"Shadowbanned", the real solution

Hey, writing this in English so it's easier for us to talk.

My channel seems shadowbanned. Yeah, after a ton of research I really think it exists.

Here's my situation, being fully transparent:

I had a Shorts channel about animals, built a few hundred followers, then switched themes to gaming.

When I posted, my first long video got a lot of impressions but almost no views, so the stats/retention were bad. It was early days and I didn't take advantage of it. Oh well.

The next ones didn't do well either. I'd sometimes spend 8 hours a day editing (those were my first edits). Oh well, that's the game.

I made the mistake of trying to reuse content that was working on other platforms. It was mostly informative stuff about a game, no voice or anything. Turns out the copied content got detected and my channel got a strike.

After that, the channel got absolutely zero views, zero impressions, zero discovery.

So I did what I'd wanted to do for a while: started a new channel so I could have the classic "1 channel = 1 audience" and have the audience match the theme.

My first channel was from 2013, 13 years old. I shut it down to do things properly, and because I'd read somewhere that YouTube recommended it.

Turns out on the new channel I still get 0 impressions from suggestions. Even though I've kept posting and improved the quality of my videos a lot.

I've read a ton of threads and discussions online.

I've explained my situation fully and transparently.

I want to create content, and I chose YouTube over other platforms where I've gone very viral, because I prefer YouTube. And yet it's the only platform that doesn't work...

I just want to know what to do. I've read that some people kept going for months, up to 7 months, before giving up. I'm scared of producing content every day for hours and having it all be for nothing.

I'm only asking for guidance on how to fix this, or how to actually contact YouTube to talk about it. I need a concrete solution. I can't plan to spend the next few months creating content for hours every day without knowing if I'll ever have a chance to get discovered.

It's the story of a little guy who chose YouTube to create content every day and ended up in a views prison.

Huge thanks to anyone who takes the time to help me sort this out.

one of my friend got this situation before sometimes we think it is shadowban, but youtube might just be struggling to find the right audience for the content. if you were me i stick to one niche, keep uploading original stuff and give it some time. Also, don't rush into creating another channel again.

One check worth running before settling on the shadowban reading: your own impressions data. In YouTube Analytics, an impression is a counted instance of YouTube showing your thumbnail - so the impressions you saw establish that some distribution happened. What they don't establish is the whole picture: they don't rule out a visibility restriction, and they don't by themselves say whether the weak result came from packaging or from reach. The Reach report in YouTube Studio shows what percentage of your impressions came from YouTube recommending your videos - that breakdown is the place to look first, because it shows how much traffic recommendations actually sent rather than guessing.

From there it's a hypothesis test rather than a verdict. If recommendations are sending impressions but click-through is low, packaging (thumbnail, title) is the variable to test: change one element at a time and judge each video by its own click-through rate and retention. If recommendations are barely sending anything, the question shifts to what YouTube is matching the new gaming content to after a topic switch, which your analytics alone may not answer. ahmadalhussein's suggestion to stay on one niche and give it time is one reasonable approach for that second case - the report will show which situation you're in.

Try to take a pause for a week or something like that from uploading new content. Then start uploading new videos slowly.