The weirdest part of running YouTube Shorts channels is how lonely it is.
You're sitting in your room editing videos that thousands of people might see tomorrow, but right now nobody knows you're doing it. Your friends think you're wasting time. Your family doesn't get it. Your group chat is talking about the new season of some show and you're studying retention graphs at 1am.
You can't really explain it to people who haven't done it. The frustration of a flop. The dopamine of a video taking off overnight. The strange feeling of watching strangers in countries you've never been to watch something you made in your bedroom.
For a while it feels like you're playing a game nobody else can see.
Then one day a video hits. Then another. Then the AdSense starts coming in and you realize the loneliness was the price of admission. Everyone who actually made it through this part is on the other side now, and you finally have people who get it.
The early days feel isolating because they are. Most people don't have the stomach for the version of you that hasn't won yet.
Keep editing. Keep posting. Keep showing up to the empty room.
The room fills up later.
Everyone is talking about YouTube's AI disclosure requirements and ElevenLabs joining SynthID.
Nobody bothered to read the actual policy (link below)
AI-generated scripts and production assistance do NOT require disclosure. Only photorealistic, meaningfully altered content does.
PHOTOrealistic.
That's it, get back to work.
Weβre making AI disclosures simpler for creators and clearer for viewers. Here's what's coming:
π·οΈ Labels for realistic AI-generated content will appear on the video player for both long-form videos and on Shorts.
π Weβre introducing automatic AI detection to help creators label their AI content more accurately.
πͺͺ Plus, over the next few weeks, weβre giving all channels 18+ access to our likeness detection technology to help spot AI deepfakes. It doesn't matter how many subscribers you have, if you're monetizing or if you havenβt posted a video yet β everyone gets it.
My channel Box Head hit 400K subscribers and 40M views in 1 year.
I was making almost $10,000+ per video with a full team of artists, editors, scriptwriters, and thumbnail designers.
Now AI can create an entire video 10x faster than my old team for < $100.