Rebuilding twenty YouTube channels — starting from what didn't work
Between late 2024 and early 2025 we launched twenty faceless YouTube channels — future cars, true history, survival skills, personal finance, fitness stories and more. Each channel got a one-paragraph prompt, an automation, and hundreds of Shorts.
It mostly didn't work. In early 2026 the uploads stopped. This post is the honest starting point for rebuilding them.
The baseline (24 October 2026)
| Channel | Subscribers | Median views per Short |
|---|---|---|
| Auto Future Now | 1,390 | 162 |
| That Really Happened | 221 | 598 |
| UltraGamingNess | 61 | 113 |
| Survival Tactics | 43 | 98 |
| Global Bites | 19 | 69 |
Most of the other fifteen channels sit below 50 subscribers and a median of 20–60 views per Short. Every channel has 200 or more Shorts. Volume was never the problem.
What we think went wrong
- Generic prompts, no research. Each channel ran on one broad prompt ("fascinating facts", "future car technology"). Nobody studied what was actually working in that niche.
- No real hook. Many Shorts opened with an atmosphere sentence instead of a concrete promise in the first two seconds.
- No feedback loop. Nothing measured which titles, topics or formats performed, so nothing improved.
What we are doing now
- Reverse-engineer what works. For every niche we look at channels that are breaking out right now — especially small channels with outsized hits — and write down why: topic choice, title formula, thumbnail, opening line, length, rhythm.
- Analyse our own history. 200+ Shorts per channel is a lot of data on what doesn't work.
- New strategy, hooks and scripts per channel, based on those findings.
- Produce and review. Three pilot channels — That Really Happened, Auto Future Now and Survival Tactics — get new videos first. A person approves every upload.
We will post here as results come in, including the experiments that fail.