Take the 'portfolio' approach towards creating content channels

These teens created a $500k/month business that started to disappear... till they started diversifying across many channels

I was watching this video about a pair of teens who are doing $500k+ in revenue/month from faceless youtube and Snapchat channels and was just blown away.

Their names are Luc and Daniel. And they’ve never even really held a real job before let alone have any substantial business experience.

When I heard their story… i was gritting my teeth.. LOL

These teens went from nothing to $500k/monthly revenue in just 9 months

They were just normal kids who enjoyed video editing but making almost no revenue when things just started to blow up.

Why did they blow up? Well they got their first major break on Snapchat channels, which is a gated access thing that not that many creators do or even know about.

You need to get approved or take over someone else’s channel. And so they figured out how to get one.

The good thing was that it was very low competition unlike Youtube. And so by using some of the things they had studied and learned on Youtube they were able to do very well on Snapchat.

The other good thing about Snapchat is that because there are no likes or comments…. its very hard to know that a channel is massive. Which is also a beneficial thing because you don’t get copied as fast as you do on Youtube and Tiktok.

They realized a simple formula that started killing it on shorts

They mention on the video that they were doing really well on Snapchat (with news shorts) and also expanded into Youtube.

And on Youtube the focus at the beginning was a single channel, Slam Dunk (link). They’d figured out a faceless channel formula that was really killing it on shorts.

And if you watch some of the videos like this one.. you can tell how the formula is really not all that complex to reverse engineer.

Pretty straight forward stuff actually…. a popular news story that includes famous people in entertainment that target a youthful audience with a very simple script using a human voice and text on the screen.

I mean.. this is not rocket science. Pretty much anybody could spend a month practicing and get stuff out of this quality.

But it was working. They were doing videos with 5m views, 10m views, and even 15m+ views.

And they were pulling in $500k+ a month revenue figures.

But then they realized that you can’t rely on a single channel

At some point the Slam Dunk channel on Youtube began to struggle more. They went from earning tons of money to earning like 10% of what they had.

And it scared them.

They realized they needed to diversify. So they created lots of channels.

They now maintain at least 10 different channels but they keep the names and exact number a mystery. Because they do not want to be copied as they were with the Slam Dunk channel.

And with this diversification their revenue came steaming back. They got back up to the $500k/month mark and started to cross it significantly.

This required creating a ‘content machine’

To maintain so many channels.. they had to create an absolute machine. So they put together all kinds of scriptwriters, video editors, etc and they connected them all via Discord.

This is like the 3rd time I’ve heard of GenZers basically using Discord the way that us older folks use Slack. Meaning that the Discord channel was only for folks in their company as it was for internal communication.

Bu it allowed them to get messages out in bulk quickly and efficiently to a widely dispersed team.

They mentioned that they’re now publishing 50+ videos per day. Which if you’re doing a lot of shorts.. is actually more than doable.

This reinforces many of my own hypotheses about content creation

I’ve watched a lot of Youtubers talk about their success in the past 6 months or so as i’ve wanted to learn the tricks of the trade.

And they all talk about similar things, ie. keep creating more content and trying to improve with each one.

You need to produce 100+ videos till you really start to get good.

But I had this nagging feeling that I was hearing “Survivor bias”. Meaning there are tons of people that did exactly this and still failed.

And when I heard these kids talk about how even to this day some of their channels fail and many of their videos will still completely flop despite all that they’ve learned and how high a level they are playing the game at….

…it started to click.

You can do everything right and still not blow up because there are numerous factors outside of your hands that you have poor visibility on.

Because the algorithm is always changing and its still quite a black box.

So to have steady outcomes and revenue… similar to investing in the stock market… you need to diversify.