What The Fastest Growing Faceless Channels Know That You Don't transcript

YouTubers, I have great news. It no longer takes you years to get monetized, which is kind of awkward since it took me almost five. In any direction we look these days, we are seeing faceless YouTube channels make obscene amounts of money in months, if not weeks. Seriously, some of these channels utilize stick men that are making more money than me, which is starting to make me think that these just aren't going to cut it anymore.

And all of this means that you're about to feel very deeply behind in your YouTube life, or stick with me on this one, you're about to discover what they have already figured out but you haven't yet. Because I delve deep into our data to pull out the actual channels and the actual formats behind the numbers. And it turns out this is not the usual just be consistent advice. We've got tons of examples and the playbook, so that by the end of this video, you will know how to make tons of money from your faceless channel real fast.

All right, let's get to it. This channel, Casual Finance, it has over 280,000 subscribers and one of those four men and stick men as a host. And according to the VidIQ tool, makes around about $5,000 a month. And then we have this channel, Monkey Mind 101. It's a little bigger at over 300,000 subscribers, but according to our tool, makes just over $1,000 a month. So even though they are both faceless animation channels of around about the same subscriber size, one channel earns five times more than the other.

Now, a lot of this has to do with how many views each channel gets per month, but you also have to factor in the categories [music] and what advertisers will pay for that. Finance versus mindfulness. And look, I get it. Pick a niche with the highest RPM sounds like the most boring advice in the YouTube world, but it is a lot more specific than that. It's not just finance versus everything else. There's actually a whole ladder here.

And once you know which rung your niche sits on, you'll suddenly realize whether you've been playing YouTube on hard or easy mode when when to revenue. So here's the takeaway. Before you plan your first video, find out what advertisers are operating in that niche. If you are stuck in a niche that only pays $2.50 per 1,000 views, then I'm afraid better titles and better thumbnails aren't going to fix your problem. Quite simply, it could be the niche that you're in.

But, here's a thing that's probably going to annoy you. Some of the fastest growing channels I found didn't seem to consider the niche at all. They found something else, something that has nothing to do with RPMs, CPMs, and revenues, and is a little harder to spot. Chat history compilations. It is pulling in close to $9,000 a month on a channel with 166,000 subscribers. But, if you're thinking that is a high category RPM win, it isn't.

If you check out their entire upload history, they have made just 30 videos. But, critically, all of these 30 videos have a lot in common. The same title format, the same structure, the same enormous run time for lots of ads, basically the same [music] everything. They didn't find a better niche, they found an incredible format that works, and they never stop making it. As a result, every single video on the channel is an absolute home run, hundreds of thousands of views at least.

And here is where this gets really interesting, because this isn't just a one channel trick. There's a channel here called Dark Ledger that is pulling in at least $2,000 a month, and they did it using a very specific format. Ranking your life at every level of wealth, from broke [music] to millionaire, and it worked. And then we have a completely different type of channel called Master POV. They took that exact structure, but pointed it at different jobs instead.

It is the same format, but with a new topic, meaning fantastic results. And they are growing fast, 60,000 subscribers, but far more importantly, revenue of $15,000 a a I should mention by the way that I'm finding all of these channels through our incredibly powerful vidIQ MCP tool that we don't gatekeep. You've got access to it as well. It is an essential research tool that brings a database of millions of channels and videos literally to your fingertips.

So, just head on over to vidIQ.com/mcp where you'll have it up and running within 5 minutes of the end of watching this entire video. I need the watch time. The MCP tool is also where I found this channel making over $7,000 a month called Chill POV Guy. They are following that same structure of ranking X, except this time it's paramedics, firefighters, policemen, and doctors. So, if you are sitting there as a lost creator thinking that you need 100 ideas every single week to make this work, you don't.

If you can put in the initial effort to find a format that works and performs really well, and then mold it into your own voice and tone and niche, then what you actually need is [music] the discipline to repeat this process again and again and again until it stops working. Which brings up a pretty obvious problem. It's a bit like the chicken and the egg. If cloning your own best format is this powerful, well, what do you do on day one when you haven't yet found this powerful format?

Well, it does turn out that the fastest growing channels have an answer to that, too, and it has nothing to do with content at all. Let's walk through this one a little bit, shall we? It's day one and you don't have any views, nor do you have any subscribers, and you've got zero credibility. And because you are starting a faceless channel, you don't even have a face that viewers can look to and trust. So, instead of earning that trust from scratch, what the smart channels are doing these days is borrowing it.

