One Identity Per Channel (Email, ID, Phone)

Most people guarding their channels are guarding the wrong door. They'll obsess over their IP address, buy a proxy, worry about which network they uploaded from. Then they verify their fourth channel with the same phone number as the first three.

Google doesn't only look at where you connected from. It looks at who you are. Shared phone numbers and shared recovery emails are the strongest links in the whole system, far stronger than an IP that changes every time your router reboots. Two channels pointing at the same recovery email are one account as far as Google is concerned. You built a wall and left the door open.

That's the shift that's happened. YouTube used to go after channels. One channel breaks a rule, one channel goes down, everything else you own carries on. Now it goes after the person behind the channel, using the device, the phone number, the email and the verified ID to work out who that person is. Once it decides a set of channels are all you, it can act on all of them at once. Identity separation stopped being paranoia and became basic infrastructure.

So here's the constraint you're actually working inside. One phone number verifies two YouTube channels a year. Two. Not five, not "as many as you want if you space them out." After the second, that number is spent for the next twelve months.

Which means channel three needs a different number belonging to a different person. Family works. A parent, a sibling, a partner, as long as it's one distinct human per number and not one person's three SIM cards. If you don't have people to ask, rent numbers from an SMS verification service and treat each one as its own separate identity from that point on.

ID verification runs on the same logic and it's stricter. Every channel that needs an ID needs a different one. And I want to be specific about how this fails, because it isn't the way you'd expect. You don't get blocked at the door. Reusing the same ID after a termination will often sail straight through. The verification passes, the channel runs, everything looks fine for weeks. Then the link surfaces and that channel goes down too. It's a delayed consequence, not a rejection, and that's exactly why people think they got away with it.

Addresses work the same way. If two people in one house each run a channel, those channels can be taken down together as linked accounts, and genuinely being two different people is not automatically enough to save you. What saves you is proof of separate ownership. Each person verifies with their own phone number and runs their own AdSense account. Do that and there's a real record of two owners at one address. Skip it and there's just one household with two channels.

One more thing, on AdSense specifically. The phone number on an AdSense account doesn't have to belong to the account holder. That part is fine. But run one number across several AdSense accounts and you've handed over the connection yourself. It will link them eventually.

Every channel gets its own everything. Email, number, ID, AdSense. No sharing, not even once, not even for the one you're only testing with.