Faceless YouTube

You open YouTube in the evening. A calm voice explains why the stock market fell last Thursday. Little cartoon men run around the screen, there is a joke every half a minute, and after 15 minutes you understand more than you did from the news. You never saw who was talking.

This kind of channel is called faceless. There are thousands of them and you already watch some. The voice over old photos that tells you how Rome fell. The map with arrows that shows who invaded whom. The scary story read over a dark forest. The stick men who explain inflation.

People make them for a simple reason. You need no camera, no studio and no nice face, and you can do it from a small town anywhere. YouTube pays you a share of the ads. How much depends on the subject. A video about money or business earns a few times more per viewer than a video about games, because the companies that advertise there pay more to reach you.

Until now the kind of picture decided how hard it was. Reading a story over stock footage is easy, so everyone does it and nobody stands out. A cartoon was the opposite. Every minute had to be drawn by an animator, one video took weeks, and only a few channels with a team could do it. That is over.

A channel called Paper Billions posted its first video on 6 November. A week later it had three cartoons and 2.8 million views. I took one of them apart, 20 minutes about a spy who got close to the boss of Nvidia, because I wanted to know how three of these in one week is even possible.

An AI made almost all of it. It wrote the script from news articles. It read it out loud, with a different voice for each character. And it drew the cartoon, but not the way you probably imagine. It does not paint. It writes instructions for the computer, thousands of lines like “circle here, table there, lift the arm”, and the computer draws them exactly. You can see it once you know. The same diner appears three times and the only thing that changes is the calendar on the wall. 1978, 1993, 2023.

Then I started counting, because I wanted to know why I watched the whole 20 minutes.

The most shocking fact comes in the first five seconds. There is no “hello and welcome”. The first joke is at second 20. The picture changes about every three seconds. Somebody is talking 98% of the time. And every big number is turned into something you can feel. A chip costs 30,000 dollars, so the voice says “a new car, per chip”. 50 billion dollars becomes “150 dollars for every American”.

None of this is new, good television has worked like this for decades. The new part is that a machine follows the recipe in every single video and never gets bored of it.

A few things I did not expect.

The subject matters more than the AI. The same people have a second channel, made the same way, also about fresh news. Videos there go from 1,400 views to 529,000. Money, tech and famous people get watched. Politics does not.

They make the same video twice. One about a plane crash got 29,000 views. Three days later they made another one about the same crash, with a better question in the title, and it got 416,000. When a video costs almost nothing to make you don’t have to guess. You try again.

The comments look planted. The most liked ones repeat sentences from the script almost word for word. I can not prove it.

And the whole channel is an ad. Under each video there is a link to the app that makes them. 37 dollars per month. Until 12 November it was 27.

So what do you do with this.

If you only watch, look at what is written under the video. This channel lists where its facts come from, the New York Times, Reuters, Bloomberg. Many will not, and a calm voice with nice cartoons can tell you anything.

If you run a business, an animated video that explains your product used to cost a few thousand euros and a month of waiting. That price is gone. What you still have to bring yourself is the thing worth saying in the first five seconds.

Sources:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MG4v3foET8
- https://www.youtube.com/@PaperBillionsTV
- https://www.youtube.com/@RetracedNews
- https://madeovernight.com