How He Turned A Faceless Channel Into A Full Time Business In 1 YEAR

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We break down how Tim built a faceless YouTube portfolio by choosing hard-to-copy niches, hiring full-time in high-ROI markets, and scaling output with systems. The highs include a $50k month on Shorts; the lows include age-restrictions and the AI slop wave.

• moving from TikTok agency tactics to YouTube systems
• breakout short at video seven and early monetization
• hard niches vs saturated niches in faceless content
• cost control through full-time hiring in high-ROI regions
• investor partnership and SOPs for scale and quality control
• rapid scale from 15 to 60 videos a month
• portfolio mindset to offset volatility and seasonality
• downturn drivers: age restrictions and AI slop flooding feeds
• pivot to long-form for RPM stability while keeping shorts
• starter strategy with branded AI influencers, not AI slop
• niche bending: proven formats moved into new markets
• creator-operator partnerships to buy back time and grow

If you want to watch Tim’s work, follow the links in the description and subscribe so you don’t miss the upcoming interview with Rene Ritchie

Transcript

Welcome And Topic: Faceless YouTube

SPEAKER_01 0:00

You must have thought you were a genius at that point. Like, I figured it out first.

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I am a YouTube genius. Yeah, I did feel like a genius because again, we cracked the hardest niche.

SPEAKER_01 0:08

Oh, why take the risk? Why do you feel like it's important to let people know how you've succeeded? Hey, welcome back to the only podcast here to help you grow your channel whether you have a face or you don't. I'm Travis, and I'm here with an incredibly special guest. Super excited about this because I know a lot of people have been reaching out to us telling us that we need to talk about faceless channels because there's so many. So guess what? I got you the hottest guy doing it right now. This is Tim. Tim, how goes it?

SPEAKER_00 0:33

Thank you for for this intro. It was amazing. So uh yeah, appreciate you having me. Um hello everyone. Uh yeah, I'll try to share as bunch of source as I can. And uh yeah, uh, can't wait for the plot. Uh I love it.

Tim’s Background: TikTok To YouTube

SPEAKER_01 0:47

And Tim Danilov, uh, you have been around for a little while, but really over the last couple of weeks, uh as far as like my radar goes on on Twitter slash X, I've seen you kind of pop off a little bit there because of some of the things you're sharing. And that's actually why you're on the podcast today. Um, one of the things that people are really excited about is the fact that Facebook channels seem to be popping off from like a monetary standpoint, and you have uh come up with some ways to make that work. And we want to talk about your history and and like how you got there and what people who are trying to do that can do and all of that here in this podcast today. Um, and if you're new here, we help you grow YouTube channels. And today I'm really excited because I feel like this could unlock um full-time creatorship for some people. And that's one of the things we hear a lot. It's like, I want to be a full-time creator, but my channel's slow. Maybe you need a second channel that just brings in money. And I think Tim can help us uh figure that out. So, Tim, talk a little bit about you. How did you get started? Who are you? What what's going on?

First Shorts Breakout And Monetization

Choosing Hard Niches: 3D Animation

SPEAKER_00 1:43

Yeah, of course. So uh, first of all, uh I want to touch just a little bit on what you just said because I think it's uh it's incredible. Like when I was planning to become a creator, I I didn't even know English and I was stuck because like nobody wants to see me speak my very bad English, right? I have uh the face that not many people like, I have like all kinds of you know struggles, like creative struggles. So I was like, that's the reason why I came with uh the the faceless YouTube. And I'll uh go a little a little bit deeper on my story and how I ended up like with uh with the channel that I'm currently running. But basically, it's an amazing business model for everyone who wants to be on YouTube, but kind of you know doesn't like to be on camera much. So uh, you know, if you are uh if you're a viewer and you're exactly that type, then uh probably that's gonna be very valuable for you. Um but yeah, uh talking about my story, uh it all started when me and my friends uh again we wanted to be creators, and uh back then it was uh 2019. Uh TikTok just you know started blowing up everywhere. TikTok was you know a new thing, like new algorithm. Everyone was given views for free. And uh uh we recorded a bunch of TikToks, and uh within the next uh four years, I basically built a content agency, TikTok agency, basically from from that first account that we started with my friends just to have fun. Uh, we started offering that to big brands and companies in my home country. We ended up building one of the top three TikTok agencies uh back in my home country. Uh worked with brands like Sephora and other big companies, Huawei, we did we did them all. We we did like uh um influencer campaigns, we created their TikTok accounts, everything. And that's where like the backbone of my expertise comes from. Uh I used to make thousands and thousands of viral short form pieces of content. But there was a problem because all of those companies they have very strict guidelines. Uh they they had their branding uh brand books, they had their scripts, they had their perspective of how their influencers should look like, etc. I really felt like it was limiting my creativity, and I really felt like I could do better by myself. And uh I was searching for a way for me to do content, but where I don't depend on any third party, and I can just do it for the sake of views and for the sake of like income, right? So that's when I got into uh faceless TikTok first, but I quickly realized that TikTok is paying um like I I don't know if I'm if I'm allowed to swear there, but uh they were paying, you know. So yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard that uh yeah, so that's when I was like, okay, cool, we need something better, and uh that's how my YouTube journey started. Uh it actually started almost uh yeah, exactly one year ago. So January 27th, I posted my first ever uh YouTube video on uh Art of War channel. Uh if uh yeah, I I can screen share and I can just show you the channel. So uh yeah, around that time uh I I started posting on the Art of War channel, as you see, like only a thousand views 20, like January 29th. It was pretty slow for the first couple of weeks, and we were posting shorts. If we go to the uh to the short section, like many people don't even know that like shorts can make you good money, but uh yeah, we'll probably get into that. But if we go to the first short 27th of January, uh, and then we were posting once every two days. Uh our first videos, they all got stuck at like 15k views, as you can see, like pretty flat-lined, yeah, up until the point when we posted our seventh video. So this was the video that absolutely blew up, as you can see, February 20 uh 10th. And this one went from zero to uh 25 million views in like first seven days. So this video got us monetized on the channel. This video put the channel at uh like I think 30-40 million views total, and uh I was already at like 15-20k followers, which for me, like three weeks deep into running a you a YouTube channel, I was like, I was amazed. It was like 30% of the silver play button that I have, still have right there, uh, you know, and I was like, wow, and as you can see later down the line, like this video ended up making us like my my first thousand dollars from uh from YouTube as well. Like we we missed a few couple of days, but then uh it absolutely blew up. And uh that's how the whole journey started. And uh, as you can see uh on the graph here, if I go like 365, you'll see that uh at some point it absolutely exploded to like 7 million views a day. Uh and since then the channel was monetized, and uh back then, uh so March, April last year, we were making about six to ten thousand dollars a month, and it was like hundred million views on shorts per month. So that was pretty exciting. Uh, back then, again, I had many struggles that uh upcoming creators have with the team, like systems will probably go into some of those as well. Uh, but you know, essentially that was a huge, huge success because uh the first ever YouTube channel blew up so hard, and I think that uh there was a reason for it. So, what I find the uh like the reasons that I uh found for such rapid success is on faceless YouTube there are two types of niches. There are niches like there are simple niches, uh something that anyone can do. So, let's say AI or uh commentary, you know, when you take someone else's content, you remake it, you add some commentary on uh on top of it, and you post it as a brand new piece. All of them work, but all of them are saturated, all of them have lots of competition because many people just want to make money with YouTube, so they go towards the simplest option. I choose the completely different approach and I chose the niche, like 3D animation. I can uh also like show you just a couple of videos that we uh that we make. These are the videos that are like actually very, very hard to produce. Like when I try to buy those on Upwork, people are just like, you know, 300 bucks per video, 400 bucks per video. Like it's expensive because this 3D animation is like handcrafted, so you basically animate every character, every bullet, every uh mechanism, you animate everything. And uh this is I think why the channel exploded so hard, because back then there was only like one or two creators that could fulfill the demand that existed for this type of content, because essentially YouTube is like supply and demand, right? And the more supply you have, the less there is a potential for the demand. And then 3D animation was just you know the niche where there's a lot of demand, but there was just like two creators in the market back then. And uh I became a third one, and obviously that's I think why the channel blew up so hard. Uh, but yeah, um uh I feel like I'm speaking too much.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

