177 videos later...

Okay, okay. The intro-page was shameless clickbait. But since you clicked... want the story? Well, it’s really me — and the filthy boot wasn’t fake.

Why “The Vileness”?

When my friends heard this story, they convinced me to make it public. And they helped me build this site...

Let’s get to know each other first :)
Who am I? I was shooting and publishing online five years before YouTube existed and ten years before Instagram. My website still gets visitors from Jamaica to Japan, from Alaska to Australia, and Google returns 500K+ results for my unique brand name: LilyWOW. And that’s not even counting “Lily WOW” - the more common spelling.

The funniest compliment I ever got was: “I’m retired now, but I still remember admiring you back in college.” LOL This isn’t self-promotion. It’s so you don’t have to wonder who’s talking.

So you may ask: what exactly is “the vileness” here?..
Judging by the way YouTube treated dozens of my works, you might decide the vileness is my art.

But what if the vileness is YouTube itself? Its sweet words about how everyone deserves to have a voice, how there’s an audience for almost every video, and the job of the recommendation system is to find that audience, and what it actually did to my channel?

You decide. I’ll just tell you the facts...

Every factual claim on this page is backed by a screenshot. Click any evidence link to see the proof for yourself.

You know those stories. Nothing unusual: you’re walking along, you trip, and you fall straight onto a knife sticking out of the ground. More than eighty times in a row.(*) That’s my case. Everyone loves a touching story, right?

Well then. Here’s mine...

You’ve already figured out that I’m a well-known model with more than 25 years behind me. But I haven’t spent the last years on silk sheets in Monaco. I returned to my homeland shortly before the full-scale war began, and I haven’t left it for a single day since.

You know, when the rattle of heavy machine guns above your head mixes with the explosions of large attack drones... it changes even the most carefree blondes forever.

I made this channel between air-raid alerts, the round-the-clock terror of sleeplessness, explosions, and close strikes powerful enough to make the walls of my home shake. [Footage from one of such nights →]. And if anyone thinks I’m making this up — or that I should keep quiet about it — we part ways here.

I made the channel not for sales. I wanted to say something real while I still had time. To share some warmth. To give people around the world, frightened by watching the world they knew fall apart, a little strength, hope, and the will to keep living...

YouTube rewarded that persistence in its own special way. I’d call it a filthy boot to the face.

What happened

So, as of now, my channel has 177 videos, and I’ve stopped publishing new ones. But this is how it started.

As you’d expect, the channel grew up normally. It gradually gained viewers and impressions, and everything was going fine — while I was publishing stupid, hopeless slideshow videos that even I would only rewatch in a coma.

Lily shows her real workspace and active production projects. Filmed October 3, 2026

Then one day I decided to make a real animated music video. It was far from perfect. But it was just as far from those old slideshows. And that’s where the lights went out. Not for YouTube. For the viewers.

Immediately after that video, impressions on the next releases collapsed by 94%. The old level never came back. Never...

Even though since then I’ve released dozens of exclusive, cinematic-quality videos created by me by hand. And the audience response to many of the later clips was no worse — and in some cases even better — than on that first cinematic video.

You may ask: “How the hell is that even possible?” May I let George Orwell answer for me...

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.

(George, you wrote that in 1945... how did you know about my channel?)

Oh no, YouTube did keep “recommending” my videos. Here’s how: [▸ screenshots]. First cinematic video: 48,197 impressions in seven days.
Next comparable cinematic release: 2,871.
Then: 1,621.
Then: 931.
* - Around eighty releases after that stayed in the same corridor.

And what about CTR and retention? Sometimes they might even have shocked the algorithms — if the algorithms had lifted the blindfold for even a second. So no, the audience didn’t turn away from my videos. The audience simply stopped being given a chance to turn them down.

To be fair: yes, YouTube warns that even good CTR and average view duration do not, by themselves, guarantee more impressions. Fair enough. But perhaps it forgot to mention that flushing another eighty+ videos straight down the toilet — with practically no meaningful testing at all — is considered normal?

And how many hundreds of videos is a creator supposed to publish before YouTube finds an audience for even one of them — that same audience which, according to YouTube itself, exists for almost every video?

