This Guy has Uploaded over 2 Million YouTube Videos

[PacificTecher]

Stumbled across this odd tech tutorial channel, not a studio or company. Noticed a shocking number "2M Videos".

https://m.youtube.com/@RoelVandePaar

 

At first I thought, I bet the big news channels like CNN, Bloomberg Live  CBS News, that upload a dozen news clips a day, probably have that many videos too on YT. Nope, all the news channels combined don't have anything near this.

 

The videos have a recycled intro, and then text tutorial. I'm wondering if it's all automated? Or if he's at least typing up the text tutorial portions?

 

Just thought it was interesting. Not a huge deal.

[PacificTecher]

His 1st video was August 2014. So 2,000,000 / about 3,900 days, is over 500 videos per day average? Definitely has to be some automatiom going on. But who and what would be triggering the video ideas initially? Is that some robot system too? (Pre LLM's and modern ai bots)

 

I guess YT has no daily or hourly upload limit lol.

[Eigenvektor]

27 minutes ago, PacificTecher said:

But who and what would be triggering the video ideas initially?

The videos all seem to follow the same schema: intro, some tech question, one or more answers based on how many people found it useful, outro. I wouldn't call this much of a "video idea", since there's nothing original about any of them.

 

Sounds more like he's scraping a site like StackOverflow, rendering the questions and answers into a video. Based on volume alone my guess would be that this is a fully automated operation.

[Blue4130]

3 hours ago, PacificTecher said:

His 1st video was August 2014. So 2,000,000 / about 3,900 days, is over 500 videos per day average? Definitely has to be some automatiom going on. But who and what would be triggering the video ideas initially? Is that some robot system too? (Pre LLM's and modern ai bots)

 

I guess YT has no daily or hourly upload limit lol.

Assuming he works 16 hours a day on this and 8 hours on sleep/eat/s**t, that is 2 minutes per video. There MUST be automation.

[maplepants]

He's definitely just found a way to automatically turn blog posts into YouTube videos. A quick run through some of his videos looks very reasonable for a tech blog / mastodon account. Even the frequency of 5 or 6 posts per day isn't that crazy for a Mastodon account (which is what we're dealing with here in terms of text amounts).

 

I tried to do a web search for some tool that would convert text into a video of that text be the first page was dominated by AI slop generators. So I can't be sure, but I'd bet that there's a pretty simple tool to do this conversion.

 

Really, this guys got something like a Mastodon account that just uses a bunch of GPU power every time he posts and every time someone reads a post. Very odd.

[porina]

Without looking at that channel, it does remind me of a GDC video where a dev goes over how they did that with a mobile game. Before the practice was banned on stores, they automated the creation of the same game based on a themed input. Basically same game with a different skin. If there is a niche someone is searching for, they might have that search hit! They even found some success from doing this because their games were so bad people actually clicked the ads to get away. Great story, worth a watch.

 

 

 

[spacepickle]

I think SomeOrdinaryGamers made a video about this guy a while back. According to Socialblade it seems like he’s making anywhere from a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars month, so likely this is just some kind of automated passive income source. 
Example video for those interested:

I gotta say props to him for coming up with this, even if the ethics are shady at best. 

[ewitte]

7 minutes ago, spacepickle said:

I think SomeOrdinaryGamers made a video about this guy a while back. According to Socialblade it seems like he’s making anywhere from a couple hundred to a few thousand dollars month, so likely this is just some kind of automated passive income source. 
Example video for those interested:

If only making that he is barely getting any views despite the massive number of videos!

[Holmes108]

16 minutes ago, ewitte said:

If only making that he is barely getting any views despite the massive number of videos!

 

Anyone know how Youtube's $/view scales?

 

i.e. Does getting 500K views each on 2 videos = 1M views on 1 video?

[danalog]

19 minutes ago, Holmes108 said:

 

Anyone know how Youtube's $/view scales?

 

i.e. Does getting 500K views each on 2 videos = 1M views on 1 video?

Not every view becomes revenue due to ad blockers but for reference: 

 

Looking at one specific video it's a lot closer to 10:1 views per cent of revenue

[PacificTecher]

Ok. Yeah so he definitely uses automation, but I'm just surprised it could be profitable with the amount of electricity and GPU power being used to create & upload 500+ videos a day (even aside from the basicness of the videos). Looks like it's slowed down now but if you average it out, 500+ videos per day is crazy. Views per video don't seem like it would pencil out, but i guess it does if he's still doing it. Good for him. Would love to see him explain his process and numbers in an interview, but I doubt he would reveal that.

 

@Eigenvektor Scraping for questions on stack overflow, that definitely makes sense, I was thinking something along that line or certain subreddits.

[Eigenvektor]

8 hours ago, PacificTecher said:

Ok. Yeah so he definitely uses automation, but I'm just surprised it could be profitable with the amount of electricity and GPU power being used to create & upload 500+ videos a day

They're mostly just text on white background, which should only take a few seconds to encode. The parts that stay the same would only need to be encoded once and can then be stitched together (e.g. using ffmpeg concat).

 

Assuming the process is fully automated (crawl site, extract question and answers, render to video, concat intro/outro, upload to YouTube) his only cost is a few kWh of electricity per day. Depending on his location that could be fairly cheap, might even use solar.

 

The huge number of videos probably means he gets a fairly high hit rate when people are searching for answers. It probably doesn't pay off immediately, but might make enough in the long run.