So no, that's I mean, that's so for people that are listening, they didn't see I first of all I'm gonna encourage you, uh as I sometimes do, you should watch the YouTube version of this podcast. I know a lot of people listen to it and we're driving, but the screenshots we just saw, and I'm just gonna say it out loud, uh, for the year,$260,000 in in uh revenue from that channel, from a shorts channel, which is mind-blowing. I do want to talk about that. I'm gonna I'm gonna push it off a little bit because that's really interesting. That's a big number for a shorts channel, but we'll we'll talk about that later. Um, so you you you were throwing out okay, so let's talk about the fact that the the kind of animated stuff was hard. So, how did you cross that barrier? Because it was expensive, and it is uh it's probably less expensive now than it ever has been, I guess we can talk about the two, but like back then you had to find someone who could do it that did it at a decent quality, at a pretty decent speed for a decent cost. How did you do that? And how did you make sure that costs didn't get out of control? And I know a little bit about what happens here. That's why I want to go into this because it's so interesting.

Costs, Upwork Limits, And Hiring Strategy

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Of course. So uh that's the common issue. This is something that I go against on all of my socials. Like, this is what I preach basically. Uh, when it comes to running YouTube, for some reason, many people would suggest you to go on upwork, find a freelancer, delegate them the task, which is basically like, yo, I need to do this video, go do a good job for me. Like, this is the script. You never spoke to the person, they never knew about your your goals, they they don't understand like how YouTube works, nothing. And they just do whatever they feel like is best. Again, maybe they you know care about like just getting paid for the video, maybe they slightly care about the YouTube channel, you don't know. Uh, so I tested this approach at the beginning, and uh, as as I told you, for the first three months the channel was doing 80 to 100 million views, which what I didn't tell you is it was still not profitable. So 80 million views a month, I was making like six to seven thousand dollars a month, but I was I wasn't making any money for myself. So I uh I used to pay again four to six K for my freelancer just to make those 15 videos a month. So I needed to get to like 100 million views, 120 million views to start making money for myself. That's how expensive it was, and that's why it wasn't realistic at all with the common approach that I learned uh again from Twitter and YouTube back then. So I didn't know much about 3D animation. So like I basically followed this basic approach, like going upwork and find a freelancer. That's what I did. But then what happened afterwards is I met an incredible person uh who later became my investor. I was uh one of the first to uh actually sell the part of my channel to an investor to get him on board as an advisor and also to get some you know cash to keep running the channel because after three months of running it negatively, I was I was about to close it basically. So I got an investor on board, and uh uh the reason why I wanted his advisory is because he is uh an agency owner, he runs an agency with like 90 employees and they're making like multiple seven figures a year. So I I really wanted that expertise. And what he told me is first you need to hire full-time, so people who will actually care about the channel, who will go all in on what they do on your channel for you. That's that was number one. Number two, you need to hire from high ROI markets. So, what I call the high ROI market is where again the supply and demand for the job, uh for the job is in your favor. Meaning, uh, let's say when you go on upwork and uh and Fiverr, you find people from India and Pakistan. Why? Because again, for them, the amount of money that you pay is like life-changing. For for Americans, it's probably you know, uh, it's not that uh significant. But the problem with that is these people still have access to the American um companies. They they can still apply for the American job posts. But if you go towards the markets where like there is no upwork, there's no fiber, there's no way for American company to hire these people, you find the uh the supply that just don't meet the demand. So, like what I'm talking about is uh CIS countries that actually have very good and Eastern European countries that have very good talent, talent with a similar like European culture, so there's no cultural barrier, but they just don't have access to the American market. That's why their prices are way lower, and working with them is way cheaper. So, what we started doing is we went to uh obviously digitally, I uh I I didn't go there, you know, physically, but uh we went to Armenia, we went to Kazakhstan, we went to Russia, we went to Ukraine, and we found the best talent from those from those regions, and we pay them local prices, which is in most of those countries the average salary is like 700 euros, right? So when you offer them 1.2k am months, 1.5k amants, they're amazed, like they're making like twice as their average salary in a country, but still for you it's nothing because if I were to hire the same like animator from US, it's like 6k minimum, like 10k, you know. It's you know, you cannot compare those things. So that's what we started doing, and we started building the uh full time. And because back then I I sold uh 10 of my channel uh to an investor, uh, and uh he we agreed that he's going to cover three months of the expenses of the channel. So, like whoever we hire, he he just covers like three months of expenses, and uh uh I give him 10 of the channel. Uh, we started expanding rapidly, and that's when the the most explosive growth happened on the channel. And uh, I'm gonna show you and I'm gonna like talk you through the numbers. So basically, we did uh 100 million views, 120 million views in April. Then we did 260 million views in May. And if I go to the dollar, so like that was the first uh thousand dollar data we did, like uh May 15th, I think. Yeah, uh so 260 million views and about 16,000 in May, again from YouTube Shorts solely, and then the biggest jump happened in June because we did 720 million views in June, and we hit 2.5k day, as you can see here, and we did$50,000 in revenue in June. So we basically went from$7,000 in April to$50,000 in uh in June in just like 60 days. And the reason why it happened is because we started posting from 15 videos uh that we posted in April, 60 videos that we posted in June. We uh for axed the amount of content because I basically for axed the team. So we hired like five animators uh at the same time, onboarded them all full time, they committed, you know, went all in on the channel. With them we started producing 60 videos, and that's that's how the whole uh jump happened. And basically, most of this revenue you can see here, 270k, we made from June till let's say October uh last year. So, in a short span of like five months, that's uh that's when most of this revenue um you know came from.

