The whole system rests on one principle: you give back what you receive. Every interaction your video receives becomes a debt with a 48-hour countdown. These rules exist so that the exchange stays fair for everyone.
Last updated: 27.09.2026 11:11
Every interaction your video receives is recorded as a debt in your ledger. Watch time is owed back second for second; likes, comments and subscriptions are owed back one for one.
You repay by opening the profile of the member you owe and engaging with their videos within 48 hours. Which of their videos you pick is entirely up to you.
Debt is measured in watch time, not in number of videos. If someone watches 13 minutes of your videos, you owe 13 minutes, repayable across any of their videos in any combination.
Watch debts are always written in whole minutes; seconds never appear in the ledger. Leftover seconds are not lost — they accumulate and are written once they reach a full minute. The debt is written once, when the watch ends, so it does not grow while you are repaying it.
Videos are grouped by length so you can find what suits you, but nothing stops you from watching a video from any category. Length no longer restricts who may engage with whom.
Because debt is measured in time, this stays fair on its own: a five-minute watch creates a five-minute debt, whether the video was five minutes or two hours long.
Each like, comment or subscription you give is recorded as one of the same in return. If you liked five of someone's videos, they owe you five likes.
Nobody can be asked for more than they have: if the member you owe has only two videos, two likes settle a five-like debt. A member with many videos can never trap a member with few in an unpayable debt.
You register with your own e-mail address and click the link we send you. Until you do, the account stays inactive - this keeps mistyped and borrowed addresses out, and makes password recovery work when you need it.
To add videos or repay debts you also need the browser extension. It measures watch time and records your engagement; without it nothing can be verified.
You have 48 hours to repay. The remaining time is shown live on your debts page and in the extension.
If the countdown runs out, the video that received the engagement is removed from the market for 3 days. It returns automatically when the period ends.
3 unpaid debts within 7 days remove all of your videos from the market for 7 days.
The administration may publish videos that appear in every member ledger. They carry the same deadlines and penalties as ordinary debts.
Because there is no member on the other side, this debt is repaid on the administration video itself. If it goes unpaid, one of your own videos leaves the market for 3 days.
Scripts, click farms, emulators, virtual machines used to multiply accounts, or any tool that simulates watching are prohibited. Engagement must come from a real person actually watching.
Multiple accounts operated by the same person, or accounts created to inflate one another, result in permanent closure of all related accounts.
The package is issued to you personally and binds to a single computer. Modifying its files, sharing it, or attempting to bypass its verification locks your token permanently and puts the account under review.
Removing a like or unsubscribing cancels the value the other member received, while their debt to you remains. The extension detects this.
The first 5 detections are warnings only — nothing is closed, and your warning count is shown on your own dashboard. On the next detection your account is suspended for 7 days and your videos leave the market for that period. There is no automatic permanent ban.
You may only add videos from a channel you own or are authorised to represent. Content that infringes copyright, is unlawful, or is age restricted may not be added.
A comment of dots, single characters, random letters or emoji only is not engagement and is rejected outright - it never becomes a debt for the other side. A comment needs at least 12 characters and enough real letters to be readable.
The comment text is stored and shown to the video owner, who can report it if it is empty, offensive or nonsense. Reports are reviewed; an upheld report cancels the engagement and carries the same penalty as withdrawing it.
You decide how many minutes your videos may be watched per day in total. The default is 300 minutes. Once that much has arrived, your videos close to engagement until the next day - so you never wake up to more debt than you can repay.
You can change it at any time in settings. Likes, comments and subscriptions also draw a small amount from the same allowance.
Turning engagement off in your settings removes your videos from the market and prevents new debts. Debts already open remain valid and must still be paid.
Time is counted only while the tab is the active engagement tab (opened from YouCanTube), the sound is on, the video is actually playing, the speed is normal and you are not scrubbing.
Each second of a video counts once: re-watching the same part adds nothing, and skipping forward adds nothing. The tab may be in the background — listening while you work is legitimate. A watch is considered finished after about 120 seconds without a new report, and only then is the debt written.
The extension activates automatically in the tab you open from YouCanTube. A tab opened directly on YouTube does not count and says so on screen.
Only one tab counts at a time. If you open several videos from the market, the most recently opened tab is the active one. When the active tab closes, no tab takes over automatically — open another one from the site, or use “Start engagement in this tab” in the extension window.
If you mute the video, drop the volume to zero, or mute the tab itself, the counter stops and tells you so. It pauses; it does not cancel. Turn the sound back on and it continues from where it stopped.
Likes and subscriptions are also not accepted while the sound is off. Engagement given without sound is not engagement.
A debt asks for at most one subscription to the other side's channel; a second subscription to the same channel is never required.
The same holds for likes: never more likes than the other side has videos. A debt that cannot be repaid does not arise.
The extension pauses the video the moment your debt to that member reaches zero and tells you on the badge. You do not have to watch the clock.
If you choose to keep watching, the extra time is not wasted: it is written as a debt in your favour, exactly like any other watch time.
For every video you may set language, niche and region filters. If you set none, the video is open to everyone — that is the default. A member outside the audience sees the video locked in the market: the thumbnail stays, the title and link are hidden.
One exception: your videos are never closed to a member who owes you. Even if you narrow the audience after a debt was created, the debtor must be able to repay; otherwise they would be penalised for something that is not their fault.
Repay 25 debts in a row without a single miss and you earn the bronze badge; 50 in a row earns silver and 100 earns gold. The calculation is automatic and runs hourly — nobody grants or removes a badge by hand.
A single unpaid debt resets the streak to zero and the badge may drop. Debts cancelled by the platform (for example when a mandatory video is withdrawn) do not break the streak, because they are not your fault.
Bronze pushes 3 of your videos to the top of the market, silver 5 and gold 10. The badge is shown on those videos and explains itself when you hover over it.
The badge does not override the daily capacity rule: videos whose owner has already used up the day's quota still rank below available ones. The boost applies among videos that are open to engagement, and it goes to your least-watched videos so that attention is spread across your catalogue rather than piling onto one video.
Each account is for one channel, and that channel may hold up to 25 videos.
The channel you add videos for and the channel you are signed in as on YouTube must be the same. If you have more than one channel, you open a separate membership for each: a separate browser profile, its own extension, and a different email address.
When the extension fetches a video's details it also reports which channel the video belongs to. If that channel is not the one you picked, the video is rejected and never enters the market.
This exists to stop one member from adding another creator's video - which would otherwise block the real owner from ever adding it, since the same video cannot belong to two accounts.
When you add a channel you choose its publishing language and niche. Neither can be changed afterwards.
The reason: these fields do not merely label the channel, they decide whether other people's videos are open to you. If they could be changed, one could look broad, watch everything, and then close their own video to a narrow audience.
A video that does not belong to the channel registered on your account cannot be added; the system checks which channel the video belongs to.
The reason is simple: you repay the engagement your video receives. If the video is not your channel's, the benefit goes to someone else's channel while the debt stays with you.
Questions about the rules? Write to us through the site.
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