YouTube Once Deleted an Entire Generation of Weed Creators. Here's How One Survived.

There was a stretch where being a weed creator on YouTube meant constantly fighting the platform: age restrictions, shadowbans, strikes. And then there was the wipeout. "They deleted my channel one time," says one of the last OG weed tubers standing. "Fully deleted it, like terminated. It was gone."

The purge

It wasn't just him. "It was the YouTube wipeout where they got me. They got Silenced Hippieish. They got Strain Central. I believe it was Custom Grow 420. There was quite a bit — a lot of weed tubers who all got their channels deleted randomly."

He panicked and started a second channel, uploaded maybe one video. Then, mysteriously, the original came back. "Mine just randomly came back. No email really. I still to this day don't know what was going on in YouTube headquarters." His theory: someone on the inside caught the mistake and restored the channels by hand. "There was definitely an unsung hero out there." But not everyone came back. "RIP all the fallen soldiers. We lost a lot of weed tubers back in the day to kind of pave the way to where we're at now."

The age-restriction lottery

The part that still frustrates him is the inconsistency. He has a video that's literally him smoking out of a bong for the entire runtime — it's at 500,000 views and never got age-restricted. Meanwhile, "you'll have videos where I'll turn around and intentionally try not to show the smoke and it will still get age restricted."

"There's no consistency," he says flatly. He's tried the workarounds — fake commercial breaks, turning around — and they work once and fail the next. The cost is real: age-restricted videos don't reach the subscription feed, don't get recommended, effectively vanish. "Sometimes I think a video is a banger and the algorithm is just not pushing it out, and it has to do with the age restriction. That's the main thing."

No ad revenue? Build the basket

Weed content has no ad revenue, so the survival playbook is diversification. "You can't put all your eggs in one basket. I learned that the hard way." For him, the basket is brand deals — but vetted ones. "You have to work out brand deals with the right companies. If I won't use it, then probably everyone else who watches my content probably won't either."

His inbox is a museum of the industry's boom-and-bust cycles. During the alt-noid gold rush, it was endless: "It was Delta-8, HHC, THCP, THCO, this and that, every single day." He tried them, and his verdict is blunt: "All those companies are dead now. No one buys that anymore." These days it's sleazy AI-girlfriend apps and weed brands who email him before getting their product figured out. "I can't promote something my audience isn't going to use."

The honest check

The purge is documented history — multiple large weed channels were terminated in the same era, and the "random restoration" he describes matches accounts from other creators who survived. The age-restriction inconsistency is his (and many others') lived experience rather than a documented YouTube policy, and the platform's policies have shifted since; the broader lesson about diversification holds regardless.

What any creator — or business — can take from this

• Never build on one platform. A terminated channel is a lost business if your audience lives entirely inside it.
• Your audience follows you, not the algorithm. When his channel died, he wasn't worried: "I knew my audience was still looking for me." Own a mailing list, a website, a community — somewhere you can't be deleted from.
• Diversify revenue early. Brands, products, merch, even paid communities — the more baskets, the less one policy change hurts.
• Say no to bad money. The sleazy offer that pays today costs you trust tomorrow. "You don't want to promote something you know your audience isn't going to use."
• Consistency outlasts virality. The channels that survived didn't have a plan B — they just refused to stop. "This is what I was doing. I didn't really have a plan B. I have to find a way to do this."

He's been at it since the era of one-take videos and no thumbnails — when a channel's most successful video was just whoever had the biggest blunt. He watched the industry he helped build go corporate, then crash, then consolidate. "It's just time flies by so fast. I'm just like everyone else." He isn't. He's one of the last ones standing from a generation the platform tried to erase — and he kept going because there was never a version where he didn't.

This article is for educational purposes only. Platform policies change frequently; information reflects the creator's account of past events.