What is a verified YouTube account?
Through YouTube account verification Google wants to make sure that the content being shared on YouTube channels really does belong to their original owners and that no creator is getting impersonated by another creator. A verified account shows that it is the official channel of the rightful owner and distinguishes it from other similar channels, posting similar content. This safeguards both the viewers of the content and its creators. The viewers can be sure that the content they are watching is indeed from the authentic creator and owner of the channel, while the creators can be confident of the safety of the copyrights of their content and that no one on YouTube can steal their identity, hijack their well-deserved viewership, popularity, and earnings. Verified YouTube channels with at least 100 thousand subscribers have the facility of getting verification badges for their owned channels, represented by a gray checkmark against the channel name as shown in the following figure.
For content creators, verification apart from the security of their content, bring some certain advantages in using the YouTube platform itself, that are not available in the unverified/default YouTube account. With the help of the following table, I will compare both the privileges of a verified and an unverified YouTube account. From the table above, you can see that as compared to an unverified YouTube account, a verified account owner can upload videos up to 12 hours of duration and up to 128 GB in size, use his own custom thumbnails, and do live streaming. Furthermore, YouTube search results favor content from verified creators and enable them to carry out YouTube activities (i.e. comments and likes) as verified users. All these extra features are crucial in the promotion and projection of your YouTube channel and in gathering more attention in the form of more subscribers and viewership. Additionally, a verified owner can make use of content ID claims to remain clear of copyright violation strikes, which again is very important for channel growth.
How to verify your YouTube account?
Surprisingly in comparison to the advantages a verified YouTube account brings, the process of getting your YouTube account verified is fairly simple. Below, I am going to explain in detail the steps required to get your channel verified. Step 1: Go to https://www.youtube.com/ Step2: If not already signed in, click on the “SIGN IN” button in the upper right corner.
Step3: Now login to your YouTube account using your Gmail credentials.
Step4: After successful login, you need to go to “Settings”. In the pane on the left scroll down and click on settings as shown by the red oval in the following figure.
Step5: YouTube will take you to a new page. On this page, in the left panel click on “Account” if not already selected. Step6: On the “Account” page click on “Channel status and features”.
Step7: On this new page, click on “Channel” in the left pane, if not already selected, and then click on the “Feature eligibility” tab the last one towards the right. Step8: Under this tab click on the drop-down box to the right of “Features that require phone verification” and then click on the blue button “VERIFY PHONE NUMBER”.
Step9: A new browser tab will open as showing a page similar to the picture below. On this page, you can either ask Google to send you a text message or receive an automated voice call for verification on your entered mobile phone number.
Step10: Select your country, type your phone number in the box without the country code, and click on the “GET CODE” button. Step11: Now wait for a little for Google to contact you on your given phone number with a code either through an automated voice call or SMS depending on the method you choose in step 9. Step12: Once you receive the code, type it in the text box as identified in the following figure and click on the “SUBMIT” button.
After that, you will see a confirmation message from YouTube that your phone number has been verified successfully. Step13: That’s it, your YouTube account verification is now complete. For confirmation, you can go to “Settings” then “Channel” and you should see a screen similar to the following picture.
Conclusions
YouTube account verification enhances the ability of content creators to stay clear of copyright infringements, gain and maintain their own identity, and help in gathering more subscribers, more views, and comments for their uploaded content and therefore lead to more channel visibility, popularity, and monetary returns from the platform. Moreover, the process of getting verified is simple and can be completed within a few minutes. One noteworthy last thing is that if you change the name of your channel, the verification process must be done again.
