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A 22-Year-Old Makes $700,000 a Year From YouTube Videos Nobody Watches
Most of his viewers never see a single frame of his videos. Many are asleep before the first minute ends. Yet Adavia Davis, a 22-year-old former Mississippi State University student, has turned that inattention into an annual income of roughly $700,000.
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Davis runs a network of YouTube channels that produce what the internet has come to call “slop,” a term so pervasive that a major dictionary named it one of 2025’s words of the year. His content is not meant to be remembered or shared. It exists to fill silence, to occupy screens in dark bedrooms, to generate watch time from viewers who may never consciously engage with what plays before them.
How does someone build a business on content nobody watches? And what does it say about the platforms we spend hours scrolling every day?
From Minecraft Kid to Content Factory Owner
Davis grew up on YouTube during what he considers its golden era. At age 10 in 2014, he spent six hours a day scripting and editing Minecraft and Fortnite playthroughs. Back then, creators made videos out of passion. Money was secondary to the joy of building an audience that cared about what you had to say.
By 2022, everything had changed. ChatGPT launched and shifted the internet’s market logic almost overnight. Davis, then 19 and enrolled in college, watched as personal brands gave way to large-scale content farms. Competitors who once posted weekly now upload daily, using AI tools to accelerate production. Waiting on human scriptwriters meant falling behind.
Davis faced a choice that would define his career. He could continue as a traditional creator, competing against an ever-growing tide of automated content, or he could adapt. He chose adaptation.
A Tesla, No Tuition, and No Looking Back
Before fully committing to AI content, Davis sold his first YouTube channel to a brand that wanted to convert it into a marketing feed. Such deals rarely work out for buyers, Davis has noted, because most brands lack the knowledge to run a successful channel. But the money was real, and Davis had plans for it.
He spent what he describes as the last of his savings on a Tesla Model 3, which at the time retailed for $55,000. After that purchase, nothing remained for tuition. Davis had enrolled at Mississippi State largely for the college experience, but he found himself unable to balance classes with content creation. Something had to give.
“If I stayed in school, I was going to be broke and distracted,” Davis told Fortune. “That was just a setback for no reason.”
He dropped out in 2020 and turned fully to building YouTube channels with AI tools at his disposal. In his view, the internet he grew up with was already gone forever.
What His Channels Actually Look Like
Davis currently runs five active channels, though his broader portfolio has included many more over the years. Several target children with Minecraft content. Others post animal compilations, prank videos, anime edits, Bollywood clips, and celebrity gossip. Each channel operates as a separate entity, targeting a specific audience with content designed to capture attention in that niche.
His most profitable venture is a channel called Boring History. It posts six-hour documentaries narrated by what sounds like a languid David Attenborough, covering historical topics in a slow, soothing tone. People do not watch these videos to learn. People watch them to fall asleep.
Such content belongs to a genre that has come to dominate YouTube, known as “faceless” content. No host appears on camera. No personality drives the channel. Videos are designed to be scalable and easily replicated, stripped of any element that would require human presence or creative vision.
A $60 Video and an 85% Margin
Production relies on TubeGen, proprietary software built by Eddie Eizner, Davis’s 22-year-old business partner. Eizner developed a pipeline that automates nearly every step of video creation. Claude generates scripts and visuals. ElevenLabs produces the British narration that gives Boring History its distinctive sound. Human involvement is minimal.
A single six-hour video can cost as little as $60 to produce from start to finish. Davis told Fortune that his network generates between $40,000 and $60,000 in monthly revenue. Operating costs run about $6,500 per month, primarily for small salaried teams overseeing different niches. Profit margins land between 85% and 89%, figures that would make most tech companies envious.
Fortune reviewed screenshots from Davis’s social media analytics dashboards and recent AdSense payout records. Individual channels showed tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly earnings, supporting his claim of roughly $700,000 in annual gross revenue. His network averages about 2 million views per day across all channels.
