Although many content creation platforms have come and gone over time, YouTube has stood the test of time. It was created many years ago and is popular today. However, many popular content creators from back in the day have deleted their videos, and even some still active now have deleted fan-favorite videos because the trends have died or because they regret them. Fortunately, there are ways to watch them.
The creator may delete YouTube videos, or they may be removed by the platform for violating a policy or copyright strikes. To watch removed or deleted videos, you can use the Wayback Machine and special Google Search Operators. You can also find deleted videos even without the URL.
Let’s take a closer look at the different ways you can locate and watch YouTube videos and why they might have been removed in the first place (whether by the platform or the creator).
How to Watch Deleted YouTube Videos Using the Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is a website that stores internet webpages in an archive as they were captured on a specific date. It’s located at archive.org and contains 500 billion pages, so there’s a chance the YouTube video will be there, but you’ll need the exact URL to watch it.
It will then take you to a video that will first refuse to play. You can then search dates and choose one when the video was active, allowing you to watch the video.
You will have to find a date before the video was deleted, which may take some trial and error.
The only caveat is that the video must be famous for it to play; if it’s not popular, the Wayback Machine won’t have crawled and archived it. It also won’t have crept and archived unlisted videos.
How to Find Deleted YouTube Videos Using Google Search Operators
Even bigger than the Wayback Machine is the monster of all search engines that have crawled most pages on the internet. So, for example, you can sometimes use Google to find old YouTube URLs.
Take the end of the URL (which begins with a “v=”) and search for it on Google. If the YouTube video is ever embedded anywhere else and hosted in a place that wasn’t YouTube, it may still be available, and you can watch it there.
What if You Don’t Have a URL?
The issue with both of these methods is that you must have the exact URL, and chances are, most people don’t—they just remember the video and may have a title or creator name.
However, you can try searching for the title name with quotes around it to ensure Google is only searching for that name, and you may be able to find the URL that way.
You can also find it on social media if it was ever posted by searching the same terms on Facebook, Twitter, etc. You may be able to find the URL if someone shared it a while ago, and you can then take the URL to the Wayback Machine or Google Search Operators.
Why Do YouTube Videos Get Removed?
There are many reasons that a YouTube video might have been removed. Let’s take a look at them.
The Creator Removed it
Sometimes, the creator of a YouTube video might decide it’s not in their best interests to have it on the platform anymore.
This may be because it’s no longer trendy or doing much for their channel, or it may be for a more serious reason, like it containing identifying information or having the potential to get them into trouble.
Either way, creators have the final say over their videos as much as YouTube as a platform does.
The Creator Made it Private
There’s also a chance that the creator made the video private. They can choose to either unlist videos (where they’re only accessible by people with the direct URL), or they can remove the video altogether, meaning that even people with the URL won’t be able to access it anymore.
Copyright Issues
There are also potential copyright issues on YouTube, and creators who don’t know better often make the mistake of getting a copyright strike (where their revenue goes to the owner of the material) or a more serious issue where the video is taken down altogether.
This can happen if they’ve had multiple strikes.
Usually, the culprit is something they don’t even realize, e.g., music playing in the background that belongs to an artist who didn’t authorize the audio to be used. It could also be something visual, such as a displayed logo.
Violating YouTube’s Terms and Conditions
Users must also agree to YouTube’s terms and conditions when creating content; if they don’t, it can cause problems.
YouTube’s terms and conditions are pretty loose in what people are allowed to upload, giving age restrictions for adult material rather than banning it.
However, some extremes are strictly not allowed on the platform, and they’re usually found and removed very quickly.
Hacking
The last possibility of how videos have gotten taken down, which doesn’t involve Youtube or the creator directly, is that it’s always possible someone else has accessed the creator’s account.
If this has happened to you and you have no notice from YouTube and did not delete the videos yourself, you can check your Google account activity to ensure no one else has access to your channel that shouldn’t.
To Finish
Overall, YouTube intends for deleted videos to be gone from the internet forever—but that’s not how the internet works. Once data has been uploaded, it’s there forever in some form or another.
If you’re looking for a deleted video, you can use the Wayback Machine or Google Search Operators to find and watch it again. You may also be able to use a downloader to save the video if you don’t want to have to go through the search again or risk losing the video forever.