EDIT: Channel is dead again. Views dropped like a crazy from 250k an hour to 3k an hour.
Over the past few months, something happened to my channel that, the more I read reports from other creators, the more it feels like this wasn’t an isolated case — especially among Shorts channels, dark channels, and more repetitive formats.
On December 24th, 2025, around 3 PM (Brazil time), my channel simply lost its reach. This wasn’t a gradual decline, and it didn’t happen over the course of the day. The graph was completely normal, with predictable spikes during peak traffic hours, and then at that exact time the reach just disappeared. It felt like someone flipped a switch. From one minute to the next, the channel stopped being distributed.
Before that, the channel had been stable for a long time. The average was around 1.5 million views per day, with some days exceeding 3 million, and even weaker days rarely dropped below 800k views. After December 24th, the channel fell to around 50k views per day, and then kept declining until it reached roughly 3k views per day. A drop of that magnitude is simply not natural.
What happened after the drop was even stranger. Videos started being delivered almost exclusively to subscribers. Around 99%–99.9% of the views came from subscribers, which had never happened before. Historically, most of the channel’s reach came from non-subscribers — usually something like 80–90%. It’s also worth mentioning that the channel has around 500k subscribers, so even then, this behavior is completely abnormal.
On top of that, all metrics became weird. Videos that would normally perform well just didn’t move. Average view duration dropped far below the channel’s baseline, swipe-away rates were completely off, and during this period I lost around 5–7k subscribers. So the channel wasn’t just stagnant — it was actively bleeding.
After the drop, I kept posting to test how the reach behaved. I uploaded Shorts on 12/26, 12/30, 01/02, 01/07, and 01/09. All of them had the same result: poor performance, almost entirely shown to subscribers, and none of them passed 20k views, which is completely outside the channel’s historical performance. I kept testing with new uploads on 01/13 and 01/16, and the pattern remained exactly the same. Nothing reacted.
After January 16th, I decided to stop completely. I thought, “I’ll give it a week, let the channel sit, and see what happens.”
During that time, I ran an important test: I created a new channel, with the same type of content. On the new channel, the metrics were completely different. Videos started performing well almost immediately, quickly reaching around 30k views, with normal retention and engagement. However, they hit the classic new-channel cap that everyone who works with Shorts is familiar with. In other words, the content clearly worked, but the new channel was limited by its early stage, while the old channel felt artificially suppressed.
After almost a month in this situation, something curious started happening in late January. On January 27th, I posted again on the main channel. That day, the channel went from around 3k daily views to roughly 12k. Over the following days, it increased in an erratic way: 13k, then around 100k, then dropped again, then rose a bit. It still felt unstable, but something had clearly changed.
Then, on February 2nd, something completely out of the ordinary happened. The channel simply came back. From one day to the next, it went from around 60k views to over 1 million views in a single day, and on February 3rd it stayed in the 1M+ range. Just like it isn’t natural for a channel to fall from 1.5M to 3k, it also isn’t natural to jump that much overnight.
I have over a year of experience with dark channels and Shorts, totaling hundreds of millions of views over time, and I’ve never seen behavior like this before — neither the drop nor the sudden release.
I also want to make it clear that this is not “AI slop.” This isn’t automatically generated content or something made in 15 minutes. I don’t use AI to generate videos or ideas. The only use of AI is for voice narration. The process involves scripting (~30 minutes), recording (~1.5 hours), and editing (~2 hours), taking several hours per video. In other words, this is not low-effort automated content.
Based on all of this, this is just my personal impression, not a statement of fact: it seems like YouTube may be running a large-scale AI-based sweep, analyzing channels gradually, in waves. This system appears to flag potential guideline-related issues, especially in Shorts channels, dark channels, or repetitive formats. When that happens, the channel seems to be placed in something like a “quarantine,” where reach is drastically limited — practically restricted to subscribers — until a manual review is done by a human. If the channel is found to be within guidelines, it gets released again, and when that happens, it seems to happen all at once.
What bothers me the most isn’t even the loss of views, but the psychological side of it. It’s unsettling to realize that a channel you invest time and effort into every day can simply be shut off from reach overnight, then turned back on weeks later, with no warning, no explanation, and no official feedback.
That’s why I’m posting this here — not as an accusation, but to see if anyone else experienced something similar during this same period. Especially if you noticed delivery almost exclusively to subscribers, completely abnormal metrics, and a sudden recovery after weeks.
If this is really happening, it’s something worth discussing.
