We can’t imagine being a 22-year-old who gets to boast about making $700,000 a year, and unless you're some Hollywood child star or famous footballer, chances are that kind of money is well out of our grasp – even as an adult. That's apparently not the case for Adavia Davis, a student who claims to be making bank despite only working two hours a day.
You might've noticed there's been a deluge of AI-related videos on platforms like YouTube, and it's no coincidence that there's been a boom in the use of the phrase 'AI slop', as well as bizarre videos like Fruit Love Island breaking records on TikTok.
Speaking to Fortune, Davis explained how his AI-generated videos are largely just background news that's played while people are asleep. His most lucrative is the “Boring History” channel, revolving around six-hour history documentaries that are narrated by a David Attenborough-esque voice. Davis' videos are powered by TubeGen, which bills itself as the 'best way to make viral videos' and was built by his 22-year-old business partner, Eddie Eizner.
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While Davis seems happy with his current situation, it's a case of making hay while the sun shines. An apparent deadline is looming until bigger rivals muscle in and shove single-person operations like Davis' out of the way. After all, if one man can generate one million subscribers on some of his channels and land an average of two million views per day across his network of AI videos, imagine what a whole team of humans (or AI) could do with a bigger company behind the scenes.
He has some handy tricks to keep people in, with Davis saying he’ll sometimes use shock tactics: "I do everything in my power to trick watch time. Because that’s the metric that’s going to pay you at the end of the day."
Davis pinpointed 2027 as the year that content creators will be shown the door, and despite him having a 'first-mover' advantage of being early to these kinds of videos, he understands the clock is ticking.
AI is already moving beyond script creation and into video production, with Davis admitting his biggest mistake was sharing a promo video for TubeGen that revealed the secrets of how he makes his Boring History videos with AI.
Within days, the market was flooded with copycats that were in danger of chipping away at his niche. Describing himself as "kind of a doomer," he reiterated that individual creators likely only have until 2027 until they'll be able to 'meaningfully' profit from AI-generated long-form content on YouTube.
Continuing his doom and gloom foreshadowing, the young creator predicts that 'sharks' will swarm in the form of large media companies that have the money to industrialize his kind of work, stating: "At that point, you’re just competing against the big fish."
Using a WWII history channel as an example, he said a fellow student appeared to be posting a video every other day at a probable cost of $110. An unnamed media company then swooped in and started posting three times a day with a cost of over $300, as Davis noted: "You can’t compete unless you have the budget."
Even though he's hopeful he can find a way to "seep through the cracks,” he's currently focused on reshaping his current wins. Looking at his endgame, Davis concluded, "It’ll get worse before it gets better,” but hopefully, "true longevity is going to come within brands and real influencers with real faces.”