When I initially setup the youtube channel I had a personal adsense account. As I will be moving this over to a proper business I set about finding a way to convert this personal adsense account to a business account before I got the channel monetised again. This turned out to be a big mistake.

After doing some research it turns out you can't just switch the account over to a business account. I had read you can have a personal and business account though so I applied with a different email and put in this website as the place I wanted to advertise on. When the youtube channel got monetised I would simply point it at the business adsense account. Well, if you can have a personal and business account I must have done something wrong because I got an email that night saying that I already had an existing account and that I should use that or shut it down before I could apply again (maybe I should have used the business name rather than my own name for the payee, no way of editing this now though of couse)

It sounded simple - I would just shut down the personal account and reapply with the new business one. So that's what I did. I got a confirmation of cancellation and reapplied with the business account. I had a feeling it wouldn't be this easy and I was correct. Again I got the same email later that I already had an adsense account and it had the email of the personal one. I thought maybe it needed some time to filter through the system so I immediately clicked to apply again.

However I am concerned - there's countless threads of similar issues around this type of thing. I applied to reinstate my personal account, but I imagine it will run into something similar. So now I have the personal account reinstatement pending and an application for the business account. At this point I just hope to get the personal account back and I will try to add my business bank account to this - I don't think there should be any issues but will ask my accountant what needs to be done.

So I tried to do the right thing but automation and a lack of actually defining what happens in the instructions potentially means I'll be without adsense revenue. Admittedly it won't be a huge amount but early on this journey it's a blow.

What I suspect is the actual procedure to switch to a business account is.

  1. Delink from youtube account (must be part of YPP to do this)
  2. Close personal account
  3. Wait 90 days for system to make sure all payments have been issued (even if there aren't any)
  4. Reapply for business account

Or maybe you don't need to go through any of this if you don't name the business payee name as yourself - who knows! The thing is you don't have any way of speaking to an actual person.

So if I don't get my personal account reinstated then I will need to wait until I hit eligibility and then see if I get any further options to sort this mess out...