SPEAKER_01 15:56

Let me talk about that that section of time because I do want to hear like what happens after and stuff, but I really want to focus in on that time. You must have thought you were a genius at that point. Like I figured it out. I am a YouTube genius. I can I'm gonna be able to retire next year. It's gonna be wonderful, amazing. For those listening to the audio podcast, what you can't see is there's a downslope that happens a little bit later, but I want to talk more about this moment. So you're in this moment, you're like, this worked out. I sold a little bit of the company and I made a lot more money. I I made my team bigger for less money so that I can um, you know, uh put out more content, which obviously worked. Um what was your mindset at that point? What did you ever have too much hubris? Were you ever too cocky? Did you ever, or were you always just really like, okay, this is just the right thing. I need to keep focusing on what I'm doing.

unknown 16:39

Yeah.

Investor Partnership And Scaling The Team

SPEAKER_00 16:39

Yeah. So uh I was never satisfied with that. So like at the moment we we were doing like 20, 30, like 40k months. I was already searching for uh for the next YouTube channel to start because my goal was never to run a YouTube channel. My goal was to uh to run a portfolio of those because I know how uh you know unstable YouTube shorts are, how uh you know volatile there are, and I know that there are bad seasons for uh, let's say like Q4, right? Amazing season for the RPM, everything is good, but then uh the rules are a bit stricter. So like YouTube is very volatile in general. So running one channel as your main occupation is very you know dangerous in a way because uh you either live from you know from a peak to uh to the peak, or you have a portfolio of channels and all of them kind of complement each other when there is a sudden drop on one of them, the the second one is uh uh at its rise, like whatever. So uh yeah, I did feel like a genius because again, we cracked the hardest niche of all, so it's the most expensive content you can produce on YouTube with uh and we did it in a format that pays the list, which is YouTube Shorts. YouTube Shorts pay about uh 20 cents per uh per thousand views, which is compared to like 10 bucks on on longs, like that's nothing, right? It's uh 200 times less. So we we did the hardest in uh the uh the worst niche of all, so to say. Uh but uh yeah, I did feel like a genius, uh, but then the the real genius behind it was not the the niche or the topics or the videos themselves, it was actually the hiring strategy because the only reason why the strategy was profitable is because our expenses were so low compared to all our other competitors. That you know, I'll just give you an example. Uh Zach DeFilms, who is the biggest in this uh 3D, most of the viewers will like probably recognize him. So Zach DeFilms uh he does uh three billion views a month, and uh he is paying a thousand dollars per short, like the same uh same quality, like a thousand bucks. Uh, and we are now averaging like 150, 160. So we pay what what's that like five five times less for almost the same quality. We're still not not there completely, but like 90% of his quality, and we're paying five times less. That was the actual genius behind it, and that's why we'll probably go into that later as well. But that's why the next um no two channels that we actually scaled in the same uh category of content, we scaled the exact same way, and we saw the exact same success because it was just like okay, we have the niche, we have the type of format, now we just add more gasoline to the fire, we just hire more team and we just produce more videos than everyone else can because we unlocked this hiring strategy.

SPEAKER_01 19:26

So I want to go into like the net the other channels of stuff first, but I also can hear some of my listeners in my head now. I can hear them now. That's great, that's amazing, but I can't afford to hire people. Um, I I will want to talk about that a little later. I want to talk about a strategy for people who don't necessarily have that because things have changed with AI and stuff, things have kind of changed. But I just want to let the listeners know, we will get to that. So just let's let's go along for this ride for a while. I love it. So far, I'm I'm intrigued. So at this time, when things are like so hot, is it now that you started to think about another channel and started to actually put one out? Or were you still so busy with this that you couldn't even do that?

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Yeah, I was I was definitely busy. I was setting up all of the SOPs, quality control guidelines, etc. So at the very beginning, I I was planning the channel as a business, not as a uh creative side hustle. So it was never at the point where I was just doing the the work. So like I was always trying to remove myself from the day-to-day operation and look at the channel as a mechanism. So, what do I need for the mechanism? Okay, I need the quality control docs, I need an HR to hire people if they get like fired for some reason, if they want to fire themselves or if I need to fire them for obvious reasons, like whatever. I need uh like a channel manager, I need the weekly tracker, I need uh like content series, all of those things. Once they were built, I didn't spend more than 10 hours a week managing the channel. And that's when I like I it was probably like July, August last year when I started to think about okay, cool. Now I have all the time on uh in my hands, now I have the channel making me like 30 to 50k a month, and now I can go and invest in more channels in this niche. So actually, instead of starting new channels, the the way we grew our portfolio, we invested in other channels, some of our competitors, some of our uh just channels from the category. We uh became their strategic partners by coming on board, bringing again cash hire uh like uh team, uh hiring expertise, uh SOPs, everything. So basically helping creators, uh people who understand the viral uh viral part of YouTube but don't understand the business part of YouTube, actually become channel owners instead of being, you know, uh day-to-day operators. So that was yeah, this is interesting.

