I Tested Daily Posting to a Faceless Cat YouTube Channel During 36 Days in the Hopes of Going Viral and Living off Google AdSense Earnings
An experiment
Late at night, cute cats, dogs, and sloths invade my social media feeds. And I can’t help but click on them.
Some clicks lead to pet-themed YouTube channels. Autoplay leads me through several poorly filmed clips of pets being pets. I look at the view and subscriber count and shake my head. With each purr, my thoughts drift further off into the distance. “Such banal content, yet these creators are making crazy good money, and it barely took them any effort.”
Let’s see what my homepage wants me to watch today:
Another short video with 31 million views.
I click on the channel. It was set up in 2012. The “About” page garnered 32 million views to date. Currently, they only have 9 videos publicly displayed. Although their last upload was nearly two years ago, they still have a solid subscriber count of nearly 45K.
What I’m interested in: What are they earning?
I put their channel name in Social Blade’s Estimated YouTube Money Calculator. With those 9 videos uploaded years ago, they still make anything between $500 to $8000 per year. While they sleep.
Earlier, I came across similar clips on a different cat channel named “meow meow.” The theme: a cat lady petting street kitties. Subscriber count: 539K. Number of videos: 879. Mostly of cats politely asking to be petted.
And it got me thinking. “What if that would work for us? What if we’d post a bunch of random videos, have them found by the algorithm, and be rewarded with Google Adsense money?”
There’s only one way to find out.
How we tested a faceless Cat Channel for 36 days
The steps were simple:
- Find someone with cats
- Collect footage (lots of short clips)
- Set up a branded YouTube channel
- Upload and schedule all clips in one-day intervals to be published at the same time
- Go through results, determine if continuation of the experiment is feasible
To set up a cat channel, we’re going to need cat footage. Original footage only, in mediocre quality. That’s how the people seem to like it. As if they shot the footage themselves.
One of my friends has two cats. Each time I pay them a visit, I make cute pictures and videos. Over the years, I’ve collected plenty of materials. So have they. That means steps 1 and 2 were covered right from the start. I set up the channel. Then, I tried scheduling all clips in one long sitting. I had to spread it out over 2+ days because, apparently, YouTube caps the number of daily uploads.
How I tried to work efficiently
To work as efficiently as possible, I batched similar tasks together:
- Selecting short clips for increased viewer digestibility (and prioritizing short clips to reduce upload and wait time)
- Keeping video editing to an absolute minimum (eg. only to slice longer clips into several shorter ones or to add background music)
- Selecting and archiving clips I want to use in a separate folder. This way, I just took one pre-selected clip, uploaded it, repeat, without thinking about what’s next
Total time spent
I spent a little over 4 hours on the experiment: cutting clips, adding audio, exporting and uploading, writing titles, writing a few lines in the description, and scheduling videos for the next open slot.
The results
We posted 36 consecutive videos, of which 15 were “normal”-sized videos, and the remaining 21 were Shorts. The top 10 performers were all Shorts. 8/10 of the worst-performing videos were normal-sized ones.
The top-performing videos have quirky titles that makes you assume the content is funny or odd and evoke an urge to click:
- 3 titles have a word with a negative connotation in it that makes you think, “What the?”
- One title is yet another cat asking politely to be petted
- One title used a word incorrectly, resulting in engagement in the comment section, thus bumping up the video in the algorithm
- One title ascribes behavior to cats that humans do, but cats don’t
- One title shows a cat being discontent with life
- And one exploits the title of a very popular song
We repeated the “cat politely asking for pats” title, but the second round didn’t garner equal or similar results (745 views for the top performer vs. 2 views for the not-so-well-performing video)
The majority of views came from the US. Not that that matters for a cat channel. The age range varied, but most are millennials. Cats are for anyone and everyone, after all. Gender-wise, we saw a 55–45 female to male ratio.
Going through the stats, we noticed the algorithm bumps seem gradual. And right before and after the bump, you get to ride along with the wave. At least until it dies off again.
The channel’s average view time is 14 seconds. Our current content can therefore be categorized as “pure entertainment,” “micro-break,” or “low attention span” content. It plays a role that YouTube is pushing shorts. If you don’t mind this format and you have a channel you want to grow, you could bump up your stats faster with Shorts than with “normal” sized videos.
On the other hand, if your content is of good quality, people will consume it, and YouTube will reward you, regardless of the format. I am aware of this.
Conclusion
The primary goal of this experiment was to, first of all, conduct it. Therein, we succeeded. We uploaded and scheduled 36 days of original cat content.
Based on the data, we learned that YouTube Shorts can help you garner views and get your stats up faster than regular-size videos. Extra points if you use a quirky title that entertains or pisses people off.
To apply to the YouTube Partner Program, you need 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. Did we go viral and move our company base to the Bahamas? No. In 36 days, we went:
- From 0 to 22 subscribers, which is 2.19% of the 1,000 subscriber goal
- From 0 hours of watch time to 42 total watch time, which is 1.05% of the 4,000 valid public watch hours goal
Was this experiment worth pursuing? I’d say so. We were curious. With “what ifs,” I prefer to not leave any stones unturned.
What about extending the experiment duration to a full year instead of “just” one month? We’ve considered this. My friend and I have our other ongoing projects that are much more important than this cute but random cat channel. Although the current stats were collected with an investment of “just” 4 hours, that is still 4 hours taken from a priority project. For this reason, we’re leaving the cat channel as it is, for now, and maybe return to it at a later point in time.
If so, you can expect a report of our findings here on the blog.
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