xQc’s YouTube channel terminated for copyright claims

Reaction content enthusiast xQc has lost his main YouTube channel.

YouTube terminated the channel Nov. 25, and according to xQc, it was because of multiple copyright infringement claims hitting at the same time. That’s not surprising, considering he–like many reaction content makers–has regularly been criticized for using other people’s videos in a way that (1) can upset those people, and (2) may not be transformative enough to squeak by with copyright laws.

xQc (aka Félix Lengyel) found out about the deletion during a Kick livestream, and didn’t seem all that concerned.

“It’s literally gone,” he said, checking. “Ah, whatever.”

Later, he added, “Bro, the reason why I’m not panicking and I’m not going haywire about it is that, I always said YouTube is for people and I don’t care about the amount of money it makes. It’s just for people. It sucks that we lose it for now because people don’t get their VOD content, right? Revenue-wise, I haven’t looked twice at it.”

The channel had 2.3 million subscribers when it was deleted, and had been pulling in between 20 and 30 million views per month consistently over the past year, according to data from Gospel Stats.

YouTube is serious about copyright strikes. (It’s become more lenient about community guidelines violations, on the other hand.) Each channel gets three of them before it’s permanently terminated. Creators who get a copyright claim can appeal it, but appealing only works if they didn’t use the content in a way that violated copyright.

Lengyel told Kick viewers his channel already had two strikes when this new batch of claims arrived.

“I think it’s because, basically, I had some strikes that were going to kick in, and then I had, like, a counter-claim, and it didn’t kick in in time or something like that,” he said. “It’s auto-termination. But it comes back up. I mean, I’m sure you’ve had that before, where you have, like, multiple strikes and they all kick in at the same time.”

He added that since the strikes all kicked in together, “and since they didn’t get fought and cleared at the same time […] if one of them went through, because I was only on two strikes, I mean, it’s a GG.”

We have no idea whether Lengyel will get his channel back, and he doesn’t seem particularly concerned about it. We can kinda get that: based on his numbers, the channel was probably bringing in some cash, but not nearly as much as that $100 million streaming deal–non-exclusive, by the way–he signed with Kick back in June.