. I suppose it would've been within my rights to copyright claim TED's video in return, but I cannot begin to describe how wholly uninterested I am in playing that game.

Moving on to a more recent example of a policy disagreement, Google has sold/used my videos for AI, and I don't like that. This really shouldn't be considered legal under any interpretation of the terms of service, in my expert opinion as a mathematician and tech researcher who understands how AI works.

It's not something I would've agreed to if YouTube's intent was made explicit. It's content theft, and in this house we don't uncritically repeat propaganda about AI being a "legal grey area". It's really not, except for in the same way that every kind of theft is a legal grey area when you've got a good enough lawyer.

Maybe for a different me with a different channel, stealing my stuff for AI and trying to justify it with the terms of service would be one step too far. Maybe I would remove everything from YouTube out of principle. But I have higher principles, including that I want my videos available for free without ads where students and teachers can find them.

So that was one of many times I didn't delete my channel, but that I did lose another chunk of motivation to ever touch the platform again.

This is still only the medium-length version of my YouTube history, so we'll leave out almost everything. There's a ton of reasons why I never wanted to go full-time YouTuber, and a lot of them come down to the kind of person I am.

I'm an artist. I make what wants to be made. I care about where my work lives and breathes. I care about the people that live and breathe with it. There are things I'll compromise for money, but not that.

3. Real Partnerships

My experience with YouTube didn't stay online.

At the end of 2011 I moved to Mountain View to join Khan Academy. I coordinated with YouTube to help organize the first YouTube EDU Summit in 2012, and as part of that Khan Academy sponsored a contest to support new EDU creators, a couple of whom have gone on to become successful.

In 2014 I became a Principle Investigator at SAP Labs, and my team built the first web player for VR video. A team at Google became interested, and we were allowed to share all our code and designs and feedback, so we did. We later collaborated with that team on an industry event for spherical video at Vidcon 2015. In their words, my team was "instrumental in the launch and early success of 360 video on YouTube."

There's a lot of memories here, a lot of things that come to mind when I think about my relationship with YouTube/Google over the years. I've probably been to visit their offices in person at least a dozen times, and their employees have visited me at least as often, about these and other projects. These were actual partnerships, with people who care, working together toward common goals. I like almost everyone I've ever hung out with at YouTube and Google.

Meanwhile, on the YouTube platform, my status as a "YouTube Partner" is left up to an automated system that doesn't know anything about my actual history with the company. On YouTube, partnership feels like an adversarial relationship. Everyone is fighting against the algorithm, against demonetization, against changing policies, with no ability to negotiate.

I eventually drew away from YouTube pretty much entirely, both as an industry collaborator and for posting videos. But I'm proud of the videos I've made. I was content to let my backlog continue to exist where people could find it, and to simply not have to personally engage with the platform if I didn't want to. Maybe post once a year on Pi Day, maybe not.

Unfortunately, due to one of those many terms of service changes that happened over the years, my channel is not allowed to simply sit around remaining as it was.

4. Losing Partnership Status and "Monetization"

So here's the acute reason that I deleted my channel:

I got a notification last month that I needed to post within 30 days, or else YouTube would remove me as a partner.

This is more coercive than it might sound if you haven't kept up to date with the terms of service. Because partner status affects monetization status, and monetization doesn't mean what it used to mean.

In colloquial contexts, "monetization" and "demonetization" is used to describe whether a video has ads on it and is making ad money. Creators might also use "demonetized" to mean that a video has been claimed by another copyright holder who is now putting ads on the video and getting the ad revenue.

But at the channel level, "monetized" means the creator has any options regarding ads at all. If they choose ads, they have some control over the type of ads, and they split the revenue unevenly with YouTube.

The important thing is this: for a channel to NOT have ads, the channel needs to be monetized.

If a channel loses monetization, YouTube can put ads on it and take 100% of the revenue. For the creator that's functionally like having the entire channel be copyright claimed by Google.

In my case, having partnership status means I can monetize my channel into being ad-free. Losing partnership status means YouTube grabs monetization of my channel for itself. YouTube can put whatever ads it wants on my videos, taking all the revenue. I don't agree to that.

And it's happened to me before.

In 2023 I lost partnership status not because of lack of posts, but because I hadn't signed the latest update to the terms of service. Yep, my bad. I saw the email, said "I don't have time to read through this right now," and forgot about it.

When YouTube started putting ads on my channel, I didn't notice for months, until someone made a comment referencing an ad they'd seen on my video. I was confused, looked into it, and found out that a terms of service update in 2010 made it so that they could put ads on non-partnered channels. Which I now was. And because I had YouTube Premium and pay not to see ads, I couldn't see that for most people my own videos were covered in them.

Once I'd regained monetization, I decided not to take the ads down right away so that I could get some hard numbers on what the revenue looked like.

I now know that even without the view spike from posting new videos, and even without any other weird random algorithmic spikes, my channel can passively generate ad revenue in the low hundreds of dollars every month, split unevenly between myself and YouTube. If my channel were truly inactive, that's what I'd expect it to make.

But I had posted in that time. In fact, in order to be eligible to re-apply for partnership, I needed to post, and those spikes in views were monetized entirely by Google. From the data I got later, I estimate that in those months Google pulled in thousands of dollars advertising on my channel, and I didn't see a cent of it.

But even the $100 of a slow month isn't a throwaway amount of money. I can say no to it if the alternative is vampirizing the attention of thousands of students in a way that feels gross to me, but it's still $100. Enough that it would be a big deal to me if someone were taking it behind my back, and very much more so if they're doing that while selling my viewers' attention to the highest bidder.