SPEAKER_01 21:46

I need to understand what you just said there, because that sounds first of all, it doesn't sound like something you would expect. I expected you to say next. So you found other successful channels, right? And then you would go to them and say, Hey, you know, you're pretty good, but I bet you I could help you make a lot more money. Money is it would be like I would like more money, and you guys sit down and have some type of conversation, and then would you basically become the investor in that channel and then part owner of that? Is that how that works?

Explosive Growth: 260M To 720M Views

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Yes, yes, exactly. So, for example, uh, I'll I'll tell you a cool story about uh Mario, who uh who is an owner of uh Zec Felms. So, this is another channel from the portfolio uh that I noticed back then. We basically started our channels at the same time, pretty much. And uh for a while I I tried uh treat him as a competitor, but then I've realized that he's posting completely different style of content. So if my main channel is history and military and spies and all of this, uh he's more into memes and uh and jokes and uh like the stuff that we all run and uh love and etc. So but the problem was uh he was animating videos himself. He was stuck because like 24-7 he needed to animate his videos, and again, he had a nine to five job back then, and uh uh you know, all of the time on his hand he spent like actually animating videos, he was barely passing like 12 videos a month. So it was it was nothing compared to our scale, like 60 videos a month, right? And I basically like I just reached out, like figured out this situation. I was like, okay, cool. What if we just scale the channel together? I bring on board the team, I bring script writers, animators, I bring all of the systems and everything. You will be the creative brain behind it, you'll still be approving all of the scripts and videos, like you know, uh sharing your ideas, but I'm gonna give you the hands that will make this content for you, and this way we can you know multiply your creativity by five, by like 10, whatever. And that's how we grew the channel from I think 150,000 followers when we partnered to 830,000 followers now. And uh he did like 100 million views by himself, maybe like 150 million views. I don't remember exact numbers, and now we are at um 700 million views only on YouTube. We have uh huge TikTok. Unfortunately, we got banned on Instagram, but uh it's still uh like still was a uh like big platform back then. So uh again, this is how we then grew the portfolio, and now running a portfolio of channels. Uh so uh the the way I call it, uh that is doing like 600 to 700k a year. Uh and we do this again by inserting proper teams and structures into uh creative businesses and helping creators actually become owners of the operation, not you know uh the day-to-day workers of their own business. Because if I'm being honest, like most of the creators are like they try to escape their nine to five by doing YouTube, but then they just work nine to five at their YouTube channel, and maybe it's like even 24-7, like uh you know, seven days a week. So they become slaves of it because you know that their biggest struggle is they cannot hire because no one can do the quality they they want and the quality they see, like they they feel like they're doing you know the best, and obviously that's true. But then the other truth is you can do 99% of the quality and still get views and still get paid, but you'll do it through someone else, an animator, editor, script writer, whoever. The quality doesn't need to be 100%, it can be 90% and it will still you know uh get you paid. Yeah, still will be profitable, and you'll still and you will have like hours of your time back, like hundreds of hours per month. So um, yeah, we're probably all over the place with those topics, but I know how interesting it is. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

I love it. So the I think one of the things um that's important here, and again, uh I can I can still feel the anxiety of my listener going, okay, but I can't afford that. Hang tight, we're gonna get there. But I think what you just said is so important because it's one of the things I talk about just in my normal life all the time. The only currency in life that matters is time because you can't get it back. Once it's gone, it's gone. So you're buying back your life with money and being able to invest in these other things. And like I said, we'll get there. So I love that you you you prioritize that and say, hey, you know, I want to be able to help creators or even myself get a little bit more free time so I can live life because that's actually what we're here to do. Um, let's talk a little bit about towards the end of the summertime and into September when things start to go down. What happened? Um, you know, what did you do to kind of like try to protect against that? And where are we at now?

Mindset, Portfolio Over Single Channel

The Real Edge: High-ROI Markets

SPEAKER_00 26:23

Yeah, so uh it wasn't the uh the greatest season uh for the channel. Uh and I think there is uh there's a few things. I don't want to scare the viewers too much, but again, uh it's important to share the experience. So uh in in October, we did October the 1st, we actually did our best day, like$4,000 a day with YouTube Shorts. Again, purely YouTube shirts. We haven't bought anything else. But uh I I actually haven't seen many channels do that. So like it was an incredible achievement. Uh, this is the point where I felt like I cracked life, you know. Throughout the summer, it wasn't like that clear to me, but like 4k a day, I was like, One day, we're onto something. But then as you can see, things started to go down, and then uh around November uh they started to go down significantly. We got back to like 150-200 million views back then per month. Uh, reasons for it. So, number one, we got two age restrictions in a row, so our content is a little bit more sensitive than usual YouTube content. So we posted two videos, and it was my mistake. Like, I'm fully responsible for it. We posted two videos about suicide, and yes, I found them interesting, like it was interesting cases. We we never promoted suicide, we never like you know encouraged anyone, but it was like uh true stories of people uh committing it in uh uh again unfortunate uh circumstances, so they didn't even plan it, right? And uh like our content specialized on that because there were guns involved and uh we uh broke down the mechanism, how it broke, whatever. I don't want to go too deep into that, but uh basically YouTube considered this as like you know the content that should be restricted from most of the viewers, and when you get that, YouTube doesn't tell you, but your channel gets uh shadow banned, especially if you do it twice in a row. So when you do it twice in a row, you YouTube just thinks that you're trying to like break its policy, and it's not yet it's not the strike yet, but your views just start to go down significantly. And uh like back then I felt like we uh we would be able to fix it. And uh again, uh things things were volatile for a couple of weeks, they went up and down, etc. Uh, but then the second uh thing happened, which uh probably cost the uh you know the most of its uh of its drop, uh, which was uh the wave of AI slop. If you remember the Twitter timeline back then, so around November, basically the whole shorts algorithm was fluted. I I I recently found a study, uh 33% of the feed is now AI slop. So like basically every third video is an AI slop video. And what I think happened to the whole 3D category is those 3D videos because they look kind of like they don't look like AI, but they look kind of AI. I think they got messed up with the AI slop, and just because like there there became like so much of this slop, YouTube just started to uh deprioritize the the 3D videos, and we we saw it uh actually we saw it with VDIQ. Like I have VDIQ with uh where I have all the list of my uh competitors, and we saw that like yeah, all of them started to go down, so it was like uh red weeks and red months, like you know, just like that, one one after another. And uh like we we had like 10 major competitors, all of them probably cut their views by half minimum, and uh since then uh couldn't recover. I do have a few ideas why I think that there is my responsibility as well, because I think we like Mr. Beast talks about it, I think we oversaturated our topics. You know how Mr. Beast would have the format, let's say one buc hotel versus like one million bucks hotel, right? And he would repeat it a couple of times because he knows that it works, but then he would stop right at the point where viewers yeah, right at the edge. Because if you go one more, the viewers you know stop care slightly, you know. They they they slowly start stop caring, and uh that was my mistake. I kept pushing the formats that we did in the past, and it seems like the the viewers just don't uh don't enjoy them anymore. So, what I'm working on with the team now is refining the formats, finding something new, something fresh, something that they they haven't seen before, and uh obviously reviving the channel because I love our word. This is where we're where it all started. Uh, it's still doing amazing numbers, it's still doing 100 million views uh a month. And with current profitability, I mean we uh we're profitable even uh with uh with the the views uh being so low. So uh I guess it's just the volatility you have to uh prepare yourself for when running uh a shorts channel.

