I deleted over 4,000 videos from YouTube in the last few years, and that was a huge mistake. I hope to communicate to as many of you as possible: do not delete your YouTube videos. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and today I'm grateful that I've got 1.2 million impressions on six brand new YouTube channels — but I had more than 20 channels that I created on YouTube. I had more than a billion views and impressions combined across all platforms, and I deleted everything last year because I was so burnt out. One of the things I did before that burned me out was deleting several thousand videos off a single channel to try and optimize it.
The Only Good Reasons to Delete a Video
Today, I'd say the only time you should ever delete your videos is if you are certain there's an undetected policy violation. That is a very good reason to delete your videos. For example, you can take your video, get a transcript of it, and run it through Gemini — which is a great thing to do before you upload a video if you're unsure whether there are any policy violations in it. All you need to do is get a transcript of your video, ideally before you put it on YouTube, which you can do by taking the audio. What I do is use a cloud workflow: I drop the audio in there and I get a transcript. If I have any doubts about whether a video is community guidelines compliant, I dump the transcript into Gemini before I upload it, and then it warns me. If somehow you've gotten away with a community guidelines violation that's uploaded to YouTube but undetected, then yes, definitely delete that.
I'm inspired to write this today because one of the members of the Jerry Banfield Family, who is a YouTuber, messaged me this morning saying he deleted some of his videos and he's trying a new strategy. He said he deleted some of his low-performing videos — and that's exactly what I did, too. I deleted several thousand old, low-performing videos.
There is one other reason you might have that's valid for deleting your videos: if your videos are a serious liability risk. If you have a lot of videos where you could potentially get sued over them, or there are copyright strikes just waiting to happen, that makes sense too. But again, that's something you can ask Gemini about — put in your transcript, your thumbnail, and your title, and see if there's a realistic chance of a problem. Now, the AI will often be a little conservative in telling you; it errs on the side of flagging rather than not flagging, although I found it pretty accurate today. I had some videos where maybe that was an issue — maybe a hundred — but for the vast majority of my videos, there was no issue at all.
The Free Traffic I Threw Away
Here's what actually happened with mine. I used to get thousands of views a day on videos that were as much as ten-plus years old. I deleted them because I thought I could optimize the algorithm by not having all those old videos sitting on my channel — many of them had crappy titles and thumbnails and were outdated, and YouTube was still recommending them to people. And that's the key: YouTube was still recommending them to people. Even if one of them was a crappy video, it was getting free impressions. I was getting thousands of views a day, which means the click-through rate was often only one or two percent — so YouTube was literally giving me something like 50,000 to 100,000 impressions a day for free on these old videos. And I was still getting customers off of them. I was still getting people subscribing and watching my new videos because of them.
Then, in 2023, I decided to delete 2,000 videos off my original 2011 channel — the channel I got my silver YouTube plaque from, the one that had several hundred thousand subscribers. I thought it would be a good idea at the time to delete all those videos and try to optimize the channel around doing one single thing. And boy, was I disappointed to see what happened to my views. Before that, I could upload as many videos as I wanted every day and get hundreds of views on each of them. When I deleted all my old videos, my organic traffic plummeted to nearly zero, because I had deleted all kinds of data YouTube had collected for over a decade about who might like my videos.
So never delete videos that don't fall into the categories I've already mentioned, because that's free traffic. Even if somebody finds one of your videos and doesn't like it that much, that's better than them never seeing your video at all. They might come to your channel, look through your newer videos, and like those better. Otherwise you're just sabotaging yourself — like I sabotaged myself by deleting all those videos.
And I didn't stop there. I was so frustrated with losing that traffic that I deleted a Facebook page with millions of followers around the same time, because I was frustrated that I had been monetized and then got demonetized. I was getting tens if not hundreds of thousands of impressions a day for free on Facebook, and I deleted the page because it felt like a distraction.
The One Upside — and Why It Still Wasn't Worth It
Now, the only thing I'll say that was helpful about deleting all the old content is that it did give me a fresh start. It's kind of like if you've been working in the same store, running your business in the same place — like I had for 14 years by 2025. Sometimes it can just be too hard to do any better, or to see clearly, until you close that whole business up and start a new business in a new location. But I had so much organic traffic that it wasn't worth it.
