Transcription
For the entire month of April, I copied videos on Chinese websites and twisted them a bit to see if I can go viral on a brand new channel. How many views and subscribers can I get in only 30 days? And can I get the channel monetized? Well, let's go over the entire process.
All right, so I'm pretty sure most of you guys have come across a YouTube short like this, or this, or maybe even one of these. You see, people love these kinds of videos. Just check this channel for instance. His videos are getting a crazy amount of views, with one of the videos hitting over 440 million views. That sounds like huge money, right? I found out this channel is doing the exact thing.
So, the reason why I chose this niche is simple. One, this niche has lots of audience, and I don't even need to say it because numbers don't lie. Two, although I don't know how to cook, I think I can at least copy other people's content and twist it a little with a commentary or a story.
All right, I make a brand new channel and call it I warmed it up for about 7 days to avoid any form of shadow band. Now I can start my research. I found two channels that I assume to be my main competitors: Iconic Tales, which has close to 800,000 subscribers, and Broken Stories with close to 200,000 subscribers. What's interesting about Iconic Tales is that one of his videos hits over 40 million views. So, I spend time analyzing the top-performing and worst-performing shorts to figure out what works. This is how we learn on YouTube.
After a few hours of digging, I identified some key patterns. I'll need a good video and a good script, which can be a nice story. Yeah, I think that makes lots of sense because watching the video alone would be boring.
On the 16th day, I started generating ideas with ChatGPT because I love to use AI. I found out in my research that all the top-performing videos have one thing in common. Number one, they use underdog stories, which makes sense to me because it inspires hope and resilience. Two, they use shocking or controversial stories, which also makes sense because it's going to trigger curiosity and strong emotional reactions. And lastly, most of their top-performing videos have love and betrayal stories. I prepared this prompt to generate similar concepts. I'll leave it in the video description. You can check it out. Once I paste it here and hit enter, it generates tons of ideas for me to choose the best ones.
For the script, I came up with this prompt. I just have to enter the concept or the idea here, and it generates the script. Seems easy, right? It's not that easy. I still have a lot to do. I still need to generate the voice-over with AI because I don't have a good voice and I need to get the video as well.
All right. So to generate the voice-over, I just have to copy the script from here, then adjust it. Yeah, this is AI, and we all know it makes mistakes sometimes. All right, I'll paste the script here, then choose a voice. I will leave a link to this tool in the video description, and it's 100% free.
All right, so that's how you can also generate your voice-over. I'm going to show you the result of the first video I uploaded, the views I got on the first day of posting, and the number of subscribers that video got me. Just keep watching.
Now, how did I get the videos? It's simple. I just visited this Chinese website and found videos with high views and engagement, something like this one. You can see it has over 69,000 likes. Once I found that, I just had to copy the link of this video by hovering the mouse on share, then clicking on copy link. After that, I go ahead and save the video to my device. It's simple.
For the editing, I use CapCut because it's free to use, although it's not 100% free. If you're new, you just need to start a new project, then import all the files. Now, add the video to the video track like this. Then, set the aspect ratio to 9:16, which is for mobile videos. Make sure you remove or mute the sound of the video. Next, add the voice-over to the audio track. Then remove all the pauses. This will improve retention. Trust me. Always make sure the video is in the same length as the audio. So you can speed the video a little bit if the voice-over is short.
Okay. Next is captions. So go ahead and choose your language. Then generate the captions. Make sure to replace it with the existing captions which are in Chinese. Now you can add effects, few transitions, and sound effects. Sound effects are very helpful when it comes to YouTube shorts.
All right, so after everything, I posted this video on my channel. And guess what? I had close to 1,300 views and 12 subscribers. Not bad for a start.
Day two of uploading couldn't change everything as I uploaded another story that's almost the same as the first one and suddenly couldn't blow up. This slightly different story gets zero views in the first 24 hours and then suddenly 796 views in the next day. It gets 1,051 views then completely flatlines. I uploaded another one with lots of twists and I had 556 views in the first 2 hours and then a massive spike which is over 6,000 views and flatline again. Haha. This is normal to me because each time I post a short, it gets little to no views for the first 5 hours and sometimes 24 hours. In most cases, a massive surge of views happens the next day and then it completely flatlines at around 1 to 5,000 views.
But I think I have a solution for it. You see, I realized I was getting distracted from the actual editing because I wanted to prepare some videos for my other channel. I basically fried my brain. I chose to use Tesa AI to speed up the process and post two videos in a day, which is in the morning and in the evening.
