I’m really hoping someone here has come across this or can point me in the right direction.
Yesterday, I tried to move my personal YouTube channel to a Brand Account so my 12-year-old son could help manage it. It’s called Dev and Mojo and he’s been building it since he was 4 — it has over 15,000 subscribers and is really important to us.
I followed the official steps:
- Created a new Brand Account via “Create a new channel”
- Went to YouTube’s advanced settings
- Clicked “Move channel to Brand Account”
- Selected the new Brand Account and confirmed the move
After that, the channel completely disappeared.
- It’s not showing up in the Brand Account
- It’s no longer accessible from my original Google account
- It doesn’t appear in the YouTube channel switcher
- But when I go to the channel’s direct URL:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3guvptbdtMZ6a7C9RjdvcwI get: “This page isn’t available.”
I tried checking the channel via the YouTube Data API using channels.list with the ID, and it just returns an empty result — no error, just totalResults = 0.
At this point, I’m not sure if the transfer glitched or if something about the Brand Account setup broke the connection. I’m worried the original channel is stuck in limbo — not deleted, but also not attached to any usable account.
Has anyone dealt with this kind of situation before? Is there any way to recover or re-link a channel that seems to exist by ID but isn’t accessible?
Any advice or even wild guesses are welcome — I just want to get this channel back for my son.