How to revoke access to a video link you already sent.
Flip one switch. The old link gates on the next click.

Which of the two you pick depends on who is on the wrong side of the line. Private is for when nobody should be watching: a cut that went out before the client approved the music, a film pulled at the subject’s request, a reel that quotes a rate you no longer charge. Changing the code is for when the audience shrank rather than disappeared: a producer left the project, a link was forwarded into a group thread, an agency you no longer work with still has the address in a shared document.

Be clear about which modes actually stop somebody. Three of the five do: Private, Password, and Embed only, which returns 404 on both watch routes to everyone but you while the film keeps playing in the iframes you placed. An unlisted link is a courtesy, not a gate, and that is not a quirk of one platform. YouTube documents the same thing about its own unlisted mode in plain language: those videos can be seen and shared by anyone with the link. So if the film you need to pull is unlisted, the move is Private or a code. There is no third option that leaves the address open and the audience closed.

The practical consequence is worth stating plainly, because it is the part people do not believe until they try it. You do not delete the film. You do not upload it again. You do not generate a replacement link and write a paragraph explaining why the first one is dead. The film keeps its id, its slug, its view count and its embed settings. Only the answer to the question changes, and it changes for everybody at once.

The same property is what makes the neighbouring problem easy. If the reason you wanted to pull the link is that you sent the wrong cut, you do not need revocation at all: you can replace the file behind the same link and the client clicks the address they already have. And if what you actually want is a gate you should have put up in the first place, the mechanics are the same ones described on password protecting a video link.

A downloaded file is gone. If the film had its download toggle on, any viewer who reached the page could save the master, and that copy is now a file on their disk. Flipping the film to Private changes nothing about it. No platform on earth changes anything about it. This is why the per-film download setting, labelled allow original-file download, is the first thing to check when a share goes wrong, and the first thing to decide when a share goes out. It is a per-film switch with no tier gate, so it is on or off because you chose, not because of what you pay.

A screen recording is the same problem in slower motion. Anyone who could play the film in a browser could capture it while it played. There is no browser setting, on any service, that reliably prevents that. Treat a link you sent to a browser as a link whose contents may exist as a recording somewhere, and price your risk accordingly.

So decide what the link is for. For the overwhelming majority of client work, revocation is exactly the right tool: you are managing who is looking at an unfinished cut, not defending against a determined adversary. For the minority of work where the file genuinely must not leak, no link-level gate is the answer, and you should not have sent a browser link at all.

Two rows deserve a second look. The first is Vimeo’s lapse behaviour, which is generous in intent and awkward in practice: your gated videos are not deleted, they are switched to Private and restricted, and while restricted they cannot be played, edited or downloaded, and embeds stop working. That is a safe default. It is also a site-wide outage for every client link you had running, triggered by a billing event rather than by you. And the escape hatch is one-way, because deleting a restricted video is permanent.

The second is YouTube’s unlisted mode, which people reach for constantly as a client link and which is documented, in Google’s own words, as visible to and shareable by anyone with the link. There is no password on YouTube. The only real revocation is Private, and Private is a different product: it forces every viewer to be signed in to the account the video was shared with, which is fine for a colleague and a non-starter for a client who checks mail on a phone. Google has also changed the state of unlisted videos retroactively before, when older unlisted uploads were made private in July 2021 unless the owner opted out.

WeTransfer answers the question a third way, by not answering it. There is no revoke switch to find, because the link was always going to die: free and starter transfers stay online up to three days from the moment they are sent. A password can be added before or after sending at no extra cost, which is the closest thing to a real revocation on the platform. Until then, the free plan documents no limit on how many people can use a download link.

If your reach depends on YouTube, keep it there. Its private mode is a genuine gate, it costs nothing, and the sign-in requirement that makes it awkward for clients is the same thing that makes it strict. Nothing on this page is worth losing a distribution channel over.

If you already pay for Vimeo and your library lives there, changing a privacy setting on a paid plan does the job. The reason to look elsewhere is not the switch, it is what the switch is attached to: gates that are paid features, and a lapse that reaches into every share you have running.

And if what you are sending is a file to hand over rather than a film to watch, an expiring transfer is a simpler mental model than a permanent library with a gate on it. Send the file, let the clock run out, move on.

The case for doing it here is narrow and specific. You want the gate on the free plan, you want the URL to survive every change you make to it, and you want the film to keep playing at the bitrate you uploaded while it is up. If none of that describes your problem, stay where you are.