The Levels of a Faceless YouTube Channel: $1K to $1M a Month

A faceless YouTube channel has a different bottleneck at every income level. At $1K a month it's usually one lucky viral video in a niche with a low ceiling, at $3K it's doing everything yourself, at $10K it's the team, at $30K it's running multiple production teams on a 100,000 view floor, at $50K it's brand and formats, and from $100K up the baseline is a million views per video. The most I've made in one month off my YouTube channels is $70,000, so everything past that point is the pattern I see in bigger channels.

The Eight Levels at a Glance

I'm going to walk the whole ladder, from the channel making its first $1,000 a month to the ones making $1 million a month.

So I can talk from experience up to that point. After that it's theory, from patterns I see in bigger channels.

$1K a Month: One Viral Video and a Niche With a Low Ceiling

At $1K a month, usually one video has gone viral and there's no repeatable system. It's almost like they got kind of lucky. If somebody is stuck here, either they don't know how to make another viral video, or they picked a niche that is very limited.

A stoic philosophy channel is the example I use. It looks like a great niche because the videos look easy to make (quotes from philosophers, text on screen). But it's so hard to find channels making $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 or $50,000 a month with that format. So people get capped.

This is why I always recommend that complete beginners build at least a $10,000 a month channel, or a $30K a month channel, on day one. It takes the same amount of work as a $1K a month channel. The only difference is that when you do figure it out, you have a higher income potential. If you're still choosing, read how to pick a faceless YouTube niche.

There's sometimes a belief system problem here too. People build channels without a high ceiling because they don't believe they can make that much money. The people I see who don't struggle with this are high earners.

I have one client making, I think, $9,000 to $10,000 a month off his channel within the first few months of working with us, and he's annoyed about it, because his corporate career pays $20,000 a month. A lot of other people would be head over heels.

$3K a Month: The DIY Trap

I see this with people who try to do everything themselves. They're doing the scripts, the voiceovers and the editing themselves (or with AI).

But because they do everything, they can only put out two videos a month, maybe four. A lot of times they have a day job, so the channel is nice side income and not the full-time thing.

This is why I'm such a huge advocate of hiring on day one. The order I'd go in:

1. Editing. If you can put $500 a month into your production, hire at least the editing at the beginning.
2. Voiceover. Add it next.
3. Thumbnails. You could do these yourself with a tool like 1of10 or Canva and some AI. I would probably hire them out for fairly cheap.
4. Scripts. Eventually I'd definitely hire these out, because they become a huge bottleneck. People put too much time into writing scripts and never break through.

Sometimes the ideas are the problem. They got one video to 10,000 views, and they keep trying to recreate it over and over.

To be quite frank, this level requires you to burn the boats and go all in. On hiring, here's how I hire YouTube editors.

The Views Math, and Why You Need Moonshot Videos

Here's the math I drew out in the video. It isn't exact. RPM is how much you get paid per thousand views.

200,000 views a month seems like a good amount, but it isn't enough to break through. 500,000 usually means one decent viral video every month.

At 1 to 2 million views a month, you have a much higher floor. Either you get one pretty viral video every month (500,000 views or more), or you have a consistent floor of around 50,000 views per video and you put up ten of those a month.

You don't get from the first row to the third by recreating your 10,000 view video. You need to take moonshots.

You have to think, how do I make a video that gets 100,000 views, or a million. Say you make 10 moonshot videos. If one of those goes viral, a lot of times that one video is enough to get you to $10K a month.

$10K a Month: The Team Is the Bottleneck

A $10K a month channel usually has a solid niche with a good size audience, and it's pretty much fully outsourced. Now the bigger issue I see is that the talent isn't that good.

We have many clients at this level where it's a team issue. They're trying to pay $100 to $200 per video, in a very frugal mindset, with production under $2K a month.

I would start thinking, how do I spend $3,000 to $5,000 a month on production so I can get to $30K a month. More money doesn't always equal a better person. Be intentional about hiring better scriptwriters, video editors and voice actors.

Once you're here you can diagnose which issue you have:

• Volume. You're not making enough videos.
• Quality. The videos could be higher quality.
• Length. The videos could be longer. Video length is what really impacts RPM, and a lot of channels here are at 10 to 20 minutes. (More in how to increase your YouTube RPM.)
• Ideas. You need better ideas.

Fixing one of these is what sends you to the next level.

The mindset shifts here too. $1K to $3K a month is employee mindset. $10K is the slight transition. $30K a month is when you actually turn this into a business.

$30K a Month: A 100K View Floor and Multiple Production Teams

A mentor gave me an analogy for getting to $30K or $50K a month. You're stuck on an island with a treasure map. But you don't know if the next step on the map leads to the treasure or to the next map.

So you fix a bottleneck (increase the quality, hire a better team), and it leads you to another point on the map. Some people have one stop before the X. Some have seven. You patch the next logical bottleneck and keep going.

By $30K a month you're getting 100,000 views on almost every single video. That becomes your floor.

