The non-profit organization that I work for has a YouTube channel that no one has posted to in over 10 years, and no one knows the login information or who set the account up. There has been a lot of turnover on the board in the past few years, so my assumption is that attempting to find the person who maintained the page is next to impossible. I would like to get it up and running again, but have no clue how to log in to it. The existing account has the exact name of the organization, so I do not want to create a new account with a different name, All of the recovery info presented by Google assumes that you know the email associated with the account.

I found a number to call, which will be my next step. Just wanted to see if any of you have any thoughts on this that may not have occurred to me. This is a fairly low priority item for us at the moment, but I would like to get it resolved in the next few months.

Is the account part of a managed domain example: nonprofitname.com? If it is managed then a domain administrator can verify account information for the domain i.e. reset password.

If is not a managed account just a generic Gmail and has not been accessed in 10 yrs then more than likely the account has been deactivate by Google. Your best bet is to contact Google but my inclination is that they will make you re-create the channel without knowing any account information.

Just a few thoughts of the top of my head.

Thanks for the response. I don't know the answer to the first question. The account was created in 2008, one year before it was required to use a Google account to create a new YouTube account; so, the email the account is registered to could be a non-Google account..? Unless Google shut down the accounts that did not have a gmail address.

I left a message in Google Communities and got the following response:

Quote:

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Only the creator/owner can assist you by either giving you ownership of the legacy YouTube account if it is still in its legacy state with a Google Account of your own or, if already claimed (which was possible since May 2009), of the owner Google Account.

In order to try to make contact, you can comment on the videos, asking the owner to make contact, and if they're still monitoring the email, they will be notified of your comment(s) and might get in touch. Perhaps your organisation even has that email still.

If you own the rights to the content you can claim copyright infringement and that may have the YouTube channel terminated, but you wont be given the YouTube product by YouTube.

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I'll give that a try and see what happens.