SPEAKER_01 31:09

Yeah, and you know there's some other things that happened around that same time um where views overall on YouTube kind of went down. I actually just recently spoke to uh Renee Ritchie about that. And if you want to watch that interview, make sure you're subscribed here because it's gonna be coming up in the uh coming week or so. Um so it wasn't just you guys. Of course, what you said is really interesting, it's very specific because Sora came out. Uh, that made shorts creation ridiculously easy and probably too much so. So what's so now we're in this era where AI is here and there's just it's too easy to make um shorts and stuff and things like that. What's the strategy moving forward? Do you now go to do you now look at longs? Because as you even said, um RPMs are substantially different for longs than the R for CP uh for shorts, or do you just find a new strategy for shorts? What is the new strategy nowadays?

Partnering With Creators To Scale

SPEAKER_00 31:54

Yeah. So uh yeah, 2026, I'm looking to add uh a few long-form channels to the portfolio. I'm thinking 2D animation, 3D animation. Animation in general is what we really kind of uh build systems for, so to say. So like I know how to work with animators, I know how to scale the animators' teams, how to make them connected, brainstorm ideas together, share assets. Like, there's a bunch of things going on behind the scenes of those animated channels that we understand. So I'm looking to add more uh long-form channels because from what I've seen, again, like my my shorts channel did uh multiple like uh uh$50,000 uh days. Oh, sorry. But yeah, that would that would be amazing. Yeah, we're definitely gonna have another interview when that happens by the way. Uh$50,000 months, and uh uh that was amazing. I I've realized that shorts can also be make you big money, but then what's different about long-form money is that they're more stable. So if you have a channel doing like 30, 40k a month, it could be 40k a month for a year, and it's a totally different number. Uh so that's why I I want to get involved in uh uh you know many more long form channels. Uh I I don't give up on shorts, like I love shorts, that's the main expertise that I have. So we'll uh like we do have uh two more channels now in the props like in a process of scaling that are amazing, 3D, 2D animation as well. And uh uh moving forward for AI, what I would say is think about AI niches as your short-term vehicle to get to uh more complicated niches. Why? Uh there is thousands of people at the same time trying to figure out YouTube, trying to make money on YouTube, and the simpler your niche, the quicker it gets saturated. Meaning, if anyone can replicate it with two prompts and three buttons, anyone you know will do it because it's simple. So AI, especially very, very simple AI, it will very quickly get saturated. The moment people see that you get 15 million views, 20 million views on a video, there will be people trying to replicate your success and trying to copy your success. And the simpler your niche, the easier it is for them to basically copy and steal your ideas, your formats, your channel idea. Uh, and you can make money with those niches, but you can only do it for a short period of time. Typically, from what I see, two, three months, you make money, you're on the on an upcoming trend, then the niche gets saturated, your channel stagnates, and then slowly it dies out. Um, so we we saw this trend many times. Uh, and then the harder your niche to replicate, the more time you actually have to make money with it because it will take your competitors more time to figure out how to produce this type of content, whether it's 2D animation, 3D animation, or even complicated AI. So there are videos that are almost uh indistinguishable from uh like movies or uh like let's say Black Files channel, uh 3D animation, like almost the same as 3D animation, right? And it's very hard. It requires like a prompt engineering team, it requires like a lot of stuff, etc. So the harder your niche, the better. Like that's my huge belief. I think that the hardest niches are actually the best because if you can figure it out, then there are so many people that would give up in the process. So many, like it will take them so time to figure it out so much time to figure it out that uh like you'll just have this niche for yourself, you'll just monopolize it before everyone else can get in. So that was a huge belief that served me very well in um like last year. And I think I'll I'll just stick to that in 2026 as well.

SPEAKER_01 35:41

I think that makes a lot of sense uh for someone in your position where you can actually take a little bit extra time and resources to go, okay, we want to be on a very high mountain that's very few people are gonna be able to climb. It makes a lot of strategic sense, and I I definitely tip my hat because that that's exactly what you should be doing. It's it's super smart. So let's let's rewind a little bit. Let's talk a little bit about if you were starting. Oh, go ahead.

