--- title: 'Never Do These Things on YouTube — 10 Fatal Channel Mistakes' source: 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=zE7o6gNrosc' video_id: 'zE7o6gNrosc' date: 2026-08-05 duration_sec: 1089 --- # Never Do These Things on YouTube — 10 Fatal Channel Mistakes > Source: [Never Do These Things on YouTube — 10 Fatal Channel Mistakes](https://youtube.com/watch?v=zE7o6gNrosc) ## Summary The video, presented by Valentin, a YouTuber with 6 years of experience and over $50,000 in earnings, outlines the 10 most fatal mistakes that content creators make on YouTube. It emphasizes the importance of organic growth, niche focus, competitor analysis, and avoiding common pitfalls like fake views, copyright infringement, and neglecting security. The video aims to help both beginners and experienced creators protect their channels and achieve long-term success. ### Key Points - **Chasing Fake Views** [01:21] — Engaging in fake engagement (comment spam, view exchanges, buying views) confuses the algorithm and prevents it from identifying the target audience. Real loyalty comes from quality content, not artificial metrics. - **Lack of a Narrow Niche** [04:00] — Creating content across unrelated topics (e.g., football and space news) confuses YouTube's algorithm. A specific niche helps the algorithm understand and promote content to the right viewers. - **Neglecting Competitor Analysis** [05:31] — Regularly analyzing competitors (weekly or more) helps creators stay updated on trends, formats, and optimization strategies. Competitors can serve as a 'beacon' for inspiration and improvement. - **Deleting Videos with Low Views** [07:14] — Deleting videos that don't perform immediately is a mistake. YouTube may promote a video months later; a video can gain traction over time and even become a 'million-dollar hit'. - **Using Others' Content and Music** [08:56] — Using copyrighted material (music, videos, photos) can lead to copyright strikes, especially if a video becomes popular. It's safer to use stock sites and YouTube's own library. - **Stuffing Hashtags and Keywords** [10:44] — Overloading the description with keywords and hashtags makes YouTube treat the channel as spam. Use only 3-5 hashtags and fill the 500-character tag field with relevant keywords. - **Closing Off from Knowledge** [11:26] — Avoiding learning from others and not networking can slow growth. Attending events, finding like-minded people, and learning from others' experiences are crucial for development. - **Being Careless with Security** [13:00] — Linking unverified services, sharing personal email, and falling for phishing scams can compromise the channel. Use separate emails, enable two-step verification, and be vigilant. - **Registering Multiple Channels to One Email** [15:30] — If one channel gets a violation, all channels under the same email may be terminated. Creating a new email for each channel is a simple safeguard. - **Being Obsessed with Analytics** [16:00] — Constantly checking analytics and tweaking titles/descriptions can be counterproductive, especially with low view counts. Focus on creating more content and growing the channel. ### Conclusion Avoiding these 10 fatal mistakes can save creators years of effort and protect their channels. The key is to focus on quality content, understand the algorithm, and prioritize security and continuous learning. ## Transcript YouTube is a platform where we can develop a channel for years, do everything perfectly, but stumble just once and lose everything. And you know what's the worst thing? That almost every newbie content creator makes these mistakes. But not all is lost. And if you have a channel, or you’re just planning to create one, then this video is for you. Today, we'll explore the 10 most common and fatal mistakes people make when running YouTube channels, and together we'll figure out what to do to avoid wasting years of your hard work. My name is Valentin, and it's been 6 years since I created my first YouTube channel, which brought me over $50,000. During this time, I've managed a huge number of niches and gained a wealth of experience in a wide variety of YouTube areas. Now I can confidently say that YouTube has led me to the life of my dreams. I have also trained more than 300 people to make money in this field. But I went through a huge number of difficulties and blocking of the withdrawal channel, monetization, and was a couple of steps away from losing everything I have. Therefore, today I want to protect you from the huge made along this path, and thereby save a huge amount of nerves, time and money. There will be no fluff here, only practice, real stories and I'll give you a very nice bonus that will help everyone who watches this video achieve results on YouTube. Mistake number one is chasing fake views. What do I mean? This can take many different forms. For example, you go to a competitor's comments and start writing: "Check out my channel, like, and support me." Or join groups where you can exchange comments with other channel creators. Or send your video to your loved ones, friends, colleagues, and family for evaluation and viewing. Or, even worse, come and buy promotion for your channel, views, subscribers, and so on. But this is all fake. These are not real views, and you can’t buy viewer loyalty with money or a request . Viewer loyalty is only achieved through good, high-quality content that we create on our channel. And one of the most common mistakes is trying to get your first views in an inorganic and dishonest