Our YouTube channel started in July and now has 14 videos, while we did 100k and 8k hours of watch time. Not huge, but enough to learn from. For this end of year review I wanted to get into what we put into our best performing videos and why they led the pack. There were a few surprises.
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3. This is How AI Could End Humanity
This was our 3rd video on the channel. Our first 2 - our ChatGPT tutorial and em—dash got about 600 views between them in their first 2 weeks.
We always wanted to do something about AI and existential risk - and I had learned a lot about this somewhat bleak, but hugely interesting, topic over the year.
I spent a long time on the scripting and edit - maybe 6 days in total, but when you get a demonstrable ‘hit’ on a new channel it all kind of feels worth it.
Annoyingly when I posted it there was an editing error about 2/3rds through and I felt compelled to remove it. By that point, it had 100 views in under 12 hours, which was good. The re-edit moved much slower, but after about 4 days it started ballooning.
The video pretty much rolled on for four weeks until it hit exactly 10,000 views - then it just died. Kind of annoying, given it’s pretty evergreen. Still, given it was video 3, you’d have to say it was a success.
2. How to Make the Perfect Avatar Video Using HeyGen and Eleven Labs
Over the course of the six months I’ve been wondering what the channel really stands for. Is it tutorials? Explainers? Something more like documentary?
I’ve got to say producing video tutorials doesn’t fill me with a great deal of joy. I think it’s much more of a multitasking skill than my normal scripted approach, and you’re best off using an Elgato Stream Deck with OBS, or specific software to pull it off.
But I have a lot of experience creating avatars and combined with the lighting and automation I learned in 2025, it all merged into a pretty neat video about How to Make the Perfect Avatar Video Using HeyGen and Eleven Labs.
It started relatively slowly and I had no real expectations - because our ChatGPT and Midjourney tutorials had pretty low numbers. But after a few weeks it just kept rising, and rising, and rising. It hasn’t stopped picking up views since early September.
Indeed, it’s one of only two videos that have had any real traction after the first couple of weeks after being first broadcast.
It’s also comparatively short, at 16 minutes, but has ended up being the most viewed video on the channel and the best monetised. While the monetisation is pretty modest right now, there’s a potential of the video paying for itself in 2026, which is a nice little win.
1. The Intelligence Explosion is Coming
I started writing this one just after This is How AI Could End Humanity started taking off as it has many of the same themes, and I thought more of the same could help the channel lift off.
But through the summer there were loads of other things to produce that I didn’t feel I should just abandon so it went on hiatus for a while.
I’m not great at coming back to stuff to develop it, and the rest of the script was written in late September. I remember thinking at the time, if I can’t get to 4,000 hours of watch time (the monetisation threshold) by the end of the year, I should stop. But I felt pretty confident with this video, particularly in the edit - which was by far the best I’d done.
It took about 18 hours before it really changed off our average trajectory. It really started racking up the views and I thought, this could be a serious lift off. It reached about 10,000 within 48 hours, but much like This is How AI Could End Humanity it trailed off massively once it reached this threshold. Most of the rest of its gains came through paid promotion tests I ran in October.
But this video was extremely satisfying.
What’s in store for 2026? There’s a fair bit of experimentation to run in terms of subject matter for the next 10 planned videos - but it’s clear the macro themes are doing better for us. They’re also by far the most interesting to produce. So more of this!
Make sure you check out the channel at Absolutely Agentic.
