Last updated on January 23rd, 2024 at 02:30 am
You may do a Google search, use Wayback Machine, search Twitter and use the video thumbnail URL to find the owner of a private YouTube video.
When an owner of a YouTube video makes it private, he or she wants to limit the number of people who can watch the video.
Some owners make a video right from the beginning when they’re uploading it.
After making it private, they’ll invite a selected group of people to view the video. The invitees will have no problem knowing who the owner is. They may even be able to contact the owner as they would have access to the owner’s email.
What if a video has always been public and the owner decides to make it private?
When a public video is made private, nobody is automatically notified.
YouTube regards it as the sole privilege of a Channel owner to publish his video as private. There is no obligation to inform any of his subscribers about it.
The only way for you to get access to the video is to contact the owner through email and request permission to view it.
If the owner accepts your request, you’ll get an email notification giving you access to the private video.
That’s fair, but what if you don’t have the owner’s contact? Maybe you watched a random video from a channel and just saved the video link, but didn’t bother with saving the Channel address.
In this instance, how do you find the owner of the private video?
It’s a tricky affair but there’s hope if you use the methods discussed below to find the owner of a private YouTube video.
Can You Remember the Title of the Other Videos from the Channel?
Try searching the video URL on Google. Can you find any useful leads? You may find some useful If you’re lucky, especially if Google hasn’t updated the search results.
Not successful? Do you faintly remember the title of the video? Maybe it had a strange, catchy title.
Just enter the best keywords you can remember and try your luck.
Even if you’ve forgotten the title of the private video and the channel name, there’s still hope of finding out the channel.
Can you remember the title of another video from the channel? If you do, search for it on YouTube.
Going through the results of the search in YouTube, a channel name may ring a bell. This is one of the easiest methods used to find the owner of a private YouTube video.
Search Wayback Machine
As you may already be aware, Wayback Machine keeps captures of web pages of a website from the time it was first published.
It is a useful tool to track down pages from websites that are no longer available.
This tool can also be used to track YouTube videos, especially older ones. If a YouTube video has been published as public, then are chances a copy of the video page is captured by the Wayback Machine.
Some folks have met with success when using this method to find the owner of a private YouTube video.
Truth be told, it’s much, much easier to find an unavailable web page, compared to a video page.
So, keep your fingers crossed while doing a search on Wayback Machine.
Alright, what can you find on the Wayback Machine as far as YouTube videos are concerned?
For one, you can go and find deleted YouTube videos. Actually, there’s not much difference between a deleted video and a private video. With a private video, there’s a chance of you watching it. A video deleted will not exist on the web, unless someone has uploaded a copy of it somewhere.
Say, luck is on your side and you find the page capture of the video. You won’t be able to play the video back.
The reason is Wayback Machine just captures the video page. The Youtube video is captured as a web page.
Wayback Machine doesn’t store the video on its server. That makes sense because it’s simply impossible for the service to store all the videos on the web in its server.
The best information you can get is the video title and the channel name.
Armed with the channel name,
Try Twitter
If you can’t find the video owner’s contact details through his YouTube channel, you can use Twitter.
When you share a YouTube video on Twitter, you’re required to include the link to the video.
Generally, you can search Video ID + Twitter to see if you can find the owner of a private YouTube video.
For example, the video above is listed under Twitter. Although you can’t get to watch the video, it will lead you to the owner’s profile.
But then again it depends on luck. If the owner himself has shared the video on Twitter, then you may have luck contacting him.
What if someone else had shared the video? There’s nothing much you can do.
Grab a Video Thumbnail of a Private Video
While you may not be able to watch a private video, YouTube doesn’t stop you from grabbing a thumbnail of it in some instances.
The thumbnail will be the one that was selected to display on YouTube
Why do we want a thumbnail of the private video? You may find the channel name or a website address if you’re lucky.
To grab a thumbnail of a private video, use the link below.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/hqdefault.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ID/maxresdefault.jpg
Replace the video ID with the private video ID.
For example, if the video URL (see screenshot above) is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXUkMzFa_xk, the thumbnail URL will be
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/pXUkMzFa_xk/hqdefault.jpg
You want to do this because you may find the title of the video or the channel name on the thumbnail.
This, in most cases, may help find the owner of a private YouTube video.
But be warned that if the video has been made private for a long time, you may not get a thumbnail.
Try Searching Another Video Hosting Site
If you know the title of the video or even the channel name, you may try searching another video hosting site with the video name or the channel name.
If luck is on your side, you may discover the video.
Sometimes a video may be made private on YouTube but not on other platforms.
Some video owners may want to private the video on YouTube owing to copyright or community guidelines issues and upload the video elsewhere where copyright infringement may not be taken seriously.
Video platforms you would want to try include Vimeo, Dailymotion, and Utreon, among others.
The above methods are ways how to find the owner of a private YouTube video. They’re not guaranteed to work, but you can always try your luck with them.
