🤖 Did AI Narration KILL Our YouTube Channel!? 🪦

Oct 11 in General

Tl;dr: AI narration probably doomed this new channel of ours, but only a re-launch will tell 💀

If you've ever considered using AI narration for your videos, you'll want to keep reading — MAKE SURE YOU READ ALL OF THIS.

We're not going to talk about OUR thoughts on AI here, but instead want to talk about something we're unsure has EVER been done on YouTube before. An AI experiment that will give everyone an insight into whether AI narration affects the overall performance of your YouTube channel...

We get asked all the time about AI, but the most common question we get and see being asked in the YouTube community is this:

"Does AI narration work as well as a real human narrator?"

AI narration has become incredibly popular on YouTube over the last year or so for many reasons. It's incredibly time-efficient to use for your videos, and you spend a fraction of the cost instead of hiring a professional narrator or a fraction of the time, not needing to narrate yourself..

You don't need a microphone; you don't need an interface; you don't need to spend hours in post editing out mistakes; you don't need editing software, the list goes on.

BUT at what cost is this to your videos? Well, we're about to find out...

We spend upwards of $10,000+ EVERY month on human narrator fees. This could be cut to less than $1,000 if we switched to AI; we’re not going to, A: because we have an amazing team and wouldn't do that to them, and B: we've always wondered if it would harm the channels and our business.

Naturally, we've tested AI narration over the last year with brand new channels, and in this post, we wanted to talk about ONE particular channel we started and how it led to this eyebrow-raising experiment.

We started this specific channel in March 2024, and it is a channel that ticks all the boxes based on our extensive YouTube experience to become a hugely successful channel.

After uploading weekly, with well-researched scripts, killer titles and thumbnails, and A* video editing, the channel grew slowly and inconsistently, which is unusual for us.

There was seemingly no reason why this channel didn't grow, as we thought we'd be adding another 100,000+ subscriber channel to our belt by the end of 2024. 📈

Without sounding big-headed, we've been creating YouTube channels full-time for 10+ years; we know what the f**k we're doing.

So it WASN'T the titles, it WASN'T the thumbnails, it WASN'T the video editing, it WASN'T the script, it WASN'T the topics, it WASN'T the channel niche, so what does that leave us with?

The narration.

More specifically, the AI narration... 🤖

We stopped the channel in July 2024 because the analytics, the comments, and our gut feeling told us it just wasn't going to work.

But this is where the exciting experiment comes in...

We're re-launching the channel this month with EVERYTHING the same, except for the narration, which a real human will now do.

It will be a complete copy of the original channel minus the AI aspect.

If this channel grows as we initially thought it would, we will have an interesting answer to the question we and many others have asked…

“Does AI narration affect the overall growth of a channel”?

Stay tuned for updates... 🔔

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