YouTube API: "no linked youtube account" with a YouTube Business Account

Question

I've got a client who is a business. They are using Google Apps for Business (the paid version), and have created a Google Apps email account. Using this email account, we logged into YouTube and went to create a channel. Because they are a business, we created a BUSINESS YouTube Channel with the associated BUSINESS Google+ Page.
They also have a vendor who is using the YouTube API to upload their videos for them. However when the vendor tries to use the API, they get the error "no linked youtube account". We're thinking that this is because as a Google+ Business Page, the page is not associated with a single Google Account, but rather multiple Google Accounts can be set as "managers" of the page.

When we tried to create a "personal" YouTube Channel/Google+ Page associated with this email address, we tried to put the company name in as the First Name / Last Name and it rejected it because it says that it's a company name and not a real person's name. It also asks for gender and birthdate, and all of those things associated with a person and not a business.

My questions is.... is there a way around this issue? Can you use the YouTube API to upload with a Google+ Business Page and a YouTube Business Channel?

Thanks, Justin

Answer 1

You should be able to create a Google+ Page and a corresponding YouTube account. Here's a blog post explaining the steps.

To clarify this example, I have a Google+ page (somewhat inactive) for Cloud Hulk, a joke name my old teammates gave me. When I go to the top right corner of YouTube.com, I can select "switch account"

Now when I click on it, the very first time I do it, it asks me to create a channel. If I do not do this step, the YouTube API will return a "no linked YouTube account" error. I confirm the change:

Now that I'm logged in, I should see this in the top corner of YouTube.com:

When I'm doing the OAuth 2.0 authorization flow, I'll be presented with a list of channels to authorize as:

You can test this out by going to the API reference and clicking on "Authorize Requests Using OAuth 2.0" under "Try it Now".