My Google/YouTube Saga

Recently a blogger friend of mine, Tessa, posted on her YouTube channel about tracking your writing with bullet journaling. She inspired me to take a look at my own YouTube account, which I haven’t kept up with as much as my blog and other social media accounts. It’s a repository mainly for my GoPro videos, which I take while motorcycling, snowmobiling and kayaking.

First, let’s go back to last fall, when I stupidly installed a rogue Chrome browser extension for a purpose I can’t even remember and soon after, every web page, including my blog, became riddled with annoying ads.  I tried and tried to fix the issue: got rid of the browser extension (I WISH I could remember which one it was, I would warn you to stay away!), called my host, took up lots of a techy friend’s time, nothing I tried worked to rid myself of this crap.

Also, I have two Google accounts. One I used for everything, the other I think I just set up because I needed a Gmail account for some past venture I’m no longer involved in. So all this time, I’ve kept track of both Google accounts and password, yet only really using the one. I decided to nix the Google account I was using the most (which I thought was causing everything to be riddled with ads), and lo and behold, the ads were gone from my blog and other websites (now that I was logged into my other Google account).

Unbeknownst to me that the Google account I just nixed was hooked to my YouTube account. #doh!  So now, my channel was still visible in a search, but I could no longer upload videos to my channel without that Google account. I searched and searched for ways to move my YouTube channel to the other Google account. I tried restoring the Google account it repeatedly, but it didn’t like my password and also insisted my phone was not an eligible device, so sending a text to unlock my account was not an option either.  Ugh.  Oh, and no way to contact anyone about it, all I had was their online forum which offered no help for this particular issue.

So fast forward to this past weekend, when I saw Tessa’s video and it inspired me to sit down and take another look.  I really wanted to used my established YouTube account which held more than a few videos, plus I had video from our last snowmobile trip I wanted to upload. Miraculously, somehow I was able to restore my old Google account. I don’t know how, I literally tried EVERYTHING I did back in November, but this time it let me in and I was able to restore and reset my password, and also register my phone. (Note: This is why I will never work in IT again. Browser trouble? Create a Word doc, delete it, hop on one foot and do a cartwheel and maybe it will work. Everything you try now will fail but try the same thing next week and voila!)

I did also find an article about moving it, but haven’t went down that road yet. It wanted a branded account, and my other one was not available to select for the destination account. ???  For now, it’s back.

So, long story long, my YouTube channel now has a recent video of our last snowmobiling trip and I’m back to using both accounts. My other one is now the default so I haven’t been bothered by ads since I’m using that one to browse.

Ugh!

Thoughts, comments?  Have you successfully moved a YouTube account from one Google account to another?