I took one channel apart

Before deciding what to do on the side, I wanted to see what someone already doing it actually says. I picked one channel about making money with AI and pulled every video from the last three months — thirteen of them — transcripts included, and read all of it.

They had 976,000 views in total. The best performer was 'five ways to make money' at 275,000. The worst, posted the same month, was 'build a chat app in an hour' at 9,646. A twenty-eight-fold gap. The one about who pays and why beat the one about how it's made.

The strangest part was elsewhere. The episode collecting real accidents from AI-assisted coding had the fewest views of the whole period: 7,997. The runaway billing, the leaked ID photos — all of it was in there. It was also the only episode I actually used.

Useful and popular are not the same thing. Knowing that before you start seems worth something.