SPEAKER_00 36:02

Yeah, I want to mention one thing because I I know how I sound now. Like uh, you know, I sound like someone who figured it out. Like now I have like you know, five figure, like six figure a month's uh you know, income to to to invest in many of those niches. It doesn't require that much. So we've seen channels do really well in let's say 2D animation with not more than like 800 bucks a month in expenses. So even 800 bucks a month is a barrier to entry so high that 90% of people trying to launch faceless YouTube channels won't be able to compete. So it doesn't require a lot. We're not talking millions, we're not talking like tens of thousands of dollars. You don't need any of that. My budget for a channel rarely crossed like uh$10,000 a month. And that was when we like when we were doing like 50k. So at the beginning, it was like I only had like a couple thousand bucks to uh to my name to spend on the channel. So I you know uh by any means, uh I don't recommend you to like overspend ever. Uh so 2D animation could cost you, let's say, 150 bucks per video for long-form like eight-minute video, but it's still the barrier to entry because comparing to an AI video that costs you two bucks, like that's a huge difference. That's like 50x difference. So I'm not against you know saving money and spending as little as possible. I'm basically just trying to build a barrier to entry that would make sense for the uh for the viewer to want to watch your video, but over the other stuff, yeah, over the other stuff. So uh that's basically the main thing. And you it doesn't require more than a couple hundred bucks a month.

SPEAKER_01 37:40

That's crazy. And I'm I'll probably talk to you more about that a little bit towards the very, very end. Because I love challenges and stuff, and um, I don't know, we'll talk about that later. But I guess one thing I want to talk about now because um again, I think people are getting value out of this, but what would you do now if you're listening to this podcast? Let's take you out of the Tim that is today, and let's put you in the Tim that's about a year or so ago, and you're listening to this podcast, you're like, okay, so I can get there if I do the right things, but I don't have a lot of money right now. Uh I I can't necessarily do um animation. Like if I wanted to start this tomorrow with with only a little bit of money, but time. Like I'm gonna invest the time. I might have to take some days off from work, but I'm gonna grind because eventually I want this to be my job. What is it you're doing starting today? Like, what's the niche? What's the strategy? What would you do?

Buying Back Time With Systems

SPEAKER_00 38:27

Very good. Uh so I would start with AI influencers. So, what I mean by that is there is AI slob that everyone can replicate, and that means nothing. It's just there for fun, for views, like yes, it's engaging, but those channels like they they blow up fast, they die out fast. But there's a proper use of AI where you build a connection with the audience, and the audience trusts you for whatever reason. So it might be an AI influencer talking about finance. We saw channels like, for example, Fast at Fred do really well. Uh we uh we saw channels in finance like Nick Invest do really well, like purely with AI. So uh, like I'll I'll show you one uh a few of them just just to give you an example. But uh this is uh the the channel that I'm talking about, Fasted Fred. So again, an AI influencer doesn't even look realistic. Uh it's it's not required, it's just a person talking about finance. Again, scripts made with AI, uh like voiceovers are AI, like even the uh the images sold AI, slightly animated, like you can do it in Premiere Pro, like any editor can do it for like 15 bucks, nothing crazy. So uh like like this, uh Nick Invest uh is another one uh in finance. So I would go there. The reason for it is because these niches have more longevity. Like when you have people trust you for whatever reason, and it's not just the slop that they watch, like uh going on a subway, you know, after after the work, uh, but it's something that they watch consume, they get some information, they learn something new, they uh start to trust you more. That's when you can enjoy the whole value of like actually running a YouTube channel. You can uh get brand deals, like brands will literally pay you for uh placing an advertising in your video. You can sell products if you want, again, merch or some uh affiliate links to some software, some uh maybe info products, like whatever it is. So I would go down that road because the videos like this they cost less than 10 bucks to make, but as you can see, they're getting like very decent views, thumbnails, all AI generated, right? But there is a difference between AI slop and branded AI. And uh, I think that like my prediction is over the next coming years, uh, and we already saw it in uh in the uh only fund space, so there's a whole bunch of like AI models right now, like make making decent money, but now this trend will come towards the you know traditional uh like YouTube channels. So there were there will be people explaining complicated stuff with uh AI influencers that are almost uh you know almost as realistic as uh us real creators and uh people showing their face. So if you don't want to show your face, just create a face that you're comfortable sharing, right? And just and just talk about like whatever you feel passionate about, like cars, uh like I don't know, wakeboarding, surfing, uh like investing, uh like fitness, whatever it is, you can build an influencer for that, someone who resonates with the target audience and someone who will explain uh topics you know on on camera, simply you know, the add simple edits yourself with uh with an editor for 15 bucks and uh and just go with that. So recommendation that yeah, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 41:54

So these these last two channels I saw the animation is actually really cool looking. It looks like the last one looked a little bit like Family Guy, which I I think is really funny. It's kind of cool. Yeah, yeah. Um you're saying that uh they used uh an AI tool for that?

SPEAKER_00 42:05

Yes, yes, it's uh like uh it's simply like uh first you create a picture, Nana Banana is probably the best for that right now. Then you animate it, Grok, uh, I think it's even free, or you can use Clink AI, a bit expensive, but again, uh like it does does the job, so it animates the uh the picture, so it makes the character move move as you want, and then uh you make let's say like a hundred of those, uh you put them together in a 20-minute video, like in CapCut or like Premiere Pro, just like one clip to another, uh, add some titles, and that's it. Like it's it's purely made with AI, and uh uh yes, it does require some uh some work with prompts and etc. But again, if you are trying to figure it out, like if your budget is literally like as close to zero as possible, that's your best way to do it because otherwise you're stuck with like thousands of people trying to figure out AI slop, and then yes, one out of a thousand like blows up and gets the views, but then what happens to the other 999, right? So uh you don't want to be in that train where uh you know it's like uh there is a meme where uh there are like two doors and like everyone is lining up towards one of them, and the other one is just like they're open. And uh, you know, uh, if you are uh a smart one, you you just look at two doors and like you will question like why is everyone you know uh going towards that road? Uh like it doesn't make sense to me, but like seems like many, many people are struggling with that right now.