I start by visiting the Tesa website. I'll leave the link in the video description. Know that it's a paid tool, but it's to make the job more efficient. If you're new to this website, you just need to click the get started button here, then sign up for an account. Once you complete the sign-up process, you're going to get this dashboard. There are lots of tools here, but I found out this channel is using this feature called Reddit Story. I'm not making a Reddit story, but since it's quite similar, it gets the job done easily. Anyway, I'll be making videos about how to make money with clipping. It's a simple method which can make you at least $3,000 a month. All you need to do is to like the video and don't forget to subscribe so that you won't miss it.
All right, I'm going to click on Reddit Story. I don't need this cuz I'm not creating a Reddit story. So, I'll keep it off. You also have an AI script generator here which you can try out. I already have a script, so I'll copy my script from here. Then paste it in this text box. Okay, let's click on the move forward button, then style the subtitle. For the font style, I always go with the qua axis. And I love the default color. I also keep the font size at default, but I love to make it bold and add a shadow. For the stroke width, I'll reduce it to 2.5 pixels. Let's click on move forward here. I don't need any of these videos because I have my own videos, but if you're using this method, feel free to experiment. I'll choose green screen. Next, I'll select a voice from these voices. I love Natasha. Now, everything is set and I need to save it to my device. So, let's click this button. And you can see it's going to cost me only one credit. That's the reason why I'm recommending this tool in case you're a beginner and you want to go with this method. You can create lots of videos with the starter plan.
All right. So, after saving the green screen video to my device, I open CapCut to add the video that I downloaded from the Chinese app. So, I import the video I downloaded from the Chinese website and the video I just generated. Then add the video I got from the Chinese website to the video track like this. Before I add the green screen video on top of it, now I'll select the green screen video, then click on remove, I'll choose chroma key, then use the color picker tool to pick the green color like this, then adjust it a little bit from here. I can now add a copyright-free background sound and add some effect to enhance the video quality.
All right, so I posted this short and it flatlined again. That's crazy. But it got 78,000 views, which is more than double the usual amount of views. You can see it had zero views for the first hour, then hit over 2,000 views after 2 hours before it got to 78,000, then flatlines. It also brought me 94 new subscribers, which isn't bad at all. Seems this method got me double views.
So, I decided to stick with this method, but use similar script. I uploaded the last video for the week using this same method, similar story, and similar background video. At this point, I was expecting over 100,000 views. But do you know what actually happened? I got only 100 views. I'm kidding. It currently has over 600,000 views with over 28,000 subscribers. That's massive. I wasn't expecting this at all. You can see the graph here. I think this video will hit a million views. You can see it's still getting views.
Okay, so here's my report for the first 7 days. I gathered 717,338 views, which isn't bad at all for a start. And these views brought me 29,441 subscribers, which is encouraging. You know, week 2 turns on quite well as one of my shorts hits over 1.6 million views. I used the Tesa AI method, so I was able to upload nine videos. I uploaded two videos, which is one in the morning and the other in the evening. You can see the first video got over 57,000 views, which is a bit lower compared to the previous two videos. It brought in over 2,000 subscribers, which isn't bad. The second video changed everything. It has gathered over 1.6 million views, which is massive. I know it's going to happen because all my competitors are having such views, but it happened earlier than expected. And because of this video, I've been getting good views on the other videos as well. You can see it yourself.
All right, let's see if I was able to monetize the channel in the second week. I was able to upload nine videos this time. And these nine videos gathered 2,354,815 views, which is impressive. I got 73,571 subscribers for week 2, which is also good.
Now, for the entire month of April, I was able to upload 14 videos. And these videos have brought me 3,721,153 views. Although it's not enough for monetization, but it's encouraging. I just have to keep uploading more. I got 103,119 subscribers, which isn't new to me because short videos always get more subscribers. If you check here, you'll see I still have 7 million views to go, and it's possible if I can upload more videos. YouTube doesn't count watch hours for shorts. That's why you see zero here.
All right. So, the main question people will ask is if this channel will be monetized since I'm copying people's videos. From my own experience, I'll say yes because I already have a similar channel, but it's about restoration. I copy the videos from those sites and added a commentary. So, just go for it. You can start with the free method. Then, when you see the result, then you move to the paid plan. With Tesla AI, you can create more videos with their basic plan. Thanks for watching and see you in the next.