Chameleon Channels: Measuring YouTube Accounts Repurposed for Deception and Profit

TL;DR

It is found that a substantial number of YouTube channels (re)sold over these 6 months are used to disseminate policy-sensitive content, often without facing any penalty, and the market for cultivating organic audiences is set to grow, particularly if it remains unchallenged by mitigations, technical or otherwise.

Abstract

Online content creators spend significant time and effort building their user base through a long, often arduous process that requires finding the right "niche" to cater to. So, what incentive is there for an established content creator known for cat memes to completely reinvent their channel and start promoting cryptocurrency services or covering electoral news events? We explore this problem of repurposed channels, whereby a channel changes its identity and contents. We first characterize a market for "second-hand" social media accounts, which recorded sales exceeding USD 1M during our 6-month observation period. Observing YouTube channels (re)sold over these 6 months, we find that a substantial number (53%) are used to disseminate policy-sensitive content, often without facing any penalty. Surprisingly, these channels seem to gain rather than lose subscribers. We estimate the prevalence of repurposing using two snapshots of ~1.4M YouTube accounts sampled from an ecologically valid proxy. In a 3-month period, we estimate that ~0.25% channels were repurposed. We experimentally confirm that these repurposed channels share several characteristics with sold channels -- mainly, they have a significantly high presence of policy-sensitive content. Across repurposed channels, we find channels similar to those used in influence operations, as well as channels used for financial scams. Repurposed channels have large audiences; across two observed samples, repurposed channels held ~193M and ~44M subscribers. We reason that purchasing an existing audience and the credibility associated with an established account is advantageous to financially- and ideologically-motivated adversaries. This phenomenon is not exclusive to YouTube and we posit that the market for cultivating organic audiences is set to grow, particularly if it remains unchallenged by mitigations, technical or otherwise.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: On the left, a channel listed for sale on Fameswap about entertaining facts with 1.19M subscribers. Videos are created predominantly with AI tools. This channel would later change to a news channel discussing political issues with no trace of its previous identity (on the right). Note, the channel on the left has been reconstructed using metadata. To not drive traffic to the channels, handles and titles are blurred.
• Figure 2: Data collection procedures. We collected Fameswap listings (1a) daily and a large sample of Social Blade channels (1b). We then scrape snapshots through time. On Fameswap, we scraped a channel every 3 days on average (2a). For Social Blade channels, due to the sample size, we collected a snapshot in January and later in March 2025 (2b). Finally, we obtain historical snapshots using the Wayback Machine (WM; see 3a and 3b).
• Figure 3: End-to-end experimental procedure, including samples, annotations, featurization, and regression.
• Figure 4: Distribution of listing prices, subscriber counts, and price per 1,000 subscribers for Fameswap listings. Outliers (Q3 + 1.5X IQR) are hidden. Categories are self-reported at the time of listing. Categories are ordered by median price per 1,000 subscribers.
• Figure 5: Days since a channel is listed for sale, until it changes its handle, title, and description (cumulative).