The Downturn: Age-Restrictions And AI Slop

SPEAKER_01 43:32

Yeah, I think it takes a certain mindset to uh to think a little bit just outside the box, not like super outside the box, not like you have to be a super genius, but just kind of look at it by stepping back. And you know, a lot of the creators that we deal with, and and even myself, I think we we love the the we have the passion for creating itself, but we want the business. And a lot of creative people don't have the business mindset. I can tell you right now, for sure, uh I left tons of money on the table because I was more interested in kind of being the YouTube personality and stuff that I was. For a couple of years. Um, and now I'm looking back on as I get older, I kind of wish I had something to fall back on. Like what you're doing is super smart. And I'm I'm kind of thinking about it myself to try to figure out a way that I can do something similar where I have something that frees me up. Because I think ultimately content creation is different things to different people. Um, for some people, it's a business. For some people, it's an escape. Um, for some people, it's an expression of who they are. But in order to do any of those things, let's just be honest, you need money. And if you can have something, one aspect of it making you money so that you can do the more passionate part of what you want to do, it doesn't mean you're like selling out or anything. It just gives you more freedom, um, which now you can do. You can be an entrepreneur perhaps for the rest of your life, as long as you keep doing this the correct way. Like you can do whatever you want. You might in five years, you might change your mind and just want to do something completely different. And now, because you've built this up, this can be a business that, as you've even said, can kind of run itself and then you can go do the next thing that you want to do.

SPEAKER_00 44:57

Right. And I I think it's uh one good exercise that I recommend everyone do is just take a piece of paper and list all of the things that you like about content creation and all of the things that you don't like or cannot figure out no matter what you do. So, for example, uh for uh Mario, the uh the guy that I told you about, the one that we partnered with, he's absolutely amazing coming up with ideas, scripting, uh like sound design, understanding what the audience wants, talking to the audience, like uh, you know, coming up with topics, all of those things, but then on a on a on the side where he doesn't know what to do, like what's that hiring, like managing, uh finances, like uh budgeting, like all of those boring business things. And then a smart move for me is to find a partner that can do the all of the things that you cannot, right? And just uh sharing the uh and running the business together. Because if you look at like common modern business, like most of the businesses, they're run by either partners who kind of complement each other. So it's never like uh two partners doing the same thing. It's always like you know, one is uh doing finance, the other one is doing marketing, because this guy is very creative, this guy is very like numbers guy, and Excel, like spreadsheets guy, etc. So it's the same with uh with content, but for some reason people forget that the YouTube channels are the exact same businesses as everything else. You have the uh viewers that uh you basically your customers who who will watch or or don't watch your content, uh, and uh you have the operations, the team, like everything is like super simple, uh similar to the to the business. So just list everything that you can, list everything that you can't, and try to find a partner that will complement all of the things that you can't or don't want to do so that you can enjoy the part that you actually love. Because for me, I don't like coming up with ideas and don't like coming up with scripts and the like uh thinking about oh, what my what my viewers say in the comments. Like there are people who enjoy it, I don't. And I prefer to, I I I love speaking with my team, I love uh figuring out motivating my team. I I love the ways to uh I love coming up with ways to hire better people, like etc. So I I love the boring business side, I love spreadsheets, like I'm a big fan of spreadsheets, right? And that's why I'm so good at this part, and I constantly need people who who like this and who who have the the creative part, and yeah, and we we we do amazing partnerships together because again, it feels it feels so good, you know. Uh when I uh when I hired my HR, I uh that was a huge moment for me because I've realized that I don't need to fire people anymore myself. Like I hate firing people. It's terrible, it's probably it's terrible, right? And and I realized I can just tell her to fire someone and I need to speak to this person, and it was so amazing. So imagine in your con in your channel, like you can just tell someone, like come up with an idea. You don't know how to come up with an idea, but they do. Like you just tell them, like, come up with a video idea, and they like uh bring you the idea back, and you're like, wow, you know, yeah. That that's the level of like partnership that I'm trying to build, and that's what I think is so uh so rare in the YouTube space. Nobody for some reason uh that does those like partnerships, but to me they're like absolute blessings because I can enjoy the stuff that I like the most and they can enjoy the stuff they like the most, and everyone wins.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

Let's talk about something that uh a lot of people might know you for, and it's this uh concept called niche bending. Can you kind of explain what that is and the concept behind it and why creators should know about it?

Adapting Formats And Recovering

Shorts vs Longs Strategy In 2026

SPEAKER_00 48:33

Uh I think it's the easiest way to come up with a niche because like essentially your niche, your YouTube like faceless YouTube niche is the combination of the format and uh the market. So the format is something that basically how you deliver the information. So uh there was a good uh good format uh back in the days, uh explained with bananas. So uh a channel like Primate Economics, they uh they did a bunch of videos uh taxes explained with bananas, and they would have like monkeys uh just uh explain this complicated topic of taxes or crypto or uh like inflation, whatever, explained on bananas, literal bananas, and that was very funny, right? So this is the format, and then the market is basically the audience that you serve. So uh it can be like finance, fitness, uh, it can be gaming, it can be um, I don't know, history, military, like these are all markets. Markets are very rarely uh like they they change very rarely, like there's maybe like one new market, emerging market, like a year. So like this year it's probably uh like AI and uh like software, pretty much similar to the last year, to be honest. But uh like markets rarely change. They're like you can just Google them, like Google the most popular categories on YouTube, you'll find finance, fitness, uh, you know, uh history, like all of those things. But then formats are like there are thousands of new formats every single day on YouTube, like that's the the most creative part. And what the niche bending is is you create a new niche by applying the viral format to the market where it was never used before. So, for example, if I take the um explained with bananas that blew up in finance, and I would apply the explained with bananas to the fitness, I just created a new niche that didn't exist before, that there like there's no competitors, no one is doing it, but I know the format is proven and I know the market exists because there are thousands of fitness channels on YouTube, and that's how you get the proof of concept, that's how you get something that is almost guaranteed to work. Because if you execute right, if you if your videos don't suck, if they're actually great, then you're gonna get the views, you're gonna get the followers because you know again, followers uh format is proven, the market exists. Or, for example, I can take the explained with bananas concept and I can go into real estate. So instead of financial topics, I can do real estate again, another niche we just invented, or I can do uh explained with bananas. What else can we explain? We can explain history with bananas, right? We can talk about like uh um Rome, we can talk about World War II, we can talk about like many things and try to explain them in a simple way. So, another niche that we just came up with. So essentially, what you do is you go on YouTube, you see what formats are trending right now and what formats work, and you think critically for what uh like for what markets will this format work, and you just bring that format to uh to the market. Uh same way as uh like in business, for example, if you notice that uh you know Coca-Cola does a specific commercial or like uh I don't know, they uh they do have some uh ad creatives that you like and you are um I don't know, Fanta, right? It's not your direct competitor, but you can just do the same thing, like you can bring the same uh the same formats to uh to your category. Um it works the same way on YouTube. So I really like this uh concept because what most people do is they choose the niche, meaning there is competition and they just become the number three, number five, number 15s in the niche. What I'm a fan of is creating a new niche where there's no one but you know that the audience exists and you just deliver them something new that they haven't seen before, and you become the monopoly. So it's the same way. Like I'll give you one more example and I'll uh uh I'll uh I'll I'll shut up about this. But uh uh art of war, the way we we came up with this is essentially there was Zakde Films who was posting about all kinds of stuff: war, history, anatomy, like whatever, all kinds of topics. And uh I just filter his most popular videos and I found that 40% of his most popular videos were about uh guns. And I was like, what if I do a whole channel about guns? And I just you know I just create a place for everyone who loves like war and tech and the spies and all of it, and I just create a place where they can you know enjoy content, and that's exactly what we did. This is also niche bending when you take uh you know a creator with a whole bunch of topics and you uh basically uh dedicate your channel for one of them specifically, and you just niche it down, uh, and like uh the this is a segment, like another uh kind of substrategy for uh for the niche bending strategy in general.

