The modern internet is less interested in demanding attention than in simply occupying it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Adavia Davis understands that better than perhaps anyone else. Since dropping out of Mississippi State University in 2020, the 22-year-old has built a thriving content-creation business out of what has come to be called \u201cslop\u201d\u2014 the high-volume, AI-generated background noise that thrives in the gaps of the attention economy. Davis\u2019s most successful videos aren\u2019t meant to be watched, shared, or even remembered.\u00a0Often, Davis told Fortune, his viewers are asleep.<\/p>\n
In short, Davis has assembled a sprawling network of YouTube<\/a> channels that operates as a near-autonomous revenue engine, requiring only about two hours of oversight a day. He currently runs five active channels, but his broader portfolio includes multiple Minecraft channels aimed at children as well as channels devoted to funny-animal compilations, prank videos, anime edits, Bollywood clips, and celebrity gossip. Most lucrative is a \u201cBoring History\u201d channel<\/a> built around six-hour \u201chistory to sleep to\u201d documentaries, narrated by what sounds like a languid David Attenborough.<\/p>\n The channels belong to a genre that has come to dominate YouTube, known as \u201cfaceless\u201d content\u2014videos designed to be scalable, easily replicated. Nearly all of Davis\u2019s videos are generated with artificial intelligence, anchored by TubeGen,<\/a> a proprietary software pipeline built by his partner, fellow 22-year-old Eddie Eizner, that automates nearly every step of production. Scripts and visuals are generated with Claude, the silky British narration from ElevenLabs<\/a>, then assembled into long-form videos. The results can run as long as six hours, costing as little as $60 to produce from start to finish.\u00a0<\/p>\n Davis told Fortune that his network of videos generates roughly $40,000 to $60,000 a month in revenue. His operating costs\u2014primarily small salaried teams overseeing the different niches\u2014run at about $6,500 per month, he said. The margins are 85% to 89%, extraordinary by tech standards.\u00a0<\/p>\n Fortune reviewed screenshots from Davis\u2019s social media analytics dashboards, as well as recent AdSense payout records, which show tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly earnings from individual channels, equating to annual gross revenue of roughly $700,000. He talked to Fortune more about what is turning into his career, how it got started, and why college wasn\u2019t part of the equation for him.<\/p>\n How Davis hacks the attention economy<\/p>\n Growing up on YouTube, Davis was a product of the platform\u2019s golden era. When he was 10 years old in 2014, he said, he would spend six hours a day scripting and editing Minecraft and Fortnite playthroughs. He said he mourns the passing of this era, a time when creators were driven by \u201ca love of the game, not necessarily to sell something.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n But by 2022, the launch of ChatGPT shifted the internet\u2019s market logic. Davis said he saw the writing on the wall early: The era of the personal brand was being eclipsed by the large-scale-content farm.<\/p>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t start YouTube to make AI videos,\u201d he said. \u201cI started YouTube for fun at first. Then I started to make money with all the kids channels and the compilation channels, and then, if all my competitors are uploading more than me, and I\u2019m waiting on my scriptwriter to get done, then I\u2019m just falling behind.\u201d<\/p>\n Davis was a 19-year-old college student when he felt the internet world shifting under his feet. He sold his first YouTube channel to a brand, which converted the account into a marketing feed for its product (the kind of deal Davis said he routinely accepts, even if it rarely pays off for the buyer: \u201cThey don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing\u201d). To celebrate, he spent what he describes as the last of his savings on a Tesla<\/a> Model 3, at the time retailing at $55,000. This didn\u2019t leave any funds for tuition. He had enrolled largely for the experience, he said, but quickly realized he couldn\u2019t juggle classes and content creation without killing both. \u201cIf I stayed in school, I was going to be broke and distracted,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was just a setback for no reason.\u201d<\/p>\n Davis turned fully to making YouTube channels with the new AI tools at his disposal, with the internet that he grew up with now gone forever, in his opinion. <\/p>\n \u201cThe ethics have gotten really, really bad from these higher-up companies that have their number one goal as attention,\u201d Davis said. \u201cBecause attention is the number one currency. Whoever has the most influence controls the most.\u201d<\/p>\n Today\u2019s platforms are no longer marketplaces of ideas so much as engines of extraction, he said, designed to capture attention by any means necessary. He described the system that he\u2019s monetized as very \u201cpsychological,\u201d even destructive\u2014\u201ctrying to destroy minds to make them easier to sell to.\u201d<\/p>\n Davis explained his understanding of the business model as YouTube needing to cater to advertisers, \u201cthe puppet masters\u201d of the platform, in order to stay alive. The only way to survive the system, he argued, is to understand it, or even teach it. (In fact, Davis said that he offers an online course for people looking to supplement their income, including his belief that \u201csocial media is a social science.