For how long do videos stay up on YouTube?

Youtube was launched in 2005 and there are videos that have been there ever since. I think the only reason a video is taken down from youtube is either that the person who posted pulls it off or the video violates youtube’s terms of service agreement, including, and probably the most likely, reason a video is pulled from youtube: that posting it is a violation of someone’s copyright.

The very first ever video about one of the founders at the zoo is still there from ‘05.

imgur.com will delete pictures after 30 days if nobody has viewed them in that time period. Youtube doesn’t have that limitation. I have videos on youtube that haven’t been viewed in years.

Thank you, @lillycoyote, @AshlynM, and @johnpowell. I have some favorite videos that I’ve bookmarked and I was wondering for how long I would be able to count on their being there.

I think sometimes the original poster will take things down, or the account will become inactive and then the posts are gone. I had some things I tagged and they are now gone.

@bewailknot What makes an account become inactive? Do you have to keep posting things?

What do you mean by “tagged”? Did you post videos and now they’re gone?

@2davidc8 When I first visited youtube I saw some dance videos I wanted to watch again. I added them to my favorites, years later they look like they are still there in my favorites, but a couple of them are no longer on youtube.

Why an account becomes inactive I don’t know, but some are because the person repeatedly violated some youtube rule. I am currently subscribed to 119 youtube channels. It was more but I went through the list a couple weeks ago and found almost 20 that no longer exist.

@2davidc8 The videos you’ve bookmarked should still be safe, but if you want to be really sure, depending on how many of them there are, you might want to download them to your hard drive, just to be sure.

@lillycoyote How do I download them onto my hard drive? I was just wondering about this…

@2davidc8 Use RealPlayer….this has a built in feature to download videos. When you mouse over a video, it’ll display, “download video” But I think it only works with Firefox.
Also, savtube.com. Just copy and paste the url into their website. You can either save them as a video or mp3.

@2davidc8 I use Firefox, the browser, with an addon called DownloadHelper. It’s really easy to do it that way but @AshlynM has mentioned a couple of other good options too.

Thank you, @AshlynM and @lillycoyote. I will give these a try.