Perhaps I could avoid being subjected to the next ad-grab by simply posting within the time limit, because hey, it can be garbage slop that I delete later, so what's the big deal? That would buy me almost another half a year. And it doesn't even need to be a real video, it could be a short, or a community post. I can be careful to never miss the deadline and to never miss another terms of service update email and always agree. I could just push the problem back year after year with half-assed garbage until they finally pry my garbage slop channel from my cold dead hands.

I know there's a lot of people who, in this situation, would just suck it up and commit to posting regularly for the rest of their lives. Or leave it alone, because most people don't really care about advertising. I can't say that's the wrong choice for them. But I can't agree to what I don't agree to.

5. Due Diligence

But wait! Could it really be this bad? What if YouTube made a mistake?

Perhaps when they set up this automated process for "inactive" channels, they weren't considering the implications. Maybe they intended it to catch new partners that tried YouTubing for a while and then left the platform, leaving a tiny channel that would make pennies a year, not worth the cost of even a bank transfer.

I had 1.5M subscribers. I've posted 150+ videos. Most of my videos are evergreen, with people coming back to watch multiple times over the years, for nostalgia or to teach the next generation. The views and comments roll in every day. Surely if someone from YouTube knew that this "inactive" label was also catching beloved OG educational channels who have earned their retirement, they would realize the policy is bad.

Could there be even a slim chance of that?

And that is why I spent a very annoying week doing my due diligence with YouTube partner support. I would've been happy to help them write a better policy that doesn't appear quite so blatantly like they're grabbing what they think they can get away with the moment the owner's back is turned.

I did not give up when the first 4 responses read like they were written by AI. Eventually I managed to Karen myself up to a manager, at which point I was personally assured that after a careful review it has been decided that this policy does apply to my channel and that "it's important to maintain a healthy, active ecosystem of channels."

Healthy? No, not for me.

I like to think that maybe they'll eventually rethink this policy, but I'm making my escape.

I've tried to leave the right way. I paid for a service to scrape hundreds of thousands of public comments people have left over the years, because it would be a shame to lose those too. I've downloaded the analytics that I can. I've puzzled over the bugginess of Google Takeout. I hope I've done it right.

If this were over a decade ago when I was at my YouTube peak, when I knew important people and collaborated with YouTube in real life, back when you could take the slide from the 2nd to 1st floor of YouTube HQ... if this were back in those days maybe I'd email Susan Wojcicki directly and see if we can't at least get YouTube EDU excepted from these toxic ad-grabby slop-first policies. But YouTube EDU is basically dead. And Susan is dead. And times change.

6. A Note On The Timing

Because I know this has been a point of ambiguity for some, I want to make clear that YouTube considering me "inactive" would have happened with or without the statement I made in solidarity with trans people a couple months ago. It's just a coincidence of timing.

For those who weren't following: for a while after the US presidential inauguration, the only video visible on my YouTube channel was "On Gender," a video I posted ten years ago. I did not want to post a new video in response to political news, I wanted to stand by an old statement that I continue to believe in.

Some people saw the missing videos and perceived it as "taking down my channel", but I didn't. I just temporarily hid most of my videos. I could have put it all back up with the click of a button, maintaining all my views, all my comments, all my subscribers. And briefly, I did.

If you're wondering whether taking down 99% of my backlog might put my channel below the engagement thresholds for partnership eligibility or something like that, the answer is nope! If I were applying for a YouTube partnership today (well, yesterday), I would've met the engagement thresholds. Even with only one decade-old video up.

Because that one video is a good video, and still relevant, maybe more relevant than ever. It was still being viewed, commented on, shared. I certainly did not consider my channel "inactive" during that time. A channel only needs one video when the video is that good, if I may give my humble opinion.

In a way, the timing was great for me. I'd just gone through my recent backlog and made a ton of progress on transferring videos to Vimeo that hadn't made it the last time I'd gone through, so that people could still find them while I was making my minimalist statement of solidarity. It was only afterwards that I got that 30 day notice, and 30 days would not be enough time to do everything if I were starting from scratch, so I guess it all worked out.

Though I also wish I could have let that statement stand.

7. Closing Thoughts

This inactive channel ad-grab situation was the first thing I absolutely couldn't compromise on, but given the trend of the past 15 years there's a fair chance that if it wasn't this it'd be something else eventually, because I'm fundamentally at odds with YouTube's business model.

The only obligation YouTube ever had to host my videos for free without ads was their former commitment to YouTube EDU, investing in making YouTube appear like a legitimate place to learn, and the common wisdom used to be that legitimate places to learn don't make students watch ads for weight loss pills and get-rich-quick schemes.

But why would that continue?

No one questions going to YouTube to find educational materials, anymore. Students check their phones while they're waiting for the teacher to click "skip" on the pre-roll. The whole thing is routine.

But I'm not confused about who this decision is for. It's for myself and my peace.

I know I'm not protecting the students of the world from something they care about, when I clutch my pearls about their precious eyeballs potentially being subjected to visions of anti-aging supplements. If my video doesn't have ads, the next one will.

If I made my videos with the intention of them being educational, rather than as art that happens to do math to people, maybe I'd be making different choices here. There is no arguing that in the short term, taking down my channel makes my videos less accessible.

I do feel a little bad about that. But that's somewhat offset by feeling like maybe it's good for us to get jostled out of our online content learned helplessness. Just because something isn't on YouTube doesn't mean it doesn't exist, and just because Google isn't giving you helpful search results doesn't mean it's not out there somewhere on a competitor's website.

It's still possible to have boundaries against corporate greed, even in 2025.

I thought I would have more emotions about hitting that delete button and seeing that blank page.

But I feel... content.

🐌