User:JodyBruchonFan/DownloadTuber

A DownloadTuber is an individual who regularly backs up local copies of videos from the Intenet video platform YouTube, jokingly referred to as DownloadTube. This is mainly done for archiving those videos in anticipation of them being deleted or otherwise unpublished, and for a future shutdown of YouTube as a whole.

Creating permanent local copies of videos is strongly discouraged by YouTube.^[1][2] YouTube is taking measures to prevent downloading:

In order to protect the YouTube community, we may prevent signed-out users from accessing YouTube videos when they're attempting to download material for offline use.

^[3]

YouTube also regularly purges tutorial videos that show how to create local copies of videos.^[4][5]

Instead, YouTube wants its users to pay monthly for its subscription service, YouTube Premium, to have any form of offline access to videos. However, it only lets users store temporary local copies of YouTube videos that are forcibly deleted after 29 days. In addition, to thwart any permanent preservation, the videos are stored with data lock-in and proprietary encoding in a format only recognized by the YouTube app, to prevent local copying.^[6][7][8][9]

While YouTube Premium can be advertised as technically allowing "downloading", the deceptive marketing comes from exploiting the fact that the user expects so-called "downloading" to result in a file stored in the web browser's Download folder and accessible from other software, instead of the data lock-in that YouTube Premium has.^[8]

The 29-day storage limit and the data lock-in renders the built-in "downloading" feature of YouTube Premium useless for any long-term archival.

Downloading local copies of YouTube videos through "unofficial" and "unapproved" means is the only recourse against the loss of Internet history caused by videos being unpublished by channel owners or YouTube, and against a future shutdown of YouTube. As of 2026, there is no certainty that YouTube will be operating by the year 2050, for instance.

Whenever I tell people that we need to plan for the day when YouTube goes offline, I mostly receive weird reactions. It seems to be the case that people can't think of YouTube being gone. Unfortunately, I'm convinced that most people will face the day when we lose this enormous library of videos.

- Karl Voit^[10]

Videos can disappear from YouTube for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, channel owners decide to "move on" and delete (or otherwise unpublish) their entire history of uploads. Sometimes, videos contain something Google doesn't like and they take them down, one example being "Android is losing a big feature" by comedian Sam Tucker (SAMTIME).^[11]

Sometimes, YouTube's community guidelines grow stricter, retroactively outruling existing content, and entire channels are taken down due to strikes on only a few videos, resulting in the collateral loss of all other videos, one famous example being Mumkey Jones.^[12]