Faceless channel, month 7: 41k subs, $1,840 last month, full breakdown

Started this as an experiment to see whether a faceless channel could be run like a content site. Seven months in, here is everything.

The channel
Personal-finance explainers, 8–12 minutes, two uploads a week. Scripted by me, voiced by a VA with a decent microphone, edited by a second VA.

Month-by-month revenue
M1–M3: $0 (not monetised)
M4: $112
M5: $409
M6: $1,106
M7: $1,840 — $1,290 AdSense, $550 one affiliate deal

Costs
Voice VA $340/mo · editor $620/mo · stock + music $45/mo · my own time roughly 9 hours a week

So about $835 net in month 7, and that ignores my time entirely. At the hourly rate that is not good yet. The reason I am still doing it is the RPM — $11.40 in this niche against $3 on the general-interest channel I tried first. Niche selection was worth more than every optimisation combined.

What I got wrong
The first eleven videos were 4 minutes long because I had read that short videos retain better. They retained fine and earned nothing — not enough mid-roll inventory. Going to 8+ minutes roughly tripled RPM with no measurable retention cost.

Happy to answer anything.

The RPM-by-niche point deserves its own thread. People spend months shaving two seconds off an intro when the niche choice was a 4x lever they made on day one in ten minutes.

Same lesson as content sites. Insurance and finance pages print money with mediocre content, and recipe sites with brilliant content earn pennies per thousand.

How did you find a voice VA who did not sound like a text-to-speech robot? That is the part I keep stalling on.

Auditioned nine people with a paid 90-second test script. Two were good. It cost me about $120 total to find out, which is nothing against seven months of output.

Paid test scripts are the only sane way to hire for anything creative. Portfolios are curated, a test is not.

Net $835 for 9 hours a week on an asset that compounds is a fine month 7. The job is not to beat your hourly rate in month 7, it is to still be publishing in month 24.