a gaming channel
710 videos
its own merch store
Dead
Free channel scan
Somewhere in your back catalogue, a dead link is sitting in 500 video descriptions.
You wrote that description once and pasted it into every upload since. If the link inside it died, it died on all of them — and YouTube never told you.
We check every link in every video you've ever posted. Free.
Takes a few hours. You'll need a free account — we ask for it after you paste, and it's where we email the report.
In the description template
bit.ly/•••••••
- Videos carrying it
- 2,670
- Dead since
- 2014
- Times YouTube said so
- 0
- Every video
- Every description
- Every pinned comment
- No card
- No channel access
Three we found
What this looks like when we find it
a Minecraft channel
1,060 videos
Teespring store
Dead
a gaming channel
2,670 videos
one shortened link, since 2014
Dead
All three had it in their current description template, so every new upload got it too. Anonymised — these are real channels and their business, not case studies we own.
Why it happens
Nobody checks 4,000 videos.
Link rot is a slow, boring problem right up until the moment you realise it isn't slow at all. One line in a template goes bad and takes your whole catalogue with it, in an afternoon, years ago.
- Merch platforms change. Teespring became Spring. Every old store URL in every old description stopped working on the same day.
- Products get delisted. The app you promoted in 2019 isn't in the store any more. The link still is.
- Domains lapse. A sponsor's campaign page outlives the campaign by about six months.
Your affiliate dashboard won't show you this — it only knows about its own links, and it can't tell "nobody clicked" from "nobody could."
How it runs
Three steps, and you do one of them.
-
We read your whole catalogue.
Every video, every description, every pinned comment. Not a sample.
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We check every link.
With a real browser signature, so we don't mistake "blocked us" for "broken." Anything we can't reach, we say so and leave it out of the numbers.
-
You fix it in an afternoon.
Ranked by how much traffic each video is actually pulling right now, so the 40 that matter are at the top and the 600 that don't are at the bottom. Fix your template, bulk-edit the 40, scan again to check.
The ranking
We rank by the views you're getting now, not the views you've ever had.
It sounds like a detail. It's the whole product.
A ten-year-old video has racked up a lot of views. It's getting almost none today. Old videos are exactly where dead links pile up — so anyone counting lifetime views will tell you a broken link on a 2015 video is a catastrophe. It isn't. Nobody's watching it.
16×
How much counting lifetime views overstated the damage on the channel we tested this against. That's why our list is short and in the right order.
Where the line is
Finding it is free. What ends it is the part we charge for.
The scan runs the same either way, so the finding costs us nothing to hand over.
Free, and yours to keep
- The dead link, written out in full
- How many of your videos are carrying it
- The views a year landing on it
- The 25 worst-affected videos, ranked
Click the link and watch it fail — that is the whole proof, and it costs nothing. Scanning again later is free too.
The fix list
- Every video still pulling traffic to that link, in the order to open them
- Where the 80% cut falls, so you know when to stop
- A
replace_withcolumn, and the video IDs in the format TubeBuddy and vidIQ take - The whole thing as one file
Turns "somewhere in 700 descriptions" into one find-and-replace and an afternoon.
Knowing a link is dead doesn't get it fixed. Knowing which forty videos to open, in what order, with the IDs already in the format your bulk editor reads — that's the difference between a fact about your channel and a job you can finish today.
Questions
The things people ask before pasting a channel.
- What does it cost?
- We check your channel before you pay anything. The scan is free — it needs a free account, an email and a password, so the report has somewhere to go. If we don't find a dead link worth fixing, there's nothing to buy and we'll say so. If we do, you'll be looking at the link and the count of videos carrying it before the question of money comes up at all. The fix list itself is free while we're in beta. It won't stay free, and anything you take during the beta stays yours.
- You've shown me the dead link. What am I paying for?
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The order. A dead link in 700 videos is one fact; the list of which 40 of them are
still pulling traffic, ranked, is a job you can finish. The report shows you the
top 25 free — on most channels the videos worth an afternoon run well past that,
and the file picks up exactly where the page stops. It's built for a bulk editor,
not for reading: video IDs and a
replace_withcolumn, so it's one find-and-replace rather than 700 trips to the studio. - What if you're wrong about a link?
- Click it. That's the fastest audit there is, and it's why we put the URL at the top of the report instead of a score. About one in eight of our flags turns out to be a site blocking us rather than a broken page — we subtract that from every number before you see it.
- I'm not editing 700 descriptions.
- You won't. On a typical channel about 40 videos carry 80% of the traffic hitting the dead link. Fix your template, fix those 40, and you're done.
- How long does it take?
- A few hours for most channels, longer for very large ones. We email you.
- Do you touch my channel?
- No. We read what's public. We never ask for YouTube permissions, never sign in as you, and never touch a description — the fixing is yours to do.
Most scans find nothing
Two out of three channels come back clean.
We'd rather tell you that than sell you a report about nothing. But the third one is usually surprised.
Takes a few hours. You'll need a free account — we ask for it after you paste, and it's where we email the report.
Free. No card, no access to your channel.