Attention as Currency
Davis does not romanticize the business he has built. He describes modern platforms as engines of extraction, designed to capture attention by any means necessary. In his view, YouTube caters to advertisers, whom he calls the “puppet masters” of the platform. Content creators survive by understanding how the system works and playing by its rules.
He describes the system he monetizes as psychological, even destructive. Platforms want to keep users engaged for as long as possible, which means designing experiences that override rational decision-making. Davis believes survival requires understanding these mechanics, even teaching them. He offers an online course for people looking to supplement their income, built around his belief that social media functions as a social science.
Recent research supports his observations about AI content’s rapid expansion. Researchers at video-editing company Kapwing found that more than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users fall into the AI slop category. Channels posting nothing but low-quality AI content have collectively amassed over 63 billion views, 221 million subscribers, and an estimated $117 million per year in advertising revenue.
Against that backdrop, Davis remains a comparatively small operator. He has built and sold faceless AI-driven channels ranging from roughly 400,000 subscribers to just over 1 million. But his margins and efficiency make him highly profitable relative to his scale.
Engineering Every Second
Watch time determines payment on YouTube, so Davis engineers every opening second of his videos with surgical precision. Color contrast, facial expressions, vocal inflections in the first moments of a video determine whether viewers stay or click away. He calls these opening moments “hooks,” and he obsesses over getting them right.
Some tactics venture into mischief. In compilation videos, Davis sometimes inserts a split-second flash of a spider at the beginning. Viewers see it just long enough to wonder whether they imagined it. Many rewind to check, stretching watch time in the process. In short-form clips, he intentionally misspells words on screen. Viewers pause, comment with corrections, and engage longer than they otherwise would.
“I do everything in my power to trick watch time,” Davis explained. “Because that’s the metric that’s going to pay you at the end of the day.”
A Costly Lesson in Secrecy
Davis describes his biggest career mistake as a moment of transparency. He posted a promotional video for TubeGen that revealed how he produced his Boring History sleep videos using AI. Within days, copycats flooded the niche he had built and monopolized. His first-mover advantage evaporated almost overnight.
Competition has grown fiercer as AI advances beyond scripts into full video production. Barriers to entry collapse further with each new tool release. What once required specialized knowledge now requires only access to the right software and a willingness to experiment.
His 2027 Deadline
Davis calls himself “kind of a doomer” about the future of his industry. He estimates that individual creators have until around 2027 to profit from AI-generated long-form YouTube content. After that, large media companies with capital will industrialize any format that proves lucrative.
He points to a World War II history channel he once admired. It appeared to be run by a student, posting thoughtful videos every other day. Once an unnamed media company noticed the niche, it began uploading three times daily. Such videos cost roughly $110 to produce, Davis estimates, but posting at industrial speed would cost over $300 per day. Independent creators cannot sustain that pace without significant capital.
Still, Davis remains optimistic that he will find ways to “seep through the cracks,” as he has for three years. Rather than inventing new formats, he looks for small edges within genres that already work. His latest experiment pairs narrated horror stories with looping Minecraft footage, targeting viewers who fall asleep to unsettling content. He believes the proof of concept is there.
Why Authenticity Might Win Eventually
Despite his pessimism about the near future, Davis believes a correction is coming. As AI content floods the web and trust erodes, authenticity itself will become scarce. Scarcity creates value. He already sees a growing audience for creators who reject heavy editing and algorithmic tricks, who show their real faces and speak in their own voices.
“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” Davis acknowledges. But he predicts true longevity will belong to real influencers with real faces, people who build genuine connections with audiences rather than optimizing for metrics.
Until then, Davis will continue operating in the gaps of the attention economy, producing content for viewers who may never remember watching it. His business model depends on a platform designed to capture attention at any cost, and he has learned to play that game better than most. Whether that game remains profitable after 2027 is a question he cannot answer yet. But for now, two hours of work per day generates $700,000 per year, and Adavia Davis sees no reason to stop.