August 16, 2026

A channel on Youtube

This is all about setting up channels and publishing videos. I did a bunch of this back in 2024, and am finding it challenging to sort everything out 2 years later.

Some things to know

There are personal channels (the default) and brand channels. You can have up to 100 channels under a single email address!

To transfer a channel to another google account, you must first make it into a brand account. Then you "invite new users" and they must accept. After a 7 day wait, the new account can be promoted to "primary owner".

My channels

I have more than one google account, each with its own name and password. A) tom@mmto.org B9 @TucsonTom -- 1 video B) tucsontomt@gmail.com C9 @ThomasTrebisky -- no content C) thomas.trebisky@gmail.com C9 @tucsontom1051 -- now has 1 video D) ttrebisky@gmail.com C9 @tomtrebisky9643 -- empty I have tom@mmto.org set as the recovery address for all of these

It was confusing sorting out all the above and recovering all the passwords (on 8/16/2026).

In the midst of all this, Youtube sometimes stumbled into @thomastrebisky5529, but I don't know how to get to this now -- it may be an orphaned channel that Youtube will clean up someday.

A quick path to Tucson Tom is:

In order to check out @tucsontom1051 I use clouds2.mp4 in /Projects/Video -- it seems to work fine. Maybe this is a relic channel from my 2024 efforts. It certainly seems to be, the video uploaded.

Changing the channel name (the birth of Borax Bill)

You can do this twice in 14 days. Login to youtube, click your profile picture, choose youtube studio, then Customization, then Basic Info, enter a new name, then click Publish in the top right. You must change your handle -- @joesmith separately if you want to (and you probably do).

Log in to youtube, click on your profile photo in the upper right and go to Youtube Studio. Click on "Customization" on the left. You should now see places to change te name and handle. Click "Publish" at the top right corner. I do this for @tomtrebisky9643, changing it to "Borax Bill" with the handle @boraxbill. I also add a profile picture, and again click "Publish" to make it so.

I leave this page and get warned that I may lose my changes. Indeed nothing seems to really have happened. I search on this and see that this is somewhat common. It takes time for youtube to propogate changes and they say that it may take minutes or even days -- one video even says that it can take as long as 2 weeks!

I made this change at 9:15 AM -- I'll check back through the day and see if it appears.
At 11:11 AM it still has not happened.
At 3:13 PM I still do not see it.
At 7:30 AM the next day it still isn't there.

At about 10:00 AM the day after the first attempt, I tried again, setting both the name and handle, then clicking Publish. I worry that trying this multiple times will trigger the twice in 14 day limit. But it turns out this is a win.

The Publish button stays greyed out for a long time. In fact it never comes back from being greyed out. I end up just closing this browser tab. I try doing something else in another browser tab and discover .....

Yay!! I check back about an hour later and the name and handle are there. Now I set a profile picture and that shows up immediately.

During the 24 hours where I was confused and waiting I couldn't help but wonder if I did something wrong, or if this just takes time. My guess is that some kind of human intervention/approval is involved, and that is why it sometimes takes days, weeks, even months. But who knows.

My take on this sort of thing in general is that everything that you might call "youtube administration" is slow, awkward, and confusing. But what choice do you have?

Other administrative tasks

Experimentation is not advised. Youtube places limits on how often you can do things such as changing your channel name, and there is such a long delay in seeing the effect of changes that experimenting in order to learn is both confusing and even dangerous. I am interested in what Youtube calls a "brand channel". There is no charge for such a thing (as I feared there might be). The purpose of this is to allow a team to work on a channel and for participants to come and go. My channel is currently a "personal channel" administered by an email name from my employer. I am retired, and someday that email will probably go away. Having a brand channel linked to one of my more ordinary gmail accounts would avoid some likely hassle when that happens.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org