And I made the same mistake again in 2024. I deleted videos because I was afraid of getting sued — I was criticizing so many crypto coins and getting so much traffic on those videos. But those projects are decentralized; you're not usually going to get sued by a legally decentralized entity. I got paranoid anyway. I deleted more thousands of videos in 2024 than in 2025, and then in 2025 I made the final cut and deleted everything — that was like a thousand more videos. So I've deleted at least 4,000, if not 5,000, videos off of YouTube. And man, the traffic I'd have today if I had just left all that stuff up would probably be ten times what I have today on these new channels. The only good thing is that I learned this lesson, and I hope I can help you avoid it.
What Happened When Scouse Will Did the Same Thing
I especially made this in response to Scouse Will, who is in my coaching program. In that program, I'm there to talk to you every week. This is not some crappy program like most people offer for YouTube coaching — you can literally have a 25-minute call with me every week. You can send me your phone number via DM once you join, and I'll add you into my phone so you can text me anytime you have an urgent question. It's not 24/7 support, but I'll be there as much as I can for you.
So Scouse Will DM'd me today and said he deleted all his old videos. But his old videos had thousands of views — or at least a good number of views — and a bunch of watch time, and he just deleted all of that to try to optimize his channel and make it look better. And I did the exact same thing. I got tired of what having everything on one channel was doing — that's why I have six channels today. I did gaming, crypto, music, vlogs, dating content, entrepreneurship, YouTube coaching, and a few other things like thought-provoking videos and culture commentary, all on one channel for a decade. And it screwed the algorithm up terribly. People who loved my crypto videos would often hate my gaming videos, and my gaming viewers would hate my crypto content. So YouTube got all these negative signals and would stop showing my content to people. Then the algorithm transitioned into this clickbait snowball thing, and I got so pissed. Every comment on my videos became: "You fell off." "You bought your subs." "You're finished." "You suck as a YouTuber." "Why do you only have 200 views with 200,000 subs?" I got so tired of it that I deleted all my videos, trying to do exactly what Scouse Will has now done.
And to be fair — his channel does look good now. He has 64 subscribers, and when you come to his channel, it certainly makes a good first impression. No doubt about it. But he also deleted all those minutes watched. People like me who hung out on his live streams — YouTube doesn't have that data anymore. He had live streams and videos that I'd watched, but now YouTube only has the data that I watched one video a month ago. All the time I spent in his live streams is gone from YouTube's records. And because YouTube doesn't have that data anymore, it doesn't have the data it needs to recommend his new videos to me, either.
Unlist or Private — Never Delete
Here's the better move: you can put those videos on unlisted. If you want to try and clean up your image, so to speak, that's a much better solution, because if you put them on unlisted, people who watched them before can still find them, and YouTube still has all the data. And if you're concerned about something like getting sued, you can just put those videos on private.
That's what I should have done with my crypto reviews channel. I now have my third monetized crypto reviews channel — I made two that were monetized before this one. One had 10,000 subscribers, and I deleted it. Another got to a few hundred subscribers, and I deleted that one too. Now this one has 1,600 subscribers and 132,000 views, and at this point I can just pray I don't shoot myself in the foot again, because these videos are getting views and I've built an audience again, starting from zero. What I should have done with any crypto reviews where I thought I'd gone too far and was afraid of getting sued was simply make those videos private. Then YouTube would have still had all the data about the people who had watched them, and when I made new ones, those people could have easily seen my new videos. But when I deleted the whole channel, it was gone, and I had to start from scratch with no audience.
I made this to help Scouse Will understand. I love that guy — he's one of the first people who joined the Jerry Banfield Family — and I've made this mistake of deleting my videos and trying to, quote, "clean up my channel" so many times. Never again. The worst-case scenario on a video, aside from the undetected community guidelines violation — which is very unlikely; I only had one real community guidelines violation upheld out of four or five thousand videos in 14 or 15 years — is nothing compared to losing all that data. So from now on, I would only ever put videos on private again. Never delete your stuff on YouTube.
If this was helpful, imagine being able to just talk to me anytime. I have 25 minutes of calls available with you every week, on the phone or on Zoom, and I'm here to support you — join the Jerry Banfield Family and let's have some fun together.
I DM'd Scouse Will before I even made this, and I hope it's helpful for you too. If you want more lessons like this one, you'll find them in my YouTube Coaching playlist.