The modern internet is more interested in simply occupying the internet than seeking attention.
Adavia Davis understands that perhaps more than anyone else. Since dropping out of Mississippi State University in 2020, the 22-year-old has built a thriving content creation business by harnessing so-called “slop,” the vast amount of AI-generated background noise that thrives in the cracks of our focus. Davis' most successful videos weren't meant to be watched, shared, or even remembered. Davis often said: luckhis viewers are asleep.
Davis has built a vast network of YouTube channels that operate as near-autonomous revenue streams, requiring only about two hours of supervision per day. He currently runs five active channels, but his extensive portfolio includes multiple Minecraft channels aimed at kids, as well as channels dedicated to funny animal compilations, prank videos, anime compilations, Bollywood clips, and celebrity gossip. The most lucrative is the Boring History channel, built around six-hour “sleeping history” documentaries narrated like a languid David Attenborough.
These channels belong to a genre that has come to dominate YouTube, known as “faceless” content, or videos designed to be scalable and easily duplicated. Nearly all of Davis' videos are generated by artificial intelligence centered around TubeGen, a proprietary software pipeline built by his partner and colleague Eddie Eisner, 22, that automates nearly every step of production. The script and visuals are produced by Claude, Eleven Lab's smooth British voiceover, and assembled into a feature-length video. Results can run for up to 6 hours and cost just $60 to create from start to finish.
davis said luck His video network reportedly generates approximately $40,000 to $60,000 in revenue per month. He added that his operating costs (primarily a small payroll team overseeing various areas) cost about $6,500 a month. Profit margins range from 85% to 89%, which is extraordinary even by the state of the art.
luck After reviewing screenshots of Davis' social media analytics dashboard and recent AdSense payment records, we found that his monthly revenue from individual channels ranged from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, equating to approximately $700,000 in total annual revenue. he spoke luck We detail what changed in his career, how it started, and why college wasn't part of the equation for him.
How Davis Hacks the Featured Economy
Davis, who grew up on YouTube, was a product of the platform's golden age. When he was 10 years old in 2014, he says he was spending six hours a day writing and editing scripts for his Minecraft and Fortnite playthroughs. He said he laments the passing of the days when creators were driven by “the love of the game, not necessarily to sell something.”
However, by 2022, the market logic of the Internet had changed with the launch of ChatGPT. Davis said he saw the writing on the wall early on. The idea was that the era of personal brands was being overshadowed by large content farms. But he was also frankly surprised at how his hobby turned side hustle into something resembling a business. “I didn't start it. [making content on] “I started YouTube to make AI videos,” he says, adding that at first it was just for fun, but money started coming in from his various channels. “Then if my competitors are uploading more videos than me and I’m waiting for the scriptwriter to finish, I’m just falling behind.”
Davis was a 19-year-old college student when he felt the world of the internet changing beneath his feet. He sold his first YouTube channel to a brand, which turned the account into a marketing feed for its products. (Davis says he routinely accepts these kinds of deals, even though they rarely result in a profit for the buyer. “They don't know what they're doing.”) To celebrate, he spent what he said was his last savings on a Tesla Model 3, which retailed for $55,000 at the time, leaving no money left over for tuition.. Davis enrolled in the school primarily for the experience, but quickly realized that he couldn't balance teaching and content creation at the cost of both, he said. “If I stayed in school, I would be broke and distracted,” he says. “It was just a setback for no reason.”
In Davis' opinion, the internet he grew up on is now gone forever, so he pivoted completely to creating a YouTube channel using the new AI tools at his disposal. “Corporate ethics at the top, where attention is the number one goal, has gotten really, really bad,” Davis said. “Because attention is the best currency. Those who have the most influence control the most.” He explained that the system he is monetizing is very “psychological” and even destructive, “trying to destroy the mind and make it easier to sell.”
Davis explained his understanding of the business model that in order for YouTube to survive, it must cater to advertisers, the platform's “puppet masters.” The only way to survive within this system, he argued, was to understand it and even teach it. (In fact, Davis said he offers online courses to people who want to supplement their income, including his belief that “social media is a social science.”)