You also have multiple people for each step of production. I'll usually have an A team, a B team and a C team.

There are a few reasons:

1. Something can happen to somebody on your team. Someone goes on holiday or gets sick, and no videos go up.
2. Every editor has a limit on output. One can make a video a week. Another makes one every three weeks. I've tried a lot of things to speed that up, and each editor still has their own pace.
3. Different editors give you different quality to test. The guy who takes three weeks is annoying. But whenever he makes a video, it has something like a 40% chance of getting 500,000 views.

With multiple editors you get about 11 videos out a month on average instead of four.

This is also when you start thinking about a channel manager. Ideas, hiring, managing production, uploading and scheduling become a full-time job.

You can pay a manager a good base with a bonus structure, or a pure profit split or revenue share. You could probably run it yourself in 10 to 20 hours a week, but if you want multiple channels you're going to need this role. My full process at this level is in how to make $30K a month with a faceless YouTube channel.

$50K a Month: Brand, Returning Viewers and an Idea Machine

This is where it starts to get fun. Now you're thinking about brand, and by brand I mean how do you get a repeat audience.

On my geography channel we'll make a video about West Virginia and then a video about Florida. The odds that somebody watches both are pretty slim. Each video is almost for a different person, so we're hunting down new viewers all the time.

So you start thinking about content series that go hand in hand. This is why news style content performs a lot better. Each video is for a similar type of person, and they can watch 10 of them to keep up to date. A history channel does well for the same reason.

The other issue at $50K a month is ideas.

A format is a video type you do over and over (how Elon Musk spends his billions, then Jeff Bezos, then Michael Jordan). At $10K a month you have one format. At $30K you need about three, with one dominant one (ours was geography facts). At $50K you need at least five that are really working.

I see channels make $50K or $100K a month for a month or two and then fall off, because they had one format, burned through it, and there were no more videos to make.

The formats change here too. Each video becomes a one-off, custom-made piece with its own research, so you almost need a research team. For my geography channel, the move toward $100K a month is a bigger audience, which means becoming a geopolitical channel and not only a geography facts channel.

On spend, you can comfortably put $8K a month into production, maybe $8K to $12K, and that's the conservative side. If you really want to scale, I'm now starting to push $15K to $20K a month. That feels scary, because all it takes is a slow month to drop back to $20K or $30K.

On output, I see some channels make $100K a month with four really high quality videos a month. More realistically, it's three high quality videos every week.

$100K a Month: A Million Views Per Video

From here on I'm still learning, so this is theory and pattern recognition.

There are not that many channels doing $100K a month. Making more than that is extremely challenging.

The luxury of a branded channel at this level is that it can make $100K a month for years, and private equity firms buy channels like that. You can probably sell the business for $3 to $5 million on the conservative side. That's the play I'm working toward.

What I see here is a solid team that puts out bangers every time. The baseline is a million views per video, on at least five videos a month. They do the basics really well:

• Really good hooks. This is down pat.
• The opening delivers on the thumbnail. You show what's in the thumbnail and deliver on the idea strongly.
• Big ideas worth a million plus views. Every video has to be a million view video.

The examples I point to are Fern, RealLifeLore and Kurzgesagt. RealLifeLore is a geopolitical channel, and my guess is they're sitting around $100,000 a month. Kurzgesagt is an animated explainer channel from Germany. They have strong branding and repeatable themes, but each video feels like a bespoke piece of content, close to Netflix level production.

Channels come and go from this level.

$300K to $1M a Month: A Completely Different Beast

$300K a month is more like the Infographics Show. They put out a pretty quality animated video sometimes three or four times a day. The only way they could possibly do that is a production team of 30 to 40 people or more. Channels in the $300K to $500K range probably have $50K to $80K a month in payroll.

$1 million a month is going to be the Veritasiums (Veritasium is not a faceless channel). An older, extreme example is Cocomelon. Here's what I see at this tier:

• They're typically owned by private equity, or they have investment behind them.
• They have multiple six figures in payroll.
• The brand is on multiple platforms, moving toward History Channel and Discovery Channel style content.
• Every single video hits around 10 million views.
• I bet each video costs $50K or more (not always).

The only way you get 10 million view videos is you're really good at entertaining the YouTube audience. It's still kind of a mystery to me.

Video Chapters

• 0:00The levels, and the most I've made in a month
• 0:32$1K a month: one viral video, limited niche
• 3:37$3K a month: the DIY trap
• 5:43Moonshot videos
• 7:17$10K a month and the views math
• 10:55Volume, quality or length: find your bottleneck
• 11:55$30K a month: it becomes a business
• 12:57The treasure map analogy
• 14:30The 100K view floor and multiple production teams
• 18:03When to hire a channel manager
• 19:36$50K a month: brand and returning viewers
• 22:09The idea machine: five formats and a research team
• 26:17$100K a month: a million views per video
• 30:26$300K to $1M a month

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