way in the hopes of getting the channel going and getting it on track. But, as a rule, this only confuses the algorithm and prevents it from understanding who our target viewer is. Imagine you shared a video with your friend and launched my YouTube channel, and if you watch it to the end, you'll give me a grow." And he is your good friend. Of course, he will watch it, like it, write a comment, forward it to his friends, and this will give us maximum next video, YouTube will naturally want to promote it. And the first thing he will do is show the video to those who have already watched it [music] and watched it the best way for the longest time. Of course , it will be your friend who, out of respect for you, created a 100% retention rate for you on the video. Do you think he will click on it in the recommendations? Unlikely, simply because he is not the not interested. Also any inflated views. Also, any person from any mutual subscription groups on YouTube and any person from the comments. All these people and bots have no sincere desire to watch your videos. And if they do this out of respect for you or under duress, then you are probably only ruining your channel by distancing the algorithm from a real understanding of who we should be promoting to. Therefore, the best thing we can do is not to torment YouTube and create quality content without the desire to get 100, 1,000, or 10,000 views on our first videos, but with foundation and gradually letting YouTube understand who we are. What we film and who we film it for. And over time, he will begin to understand this himself without our help, without sending our videos to any thematic groups of our friends, circles, promotions, and so on. The algorithm is not stupid, and it will understand everything itself over time. Our goal is to make great content, do it [music] regularly, and keep the viewer on the platform for as long as possible. Then our channel will only be a matter of time. The second big mistake is the lack of a specific, narrow niche. For example, we chose the news niche. Today we make football news, tomorrow news of global cataclysms. The day after tomorrow there will be space news, and then general show business news. So, it would seem that the niche has been chosen - it's news, and we're filming everything in sight, but YouTube can't figure out who watch football news and space news are essentially two different people. And in very rare situations they intersect. That's why the better we can narrow our niche and start producing content that's interesting to a specific viewer, the easier it promoting us organically. For example, I caught myself making this [music] I made absolutely chaotic content, mixing different niches, formats, duration and regularity. And fortunately, two weeks later YouTube itself directed me and showed me what content was more interesting to the viewer, giving 4,000 views to one of the videos. Then I realized, okay, let's work in this direction. This was just a news niche, and I started filming more content about this person, about whom a video with a bit of popularity was made. And what do you think? The next video I made about this man got 100,000 views. And then I realized what the channel brought me over $10,000 in 4 months and I got a silver button at 15 years old. But YouTube helped me a lot and found my target audience on its own. This is not always the case. That's why the more you understand who your audience is and start providing content that's relevant to them, the better [the music] will be, and the algorithm will be able to promote you more easily and quickly. Mistake number three: neglecting analysis. Okay, we've chosen a specific niche, we've understood what we're filming, we've understood which ideas are relevant, but there's an important nuance here. If we don't keep our finger on the pulse and analyze our competitors, we will most likely degrade, even if we publish content consistently. The fastest- growing channels are those that visit their competitors once a week, or at least a couple of times a week, and see how they're doing, what videos they're making, perhaps some new formats, what their covers are like, their descriptions, their optimization, and, in general, how they're doing. It's possible that they all had their monetization removed and we won't even know about it if we don't check them. It is not enough to simply choose the right niche. It is important to constantly be on guard and study the situation of will help us a lot. Just imagine, we accidentally visited our competitor's website in the morning and views overnight. We quickly reshot it and got the same result. Now imagine that if we had simply not visited it, we would have earned a certain amount less. Then why not make it a regular practice? R&R and analyze our competitors once a every day if you can afford it, but stay in the context of what's happening in the niche and adapt the latest trends as quickly as possible, bit by bit, incorporating the best from each competitor into your channel. We'll get inspiration from someone for a cover, from someone for the length of a video, from someone for the publication time, and from someone else for a whole series of ideas for new videos. In general, our competitors are our allies, and our task is to take the best from them. So for us, it's a shining beacon in the vast ocean of content, shining a light on us and showing us what's best we can apply right now. The next mistake is to delete a video that has not received any views. Let's imagine we