Recent data shows that so-called “AI slop” is rapidly expanding across YouTube. Researchers at video editing company Kapwing found that more than 20% of videos shown to new users fall into this category. The study also found that channels posting only low-quality AI content amassed more than 63 billion total views, 221 million subscribers, and an estimated $117 million in annual advertising revenue. Meanwhile, YouTube has emerged as a major player in both TV and streaming, with the 2020s marking a turning point in the popularity of podcasts with videos, and YouTube's dominance in more traditional TV shows like the NFL (or next year's Oscars) combined with user-generated content (UGC) to make it an engagement juggernaut. Melissa Otto, head of research at S&P Global Visible Alpha, previously said: luck Nicholas Glaus, director of consumer internet and fintech research at Ark Investments, says YouTube's dominance in UGC is the real reason Netflix is spending so much money to acquire Warner Bros. Disney's subsequent $1 billion licensing deal with OpenAI falls into a similar category.
Against this background, Davis remains a relatively small-scale figure. He has built and sold faceless, AI-driven channels from around 400,000 subscribers to over 1 million subscribers. Still, he said his video network currently averages about 2 million views per day. “When you understand the psychology, everything else falls into place,” he said.
Davis, who has run shows on TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat in addition to running a channel on YouTube over the past few years, said he has learned how to optimize for social media's toughest metric: watch time. Some tactics are easy. Davis relentlessly crafts the first few seconds of a video, or “hook,” the bright contrast of colors on screen, the first facial expression or inflection of a voice heard. Because that first moment determines whether your audience stays or goes.
Some people are more mischievous. In the video compilations, Davis sometimes turns to shock tactics, such as having a spider suddenly flash on screen for just a split second at the beginning, long enough to make the viewer rewind and see if they actually saw what they thought they saw. In short-form clips, he intentionally misspelled words on screen, prompting viewers to pause, comment, and correct, stretching out the total playback time in the process.
“I'm trying my best to cheat on the total play time,” he said. “Because that’s the metric that ultimately pays off.”
2027 deadline
So far, Davis has had something of a first-mover advantage, given his early recognition of arbitrage opportunities and years of intuition about the types of videos that perform well.
But now, competition is heating up as AI moves beyond scripting into video production, further eroding barriers to entry. He said the biggest mistake he ever made in his career was posting a promotional video on TubeGen showing how he created a long-form Boring History sleep video using AI. Within days, Davis said he saw a number of imitators posting similar videos, crowding out the niche he had built and dominated.
But he says it's the companies with the capital that pose a greater threat than individual copycats. Davis describes himself as “something of a doomsday” about the future of the field, estimating that individual creators won't be able to meaningfully profit from YouTube's AI-generated long-form content until around 2027.
Then, he predicted, a “shark” would appear. It's a big media company with the capital to industrialize any format the moment it proves profitable. “At that point, you're just competing with big fish,” he said.
Davis pointed to the World War II History Channel, which he admires. The channel was full of thoughtfully produced videos, likely created by students, posted every other day. An unknown media company caught on to this niche and started uploading three times a day. He estimates that these types of videos cost about $110 to produce, but more than $300 to post at the speed of a media company. “If you don't have a budget, you can't compete,” he said.
Still, he said he was optimistic he would find a way to “break through the cracks,” as he has for three years. Rather than inventing a new genre, Davis said he's looking for small edges within formats that already work. Lately, he's been experimenting with twists on familiar settings. It combines narrated Reddit posts with looping Minecraft footage. But instead of classic Reddit stories, he prefers to fall asleep to narrated horror stories for what he calls “psychopaths.”
“The proof of concept is there,” Davis said.
But Davis hopes that one day, soon, there will be no demand for his content at all. He believes that as AI content floods the internet and trust erodes, trust itself will become rarer and therefore less valuable. He's already seeing a growing audience for creators who reject heavy editing and algorithmic tricks.
“Things are going to get worse before they get better,” he said, but ultimately “the real longevity will come from brands and authentic influencers with real faces.”
