In December I got hit with the third penalty, the removal from recommendations, alongside a load of other creators. I was involved in discussions all over the place about people who's channels literally died instantly, 90%+ drop in realtime views, it was crazy. Then we all realised that we were no longer being recommended anywhere. We spent ages trying to figure out why this was happening but no one knew. It was bizarre as it was happening to creators from all different niches, sizes etc... there was just no pattern to it.
Here you can see my graph from that time. It died on the 2nd December but then came back on the 3rd, I was really relieved, but then it went down for several days.
Funilly enough it wasn't all of my videos that had stopped being recommended, but just my top 20% or so perfoming videos, but as you can see it had a devastating effect.
Those were extremely depressing days! I stopped uploading as there was no point wasting content. I was checking my realtime views every few minutes (it was very unhealthy) and then on Friday 8th there was a huge spike, my channel was back. I then went on to have my best month ever, even with those few dead days, and my channel has been strong ever since. So maybe they were just testing this new punishment and I was unlucky, but it affected lots of people and I think there is some who never got their channel back.
