YouTube announced that it is cleaning up the system by which users request custom URLs.
Under the current system, YouTube users could either go via the YouTube system and generate a URL in the youtube.com/ChannelName format, or those integrated with Google+ would get the youtube.com/c/ChannelName format.
YouTube Creators director of product management Tom Leung explained the changes in a blog post:
With these two systems in place, we began to see instances where two channels could request URLs with similar names in these two different formats. This is confusing for fans, and not a great experience for creators, either.
Our new system will fix that problem. With today?s launch, both URLs from the older systems will now point to the same channel. This means that in our previous example, users can now reach the same channel with either youtube.com/ChannelName or youtube.com/c/ChannelName. And with a new system in place, we?ll also avoid duplicating channel names in the future. This also means that claiming a new YouTube custom URL does not involve a custom URL for your Google+ profile, and vice versa. We believe this is a positive change for the millions of channels that have custom URLs today, as well as those that will request one in the future. However, as we make this transition, there is a group of less than 0.02 percent of channels with custom URLs that will have to claim new URLs due to duplication conflicts–when youtube.com/ChannelName and youtube.com/c/Cha...