You’ve seen the videos, you’ve seen the posts. Everybody talks about how easy it is to make money on Youtube with AI, but is there a catch or are people actually doing it? Let’s find out. Today I will be starting the experiment documenting my progress here weekly to stay accountable.
By the way, I don’t want to just churn out AI slop, I want the videos to also be “decent”.
The Tools
The tools I am using to try and make money on Youtube are:
- Grok Imagine for the AI videos
- Capcut to edit them together
- Eleven Labs for voiceovers
- Suno AI for music
If you are unfamiliar with some I have posts on Eleven Labs for using AI voices in your creations and how to make AI music.
The Research
To make money on Youtube you need 1,000 subscribers, and either 4,000 hours watched (long videos) or 10 million views (with shorts). Since we are using AI tools, we will be attempting it with Youtube Shorts.
You can’t just do whatever you want and expect growth. A niche is going to necessary if we are going to make ANY progress.There’s recipes, gaming, crypto, history, story telling, sports, brainrot, you name it. If the topic isn’t popular, you could get trapped in “0 view jail”. Youtube is extremely difficult in my opinion, but apparently the “gurus” say it’s easy.
Swipe rate is very important as well. What do I mean? If people only watch 10% of the video, then Youtube isn’t going to think it is good enough. AKA will not keep pushing it in the algo. So you need to have a video that not only looks good, but has appeal and quick cuts for all the dopamine addicted people. This might be tough.
The Decision
As a big fan of gaming (and because I saw how many views some people are getting), I decided that was my choice. No, I don’t want to make “AI Slop”, I just want to use AI to help me during the progress. Keep in mind, this is just an “experiment”.
I’m really excited to try this and see if Youtube actually awards consistent content, even if it’s technically “low quality” because of the AI. Sure, you couldn’t find a more saturated niche, but you also can’t find anything with a wider demographic to view these videos.
Day 1:
After 1 day, I have achieved 10 subscribers and a little over 5k views from a few shorts. The likes are beating the dislikes consistently, but all the comments are negative towards AI. It seems like the most passionate people really dont like seeing AI videos. But I mean movies use CGI and AI to make them now, you can’t stop it.
I think it’s a pretty promising start, but I wasn’t expecting to get 5 comments of hate so far. We are just going to ignore them and continue to see what happens. The next video is a “question” type video coming out so we will see if people engage in the comments.
We will continue to try all the different formats and report back next week. As I edited this post on Day 2, I have 17 subscribers now.