It's 2025, and the split-brain world of Google vs YouTube vs AdSense accounts has still not been solved, and is only getting worse. It seems you need to be an e

It's 2025, and the split-brain world of Google vs YouTube vs AdSense accounts has still not been solved, and is only getting worse. It seems you need to be an expert in how Google backend is structured to get anything done on YouTube. To my understanding: Google account: everyone knows what it is, your personal account. Unless you have GSuite, then nobody knows what it's meant to be and let you do. YouTube account (channel): there is now a many-to-many relation between Google accounts and YouTube accounts, but they otherwise function pretty much like pre-Google+ YouTube accounts. You can even change the primary Google account of a YouTube account, that requires clicking a button and waiting for a week. Then there is this brand vs non-brand distinction, where you can convert from non-brand to brand, but not the other way around, and some stuff used to work only with one of these types. And I think nowadays there is some way to make a Google account without a (named) YouTube channel, if you're just a viewer that doesn't even comment or create playlists, but there is not much reason to do that. AdSense account: A billing account, once again with many-to-many mapping to Google accounts, and also many-to-many [0] mapping to AdSense projects ("sites"). Requires unique billing details, and apparently unique address as well [1], but otherwise shouldn't do much. So in the linked situation, I think editing Google account login info changed the AdSense account details, which is definitely unexpected. YouTube account was probably not the problem here, I suspect the author would have had same issue if they were selling ads on a website instead of YouTube channel, though of course you have to use different AdSense UI if you sell ads on Youtube vs on the web, which probably further complicates things. Anyway, since it hit the frontpage of ~~Google's only working support channel~~ HackerNews, it will soon be solved (for that single creator only, probably). The only good solutions to this mess seem to be to either make YouTube account a standalone thing (cutting AdSense from the picture, and using Google accounts only for authentication), or to decouple all the accounts and make links between them more configurable / clear. Anything in-between, and we get (waves hands) this. But both of these solutions would also make it too clear where to cut if/when the Google antitrust process comes, which doesn't make me think it will happen anytime soon. [0] https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/11680365/how-we-can-use-multiple-adsense-accounts-on-a-single-website-is-it-legal-or-illegal-check-this https://support.google.com/adsense/thread/11680365/how-we-ca... [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/17vb8w8/can_a_couple_share_an_adsense_account/k9lhymz/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PartneredYoutube/comments/17vb8w8/c...