I want you to take a look at this. It's a faceless NBA channel that's just cracked 100,000 subscribers, and they're earning around about $3,000 a month, 40 million views from only 60 published videos. And from the very start, they have been borrowing the faces and the names from the sport that is loved by millions. And if you do a little more research into their videos, you'll notice something. It's split into two main buckets.

Half of the titles contain names of players that you'll be very familiar with from the sport. Those videos are exactly what they say, real stars and real moments. But the other half of the titles don't name anyone at all, and instead go for the approach of how a random German guy carried the NBA's greatest championship, or how a homeless team nobody wanted became an NBA superstar. So when the video idea involves a big name and a real story, the creator's going to use it.

But when the creator doesn't have a name that they can use to pitch their video, they don't fake one. They lean into you won't believe this underdog storytelling format. And this approach isn't exclusive to sports channels. Take this channel called the Tour from Home TV, faceless walking tour channel. They're filming places such as the Jurassic World experience in Singapore on a Royal Caribbean cruise. These are places that people already know exist, want to go and visit, and are going to watch the full video to get the full experience.

So neither of these channels is making anything up. There's no fake quotes, there's no fabricated drama. What they're essentially doing is planting their flag in something that's real and already has a huge audience for. So if you are starting from zero, and remember every [clears throat] single creator on this platform started from zero, you don't need to build trust from absolutely nothing. In your first few videos, you can attach your content to something that people already trust, or maybe don't trust, but it's definitely recognizable, and a lot of people are searching for it.

The key, as is often the case, is to take something familiar, but spin it so that you provide something that is of your own voice, something fresh in that space. Okay, so we've got niche, we've got formats, we've got borrowed authority. That is three levers down. But, there is a fourth one somewhere up here that's difficult to see and no one is talking about. It's about what happens when a viewer clicks on a video and just never leaves for hours and YouTube is paying the entire time.

As a quick reminder of what you're actually chasing to get monetized in the first place, 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours in the space of 12 months. And for the majority of creators, that second number is the one that is a lot harder to achieve. The number sounds enormous until you realize it's not really about how many views it gets, it's how long each of those views last. For example, if every single person watched 100% of your 10-minute video, then you would need just 24,000 views to hit that goal.

For a 2-hour video, that number shrinks to just 2,000 views to hit 4,000 hours of watch time. And this is exactly what channels such as the Sleepless Historian figured out. This channel has just hit 700,000 subscribers and is making in the region of 3 and 1/2 thousand dollars a month. Their videos are not 10 minutes long. No, no, no, no, no. They are typically 2 and 1/2 hours long. But, those viewers will watch those videos because they are designed specifically for people who are falling asleep to them.

As time goes on, YouTube is turning more into a lean back viewing experience where people are semi-distracted doing other tasks. And this is where YouTube on TV comes into play. It is gobbling up more and more watch time on the platform. So, instead of somebody leaning into their phone and being engrossed on a video for a short amount of time, they're putting on the TV and letting YouTube play in the background as they're maybe scrolling on their phone, washing the dishes, and again, falling asleep to the content.

It is on in the background and it [music] just keeps playing and playing and playing along with those ads. And so, if your content performs well in these environments, then your videos can run and auto play onto the next video for hours and hours. And this isn't just a one channel [music] fluke. Take this channel. They've just earned their silver play button and they're earning over $3,000 a month. The packaging is clear and on point.

The content is soft-spoken commentary over calm, cozy gameplay built specifically as background noise for sleeping or study. Again, like the previous channel, these videos run for hours at a time and this channel has exploded in the last year. And again, it's an example of just swapping the topic where the format pretty much stays the same. From history to casual cozy video game play. If you structure your content around that, then you can hit 4,000 hours of watch time in a fraction of the uploads that it would take for normal channels that are making 5 to 10 minute videos.

I hope you can see from these many examples that you don't need years of toil and struggle to monetize your YouTube channel and turn it into a sustainable income. What you do need are the right strategies done correctly. But, if you are thirsty for more faceless YouTube channel niches that are making tons of money right now, then we've done a full guide over here with real data and real numbers. I'll see you there right now.