upload a video to YouTube, watch it a day later, and see three views. The first and most logical thought is, damn, there's something wrong with him. If YouTube doesn't move it, then I'm screwing up, I'm doing something wrong. And it’s better to completely redo it, delete it and upload it again. But the truth is that YouTube, as a rule, needs more than a day or a week to understand whether our video is good or not worth promoting. And if he understands that the video is good, then he can promote it even after 3 months . And it doesn't work like TikTok or Rails, where we get the bulk of our views in the first week . Even in my example, in all my channels there were times when they were at a standstill , and then one video would take off and drag the whole channel down with it. Because YouTube sees that if one video I'll promote other videos on this channel. Maybe they'll show the same dynamics and retain viewers as well ." And then our videos can go from zero views to a million simply because their time has come. That's it, there are no more So, I have one video on my channel that has been gaining popularity for 5 years and has brought me a total of $4,000. But imagine if I had deleted it when I saw that I had no views on it. So, the next time that you consider inferior to the competition, made on the fly, or just plain wrong, think twice, because it could potentially be a million-dollar hit, and if not, it could be a video that will show YouTube the dynamics of your channel and show you, personally, how you created content in the beginning. And after a year, you will be able to go to this video and see your progress. This will become an delete old content, I never delete unusable content, understanding that the potential of these videos may simply not yet be realized. The next mistake is using other people's videos, hashtags and music. These are very common mistakes among newcomers to YouTube, who take music from Spotify, video content from competitors, photos from free resources, and end up with copyright infringement on all fronts . I think YouTube is a difficult platform and is being abandoned. And, as a rule, when we start running our channel, we think that we are small. And who will even notice us, who will present us with anything, because we don’t have many views. But the harsh truth is that if our video gets that same million views, then that's when we'll have mind that if we want our videos to get millions of views, us a good income, then we need to treat it as our business, can’t build your own on someone else’s business. This is why it is important to make content unique. copyright within the creative studio . And as soon as we take someone else's video or someone else's music, the author immediately receives a notification: your content has been used on this channel. What to do with it? Pardon or you might think I'm being cruel there and so on, but when someone make money from it, I didn't immediately think about blocking them. Simply because these are can’t create something of his own and try to make money on someone else’s, then I will never support it. So every time you think about stealing someone's video, photo, or music, think about whether you need it. It might be easier to take photos and videos from stock sites, music from YouTube fan libraries, and create content ourselves than to risk the channels planning to make money from for years to come. Our safety is more valuable than a couple of extra clicks and sleep soundly and not worry about something happening to our channel. The next mistake is to stuff dozens of hashtags and keywords into the description. I think this will direction to take us in. It might look like: "The more words I put in the description now , the better YouTube will promote me." But this is not true. In fact, if he sees a bunch of spam in our description, he simply stops taking it into account when he wants to promote us. If we fill the description with 1,000 keywords, YouTube will simply think that we are a spammer and will think promoting us. Therefore, there should be three, maximum five, hashtags separated by a hash mark in the description. will be much easier for YouTube to understand who we are making content for and where we should be tags. If we're talking about them, I recommend filling out all 500 characters in the tags. This is exactly the place where we can leave all our keywords and help YouTube find our viewer. The next mistake is to close yourself off from knowledge. This is what was inherent in me at the beginning of my journey. I didn't want to look for anything extra. I simply chose my path and tried to tread it myself through the dark forest, difficult roads, and not thinking about the fact that it seems I could fly over it from above in a helicopter and land right at the point I wanted. And when I realized this, I immediately began to look at this matter differently. I quickly began looking for a network, that is, in this field, looking for a niche, earning money, trying and developing in this field. I also trying and developing in this field. I also the best and implementing it on my channels. Thematic events, of course. compromise, or if there are YouTube-related events in your city or gain context, find like-minded people, and gain new knowledge, then don't hesitate to go there. There's a sea of useful content out there right now, what you watch, because after watching five different confusion in your head, you can simply abandon the whole idea, because everyone is broadcasting their own experience