The funniest part? YouTube Studio’s own AI assistant described my recent results as “an unattainable dream for most channels,” called the videos “diamonds” from the audience’s point of view, and said the content was “working perfectly” — while viewers were simply not being shown it. And anyway the videos were still shown to almost nobody...

Of course, still believing in the best — that this was just some random technical failure — I tried to get the YouTube team’s attention. I sent a detailed explanation with screenshots and evidence through every channel available to me. At least one message was definitely delivered.

The reply stage apparently got stuck while aiming at the correct key... It stayed in that position for more than 30 days. You get it, right?

Received. Read. Trashed.

Analytics inside the same YouTube Studio clearly showed that viewer engagement from the United Kingdom, Italy, India, and a number of other countries was several times higher than from Russia and Central Asia. [▸ screenshot]

Yet month after month, YouTube kept pushing my content precisely into the regions showing dramatically worse reactions — repeating the same “unexplainable” anomaly again and again. As if growling into my ear: “I’m going to make these exact guys watch your videos anyway. Just believe.”

YouTube says Shorts can help with audience discovery and give new viewers a chance to discover your long-form content. [▸ help page]. Such beautiful words. Except Shorts didn’t bring my channel a crowd of new viewers. They brought a funeral crew with shovels. Within days of launching Shorts, YouTube Studio’s own AI assistant was basically screaming: “Hey — turn Shorts off, NOW! They’re pumping dead shit into your channel.” Paraphrased for brevity and tone. Full original exchange: [proof].

The same “mysterious” off-target distribution... Magic, right?

More than a month passed. Still believing in the fairness and decency of the YouTube team — and assuming their silence had been caused by an alien attack on the office and mass hypnosis by evil reptiloids — I contacted them again.

This time I attached a fresh stack of screenshots that left very little room for doubt about the "unhealthy distortion" in the way my channel was being distributed.

My message did not accuse, insult, or threaten anyone. It simply said, with facts in hand: “You have a bug. An error. Please fix it.”

The answer? If I translate the essence of it briefly:

Yes, we saw your evidence. No, we’re not going to fix anything. Go fuck yourself, smoke the docs.(*)

* - The author’s sarcastic interpretation. Not a quotation and not a statement of fact. YouTube’s literal response is [here].

The last hope

Eventually, there was only one hope left... Without a stable income, I put $300 from my last personal savings into paid promotion of my videos — directly through Google’s own advertising platform.

Over 20 tests. Different variations. And...

The result: zero.

Seems the audience just couldn’t make sense of the mismatch: polished content + dead channel. So they did what confused people usually do — they scattered.

YouTube’s algorithms did not budge even for money.

Get me right

No, this site is not about “please help me, they hurt me.” I don’t need pity. And I don’t need anyone’s permission to call filth what it is.

By strangling a project like this, YouTube disgraced itself, not me. Of all the humane and legal options left to me, there is only one:

show people what YouTube did to my channel

Yes, I lost several years of my life working 18-hour days with no days off, and in return I got complete and eloquent silence. The easiest thing would have been to quietly blame my own lack of talent and stop bothering respectable people.

But you’ve already seen the numbers. This story is definitely not about lack of talent. Talent, hard work, and playing by the rules are not what YouTube rewards.

Or are they?
At the very least, let others learn this before they repeat my mistakes and believe the sweet stream of marketing fairy tales.

Afterword

that lie can cost you dearly

Disappointment in people. Loss of faith in yourself. And several years simply erased from your life by someone else’s hand...

Honestly? I’m not bitter. I’m not complaining. And I’m not asking for anything. I’m not even particularly surprised.

I just wanted to ask you one thing: ...But changed my mind.

P.S. Yesterday I had a dream.
James Hadley Chase stepped out of the haze, looked at me with sympathy, and gave me a sad smile.
“My poor silly girl. Did you really believe anyone gives anything for free in this world — no matter how shamelessly they lie when they promise it? I wrote about all of this a long time ago. Another fool believed in The World in My Pocket...” Then the air-raid siren began to howl. And Chase dissolved into a restless awakening...
And then the sun rose, and life went on. Just now there was one less vileness in it.
At least for me.