YouTube has reportedly reassigned a URL from a long-standing YouTube personality to a large cosmetics company with a tenth of the subscribers.
Matthew Lush has taken 10 years to build up a subscriber base of a million people. YouTube is a source of income for him because he makes money from the adverts that appear alongside his videos.
In a video by Lush, he explained he gained control of the user name, Lush, in November 2005.
YouTube recently gave the user name to Lush Cosmetics, a high-end handmade cosmetics company.
Now both www.youtube.com/user/Lushcosmetics and www.youtube.com/lush direct users to the Lush Cosmetics YouTube channel.
The video network said in a statement to Business Insider: "We updated our URL system last year, allowing creators and brands alike to claim a custom YouTube URL that is consistent with their identity across Google. Based on a combination of relevancy factors, this new system algorithmically reserves certain URLs for creators to choose from."
YouTube reportedly told the BBC it was up to Lush Cosmetics to decide if it will give back the URL. According to the same article, Lush Cosmetics claims it never asked for the URL.
Lush said he asked YouTube why it gave the URL away and it reportedly said it was because the company has trademarks in soap and cosmetics.
Lush then contacted the cosmetics company, thinking it would be on his side because he has video blogged about its products "countless" times and spent thousands of dollars on its offerings. The company reportedly said it was a billion-dollar business and wanted to keep the URL.
"This makes me so angry, because before YouTube cared about their content creators... And then Google bought them over and now they only care about big business and who makes them the most money," says the vlogger.
"We are the reason people keep coming back to YouTube."
"If YouTube starts snatching URLs, it could cost them some of their biggest assets. Ask Myspace how quickly the tide of public opinion can change once corporations get involved," a digital media news site warned.
More than 10 000 people have signed an online petition in the past week, to get the cosmetics company to give the Lush URL back.
The reasons fans gave for signing the petition included: "It's disgusting YouTube would submit to a company...This is corporate America in action and I find it vile...[YouTube] is taking away the hard work of an amazing person," said Rebecca Renda. "Since when did big companies matter more than the YouTube community?" said Alyssa Grzechowiak.
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