Esmee Denters’ dip on YouTube
Friday, March 20th, 2009, 162 views
by Richard van den Boogaard
- 0
- Add a Comment
Between March 15th and March 18th 2009, Esmee Denters’ channel got deleted by accident on YouTube. Although it’s currently back on again, some assets still appear to be missing or were deleted for good. Through TubeMogul, Branded Channels was able to see the figures.
Last Tuesday morning (C.E.T.), this is how YouTube star avant-la-lettre announced her discovery on Twitter that her YouTube account had been disabled. In her next tweet, she described how she was freaking out by pointing her followers to the following video:
The above is probably a feeling we can all relate to. Certainly anyone who ever deleted a file on a computer, that should have stayed. In this case, matters were even worse, because this was not the result of Esmee’s own wrong-doing. Instead, YouTube apparently had deleted (or suspended) her account by mistake. With more than 129 million (!) video views and nearly 14 million channel views, this did not happen to just any channel, but one of YouTube’s most popular and most treasured assets. Esmee Denters = YouTube. She earned her popularity through YouTube and even appeared on Oprah (at age 19) as a result of it.
Naturally, Esmee was very saddened to see her account go up in smoke. Deleting of videos, let alone accounts, usually means starting from scratch. Nevertheless, YouTube worked hard to restore the account. They successfully managed to do this on March 18th and Esmee was happy to make the following tweets about it:
The only thing YouTube could not fix is restoring the links of people who favorited one of Esmee’s videos. Logically so, since this is a function that lies with YouTube users, not Esmee’s account. What is interesting is to see what actually happened with the video views before and after the incident. Using the video tracking services from TubeMogul, Branded Channels discovered the following pattern:
