Why don't you do ads on your main channel? I know it's annoying for viewers, but it'll make you more money, and I'm pretty sure you get a lot of partnership and ad requests.
I don't want to do ads on my main channel, because even though I understand it'll make me money short-term — someone offered me $100,000 the other day for a dedicated integrated sponsorship video — I did the math on the trade-off. Taking one of those a year would boost my annual revenue by maybe 2-3%. The question is whether it would hurt new signups by more than that 2-3%, and I think it would, because people are less trusting of someone once they start seeing them do sponsorships and dedicated posts on a long-form channel like YouTube. So I'd rather not risk that trust hit for a relatively small revenue bump.
I’ve never started with sponsorship revenue; I went straight to my own product because the margins are much higher and it keeps everything congruent—you only promote things you truly care about, so there’s no credibility leakage. I later experimented with sponsors because they wanted me to pre‑record videos for them, which turned into free ad exposure and helped grow my audience. My recommendation is to make as much money as possible from your own product first, since it’s highly congruent and your core audience will value it. Once you’ve built a reasonable size—say a few million followers—you can start running ads for other platforms, as long as they align with your niche. That way you maximize earnings from your product before leveraging external sponsorships.
That's impressive—54K TikTok followers and 4–5M monthly views. Ad revenue at that level is likely a few thousand dollars per month, similar to what you'd get from 200K views on other platforms. To monetize, stay adjacent to your movie-editing niche: offer services or products that complement it, like teaching how to edit like you do, selling editing services, or creating a community around high-quality edits. Avoid unrelated offers like personal development, which would feel off‑brand. Instead, leverage the quality of your edits as the differentiator—give email subscribers or community members exclusive editing tutorials, tips, or access to your process. You could also highlight that the channel is AI‑driven, but be cautious as that might affect viewer perception. In short, sell what’s closely related to movie editing, not something completely different.
I’ve run paid Facebook ads for AI offers and seen a very high cost per acquisition—around $1,500 per lead—so the campaign isn’t profitable right now. I’m going to keep testing and optimizing the ads to bring the CAC down, but for now it’s not a recommended primary channel unless you can significantly improve targeting or offer.
No, I wouldn’t start a daily updates channel just for the sake of it. I do it now because my own work—running a scrappy AI automation business—is inherently interesting to watch; it’s like seeing a vlog of someone operating at a high profit level that few people achieve. For most people, watching them wouldn’t be interesting unless they’re already skilled at what they do. Running the channel takes extra time (20‑30 minutes daily) that could be spent elsewhere, but I keep it because the distribution and personal accountability it creates are valuable, and there’s a large potential payoff later as people see my consistent effort over months or years. That said, I appreciate when others start their own channels—like the one set up for me posting daily short Q&A clips—or when they share feedback, clipping content, or experimenting with formats (vertical videos, podcast clips). I’ve seen others, such as Marlon, launch similar channels and grow to around 100 subscribers. I’m open to tips, but I think the current approach is solid. I’m currently bottlenecked for taking calls, so I don’t see near‑term upside in spending time on them. Instead, I’d prefer an affiliate arrangement: if you join Maker School and create clips on channels like this, you can earn money when those clips drive sign‑ups, plus a flat CPM payment for views. This aligns incentives and creates a win‑win. I’ve already answered similar questions about the channel before, so I’ll keep it brief.