As YouTube ages, its defunct channels are becoming hot commodities

The sale of a YouTube channel to the highest bidder is a violation of the platform’s Terms of Service, but the current conditions of the creator economy are making those transactions more common. A new report shared via Cornell University‘s arXiv database detailed the use of third-party sites to buy and sell defunct social media accounts that have thousands — and, in some cases, millions — of followers.

The research team, helmed by lead author Alejandro Cuevas of Carnegie Mellon University, used Fameswap to find its experimental sample. That’s the name of a virtual marketplace where creators can put their accounts up for sale. Some YouTube channels listed on Fameswap have more than seven million subscribers.

After examining 4,641 YouTube channels that were listed on Fameswap between October 2024 and March 2025, the researchers determined that those hubs had a combined 823 million subscribers, and the ones that found buyers collectively generated more than $1 million in sales.

YouTube confirmed to Fast Company that these transactions run afoul of platform rules. “If we detect that bad actors are creating channels with the intent to scam, mislead, spam, or defraud other users, we terminate those channels,” a spokesperson said.

Even with that policy in place, many of the people who are active on Fameswap are buying accounts for nefarious purposes. The researchers claimed that 37% of channels that were refashioned by a new owner were used to promote potentially harmful topics, such as political misinformation, crypto scams, and gambling ads.

Even as YouTube takes action against those bad actors, its technology encourages illicit channel sales. Algorithmic tendenices seem to favor channels that have built-in subscriber bases, even if the new owners of those hubs are sharing content that is completely incongruous with pre-purchase uploads.

“Part of the reason why this is so prevalent right now is because systematically, in these platforms, we’ve seen a decrease in the agency over what we consume,” said study co-author Manoel Horta Ribeiro. “The short-form content paradigm facilitates this a lot, because in the past, you would search for channels directly, maybe by name, or be more aware of that.”

Even if Shorts exacerbates existing issues, this is not just a YouTube problem. There is a lot of activity on Reddit from users who want to purchase old accounts, and “Hawk Tuah” girl Hailey Welch made a splash earlier this year when she sold her X account to the owner of a meme page.

X has come up with a potential solution by proposing a program that would distribute inactive accounts among verified users. YouTube could try something similar, but that move probably wouldn’t slow down sites like Fameswap. YouTube accounts with big followings have become serious business, and owners who choose to give up the creator lifestyle find themselves sitting on goldmines.