about someone else. If you'd like a step-by-step guide to how I did it and how you can replicate it in your case, [music] This is a full-fledged plan, where I told what I filmed, how I developed my channel and what I managed to achieve right broadcast about my experience. [music] It's absolutely free. You'll have half an hour, and I'll give you the full strategy on how I managed to do it. Link in the description. The next mistake is to be careless. What do I mean here? In fact, this can manifest itself in completely different ways. For example, linking After all, many people, when they start their journey, register on every service in a row. [music] analyzers, websites, extensions, subscriber boosting and a whole bunch of other stuff. Let's gets access to our YouTube account. But some are just for information about our channel, and some are for all the functions for managing our what could happen if we give some unverified service complete be careful and constantly double-check who you give access to. For example, leave your personal email in the contact section on your YouTube channel. For this purpose, it is better to create separate email addresses where a person can risky move, because as soon as our channel starts gaining momentum, we may receive fake emails from some brand or company wanting to buy advertising on our channel. They call themselves representatives of received such letters a huge number of times. And what is their goal - just to send technical building for advertising with you. Please read it. As soon as we click on this file, all data and access to our account falls into the hands of scammers. There are different schemes, they come up with them all the time, but I fell for it. Therefore [music] be extremely careful, do not rush to some big brand in your mailbox. Don't look at the $1,000 integration and be extremely vigilant. And also, to be as careful as possible with YouTube, I recommend setting up two-step notifications, linking an additional phone number, a backup email, and Googleifier app, which allows you to further protect your channel. These are all rather difficult, routine processes. We need to take all this and throw it all together, especially if we have 10 channels running there, and also keep some kind of each channel, what we linked to it, and so on. But this is the scenario in which you will never have a problem with the channel, and no one will be able to access to it. Therefore, I urge you to be as careful as possible and thereby invulnerable to scammers. After all, at the beginning of the journey it might seem, yes, that I should for example, I remembered that I don’t have two-step notification at the moment when subscribers. I think: "Oh my god, maybe it's time to install some kind of protection for the channel?" poked or climbed anywhere yet. Therefore, I urge you to take care of this immediately and not return to it again. The next mistake is registering multiple channels to one email. Of course, it is not so fatal, and it can be done. circle have large networks of channels, and many of them are made under one mail. But I never did that, because I saw cases where one channel caught violations, and even if all the others were completely clean and harmless for YouTube, they flew off along with the offending channel. Therefore, if you have the opportunity to create a new email for each new channel, then I a small thing that will only take you a minute, but at one particular moment it will last mistake for today is being obsessed with analytics. [music] For example, we released a video, and we views, to change something like the title, description, covers, and so on. Instead of focusing on creating new content, perhaps a competitors, which will bring us much closer to results much faster and more effectively than constantly checking our video's statistics, we might try to change something in the title, description, cover, although the problem may that, for example, it does not reach the level of our competitors. And it’s worth checking our analytics. [music] This is what I did for probably the first I did for probably the first year or two on YouTube. I constantly checked views, videos, titles, and so on. And this happens in an even more serious stable income. Every day we simply go into these statistics, get updated with the numbers, try to do even more, and delve into some small details and nuances. Although in reality, our main point of growth is to create more content and we don't have at least a thousand stable views on our videos, don't rush to look at CTR, retention, strange videos, or the average age of our have a large sample size yet to give us accurate data. Our goal at this stage is simply to continue publishing and growing our channel. We just covered what I consider to be the 10 most fatal mistakes that both beginner and experienced YouTubers face. I'll leave a reminder about them and how to avoid making these mistakes in my Telegram channel. If you're not there yet, this is the eleventh mistake of the day, and I advise you to correct it right now video, I share my life insights and useful information about YouTube. connecting your life with YouTube in the coming years and starting to make money systematically, then I have a gift for you. This is my step-by-step instruction, where I tell in detail, without [the music] work . Less than an hour of your time is 6 years of my life experience. So, follow the first link in the description or the end screen and enjoy this information. enjoy this information. [music]