\u201d)<\/p>\n Recent data suggests that so-called AI slop has rapidly expanded across YouTube. Researchers at the video-editing company Kapwing found<\/a> that more than 20% of the videos shown to new users fall into that category, and that channels posting nothing but that AI low-quality content have collectively amassed over 63 billion views, 221 million subscribers, and an estimated $117 million a year in advertising revenue. Against that backdrop, Davis remains a comparatively small fish: He has built and sold faceless AI-driven channels ranging from roughly 400,000 subscribers to just over 1 million. Yet, he said, his network of videos now averages about 2 million views per day.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you understand psychology, everything else just falls into place,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Over the past several years running channels on YouTube as well as shows on TikTok, Instagram<\/a>, and Snapchat<\/a>, Davis said that he\u2019s learned to optimize for social media\u2019s most unforgiving metric: watch time. Some tactics are straightforward. Davis obsessively engineers the opening seconds, or the \u201chook,\u201d of a video\u2014the bright contrast of colors on screen, the first facial expression or vocal inflection you hear\u2014because that initial moment determines whether a viewer stays or clicks away.<\/p>\n Others are more mischievous. In compilation videos, Davis sometimes turns to shock tactics such as a sudden flash of a spider on-screen for a split second at the beginning, just long enough to make viewers rewind and check whether they actually saw what they think they saw. In short-form clips, he has intentionally misspelled words on-screen to bait viewers to pause, comment, and correct him, stretching watch time in the process.<\/p>\n \u201cI do everything in my power to trick watch time,\u201d he said. \u201cBecause that\u2019s the metric that\u2019s going to pay you at the end of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n The 2027 deadline<\/p>\n So far, Davis has had something of a first-mover advantage, given how early he was to spot the arbitrage opportunity and also his long-developed intuition for the sort of video that performs well.<\/p>\n But now, with AI advancing beyond scripts into video production and further collapsing barriers to entry, competition has grown fiercer. He said the biggest career mistake he ever made was posting a promotional video for TubeGen showing how he made his long-form Boring History sleep videos using AI. Within days, Davis said that he saw scores of copycats posting similar videos, crowding out the niche that he had built and monopolized until then. <\/p>\n But more threatening than the individual imitators, he said, are the companies with capital. Davis describes himself as \u201ckind of a doomer\u201d about the future of the space, estimating that individual creators have until around 2027 to meaningfully profit from AI-generated long-form YouTube content.<\/p>\n After that, he predicted the \u201csharks\u201d will arrive: large media companies with the capital to industrialize any format the moment it proves lucrative.\u00a0\u201cAt that point,\u201d he said, \u201cyou\u2019re just competing against the big fish.\u201d<\/p>\n \u200b\u200bDavis pointed to a World War II history channel that he admired, full of thoughtfully produced videos that seemed to come from a student, posting every other day. Once an unnamed media company noticed the niche, it began uploading three times a day. Those sorts of videos cost roughly $110 to produce, he estimated, whereas posting at the media company\u2019s speed would cost over $300. \u201cYou can\u2019t compete unless you have the budget,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Still, he said he was optimistic that he\u2019ll find a way to \u201cseep through the cracks,\u201d as he has for three years now. Rather than inventing new genres, Davis said he looks for small edges inside formats that already work. Most recently, he has been experimenting with a twist on a familiar setup: pairing narrated Reddit posts with looping Minecraft footage\u2014but instead of a classic Reddit story, swapping in narrated horror stories for the \u201cpsychopaths,\u201d as he put it, who like to fall asleep to them.<\/p>\n \u201cThe proof of concept is there,\u201d Davis said.<\/p>\n But Davis hopes that one day, soon, none of his content will be much in demand at all. As AI content floods the internet and trust erodes, he believes authenticity itself will become scarce and therefore valuable. He already sees a growing audience for creators who reject heavy editing and algorithmic tricks.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u201cIt\u2019ll get worse before it gets better,\u201d he said, but eventually, \u201ctrue longevity is going to come within brands and real influencers with real faces.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The modern internet is less interested in demanding attention than in simply occupying it.\u00a0 Adavia Davis understands that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378657,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,23276,25359,4136,10815,61160,108,16724,74,9280],"class_list":{"0":"post-378656","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-colleges-and-universities","12":"tag-influencers","13":"tag-instagram","14":"tag-media","15":"tag-snapchat","16":"tag-social-media","17":"tag-social-media-networks","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-youtube"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378656"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378656\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}