Buying a YouTube account

Hello everyone,

Let me explain my situation:

I want to buy a YouTube channel from a very good friend of mine, it has 150k followers and I know for sure that they are real, it is monetized and made much money with ads. ( It was a gaming youtuber with a very engaged audience).

He agreed to sell it to me for a ridiculously low price <1k.

My plan is to use it as my travel blogger channel and connect it to my personal instagram profile that has more than 100k followers.
I don't care about monetization, I mostly need it for social proof and to sell myself to brands.

I have a few questions:

- is it possibile to change name of the channel, email and all the data and delete all the old videos?
- is it safe to buy it and make sure he can't reclaim it back in a few months?
- what do you think about this plan?

Thank you.

It's a very bad idea to buy a channel and change its niche, I don't recommend you to do that. If you buy it, you should upload related content to the channel or the subscribers won't see the videos

What makes you think the followers are going to stick around? Especially if they’re real?

Ask him to upload a video from your desired niche. See if the audience steer away or you're losing all that money.

I'm not very interested in monetizing and views.
Mostly I need it to get more social proof with brands.

Giaco90 said:

I'm not very interested in monetizing and views.
Mostly I need it to get more social proof with brands.

Click to expand...

Don't do it if you are in a different niche

Well mate why waste so much $ in the channel if you only need a channel for social proof? then build 1 and buy fake suscribers, would be the same .

Well 500€ for a 150k real subs channel isn't so much money.

Would be way more expensive to buy fake

You might want to be sure he actually wants to sell, and isn't the type of friend to one up you. $1,000 is ridiculously cheap. Get the email and password from him and use that and change that.

I would highly advise you AGAINST all this.

First to answer your points:
- if it's a Brand channel than it is possible to do all that. It's a bit complicated to change the email, but it is possible.
- If you're afraid he's going to claim it back, then no, it's not safe to buy. Only buy from people you trust - like all things in life.
- A very bad idea. Let me explain:

1) as others have mentioned, if you start posting videos that are in a COMPLETLY different niche and don't warm your audience up to it slowly over the months, people will stop clicking your videos when YouTube exposes it to them. That's a CLEAR sign for YouTube your subscribers are not interested in your videos anymore and they will completely kill your organic reach. For example, if now videos are getting let's say 15k views, you can be certain that afterwards, you'll not be getting more then a couple 100 and it's nearly impossible to turn around this vicious cycle if you want to somewhere in the future.

2) Having a YouTube channel with 150k subscribers and a couple of videos with a couple of 100s views is NO SOCIAL PROOF to any serious company - they will see right through you. It's very obvious you didn't get those subscribers with hard work and great content, therefore it doesn't really serve you. It would be the same as opening up a new channel and buying a couple of thousands of fake subscribers - doesn't work like that.

Monetized channel with 150k organic subscribers under $1k seems suspicious to me.

For claim back,.ask for ownership exchange..

Guys, he doesn't care about monetization.

My answers to OP questions:

- Yes, it is possible.

- Yes, it is safe, mainly because it is your very good friend.
There are few possible options:
a. Move the channel to your Google Account.
Normally it's not the best option because you'd lose some stuff like comments etc. But since you only want the Subscribers count, this might your best option.

b. Ask for the Google account details.
Change / remove (if there's any/applicable):
password, security question, phone number, email recovery, acc info details, link account, log out all device. Activate two ways authentication for few months if needed. If you care about monetization, this is your best option.

- No idea, it's a HUGE waste, but it's your money.