SPEAKER_01 53:36

Wow, that's uh that's really incredible because the when you think about the banana, I see when I do examples of things, I use extremes and you did with the banana thing. And I I love that because it it it connects faster. Because you could say, oh, I could do a niche bending where you're kind of working out by talking about history, and you're like, okay, I guess I can see that. But when you take something so left of center and go, I'm gonna talk about Rome with bananas, you're like, oh, I think I kind of understand what you're saying, and like makes a lot more sense a lot faster. That's really crazy. So to wrap this up, I want to talk about kind of where you're going forward in 2026. I know that you have a couple of channels you don't really want to specifically speak about yet. I know that'll probably come. But tell us kind of early days, what it looks like performance-wise, kind of give us some general ideas of like where you are performance-wise and where you think you'll be by the middle of the year.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

Yeah. So uh we're now, because it's Q1, obviously, not the best time for YouTube, but we're doing now about uh 50 to 70k a month with the portfolio of channels. And uh uh what I want to get to is uh 10 branded faceless channels uh in a portfolio, uh doing about$2 million a year uh by the end of this year. And uh uh basically the way we're gonna do it is by leveraging what we do best and partnering up with those who uh does that what we are missing. So uh as I as I already said, uh we're very good at hiring and scaling uh proven concepts. So I'll probably just uh you know, through the network and uh uh maybe even podcasts like that, I'm just gonna find creative founders that are struggling to grow and they understand that if they post instead of one video a month, eight videos a month, they're gonna grow 10 times faster. And that's exactly what we can provide them with. Because uh, you know, unlike many many companies, like we don't provide it as a service, we actually come as investors on board, and that's how we you know for sure that we care about the channel actually growing. So uh yeah, that's uh that's the whole focus, plus obviously uh providing as much context on what we do on on my Twitter and uh and other socials because I've realized how how little creators actually understand about this uh uh business side of YouTube and how to make things work at scale. Uh, like I'll just give you one number across all of the all of our projects. We now have 44 people working for us full-time. So that's a whole nother scale compared to three freelancers on our work under contracts. Like that's that's a different level of system you need to build to manage all of those people, keep all of them happy, and uh and etc. So uh yeah, that's that's gonna be my my focus for 2026.

Budget Paths For Beginners

SPEAKER_01 56:20

And one final question, Tim, and I I think this might be just one that I'm more interested in than anyone else. Why? Why are you sharing this information when technically like you don't have to share it to anybody to be more successful? And perhaps you're sharing it to someone who becomes a new rival to you. Like, why take the risk? Why do you feel like it's important to let people know how you've succeeded?

SPEAKER_00 56:42

Uh, because of stories like uh uh like the the case that we did with Mario. So I knew that the account, if we don't help like again, uh let's not touch Mario. Let's uh let's actually talk about another guy. I can't say his name or channel, but okay. He he is in pain, he's struggling because he's doing all of the video himself and uh he's animating everything. He learned to animate only to run this channel. He he felt such an urge to to run this channel that he learned animation. Like, can you imagine like how how motivated he is, right? But he's doing it 24-7, and he's only able to produce like two videos a month. So he it takes him two weeks to produce a video, and then if it's a flop, then you know for the next two. Yes, he lost two weeks. He lost basically all the motivation going forward with the next video. And I know that I don't have the number, five percent of YouTube, 10% of YouTube are creators like that, maybe even higher percentage. Like, I don't know the number, but I know that there are people like thousands of them uh out there. And for me, like, yes, they can become competitors, but again, the uh the actual impact of me just telling them, look, you don't need to do it by yourself. Look, there is this kind of quality control you can install, there is this website where you can hire people. For me, it costs absolutely nothing. For them, it's uh it's their life, it's the the business that they can build based on just like one random advice from a random team on the internet, right? So I think that the impact of me doing that is uh you know the the reason why uh I do it because everyone can talk about how to increase the uh CTR on the thumbnail. Like everyone does it, right? I don't want to be like one of those, but I'm here to help creators heal from this disease, which is basically doing everything by themselves and thinking they will still somehow grow because it like they won't, like that's the reality of things. They will be stuck up until the point where they realize that they need to enhance their uh workflows uh with the teams and systems and the the business approach.

SPEAKER_01 58:53

Tim, this has been mind-blowing, man. I really appreciate your time. Um, if you're listening to the podcast, either on audio or video, we're gonna have a link to his Twitter X uh channel or sorry, I should say, uh account. And then we'll even uh link up the Art of War just to just to kind of see where it's been and where it is now, just so you can see exactly what he's talking about, where he's been and where he's going. And it's just it's fascinating. And I think uh we should definitely circle back in six to eight months and see what has happened because I'm super curious where you're gonna be in just a couple of things.

SPEAKER_00 59:24

That would be fun. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 59:26

So if you're new here, this is kind of the stuff we do here. We want to make sure we see you in the next one. And if you want to see Tim, like I said, plenty of links in the description and in the show notes before. And we'll see you in the next one.