Case Study: $30,500 Plus per Month Reading Reddit Posts

by Jonathan Jenkins · September 4, 2024

This one seems almost too easy to be true, and yet here we are.

If you’ve spent any time on Reddit, you’ve most likely run across one or more “AITA” posts, which stands for, “Am I The A***OLE?”

These are posts made by people who describe a situation of theirs in which someone is accusing them of being the a***ole. They state their case, and then Redditors weigh in with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and explain their reasoning.

I found a guy who is using these Reddit AITA posts to make as much as $30,500 every single month. All this person is doing is turning these posts into videos, loading them onto YouTube and partnering in YouTube’s advertising revenue program.

If you want to try something like this yourself, you don’t need to go on camera to do it. In fact, you don’t even need to use your own voice if you don’t want to, thanks to voice artists or AI.

The YouTube channel is called ‘Am I the Jerk?’ This person goes on Reddit.com and finds interesting and entertaining posts. He then reads them aloud while playing video footage of a video game.

He is just one of several people doing this and you can do it, too.

To give you an idea of what these videos are like, here’s the latest one as of this writing: Karen INTENTIONALLY scares off BUYERS to STOP ME from SELLING MY CONDO.. so now I’M GONNA SUE HER

The video begins with…

“My entitled neighbor is scaring off buyers who are trying to buy my condo, constantly making snide remarks as well as potentially racist ones to anybody that she doesn’t like. Things are so bad that I’m now considering going through legal action just to try and get this lady to leave me alone so that I can finally sell this condo. Because right now I am completely at a loss and I seriously don’t know what to do. Here’s what happened…”

This copy is verbatim from a Reddit post, and the visual aspect of the video has nothing to do with the audio, which is an AI text-to-voice reading the Reddit post. You could certainly improve upon this by making the video at least somewhat match the text.

This channel has 1.22million subscribers, with videos reaching as many as 10 million views.

Assuming they’re getting paid from YouTube, we can look at the typical CPM (cost per thousand) and do some calculations.

Typically for every thousand video views, they get paid approximately $10. For the video with 10 million views, that would mean they’ve so far made $100,000 for that one video.

If you go to socialblade.com and plug in @AmItheJerk, you’ll see the estimated annual earnings are $22.9K to $366K.

This channel was started in 2021 and has 4,185 uploads, which sounds like a crazy amount until you realize how easy it is to make these videos. Copy and paste the text into AI speech to text, add completely unrelated video footage and that’s it. It will likely take you longer to read through the text on Reddit to be sure you want to use it than it will be to make the actual video from that text.

This channel also has “Am I The Genius?” videos which use Reddit posts where someone asks a question and then experts weigh in with the answer. For example, “Historians, What is the Strangest Chain of Events You Have Studied?”

And this channel isn’t alone. When you search you can find other YouTubers doing something similar.

To do this yourself you’re going begin by locating social media posts. While you could go places other than Reddit to find these posts, I’d highly recommend you begin on Reddit because of the sheer volume and variety of content here.

You can do this in any niche market. Reddit is filled with thousands of ‘subreddits’ on any topic imaginable. And I mean any topic. And if by some miracle you find a topic not covered, you can start your own subreddit.

Just to illustrate the wild, strange and sometimes bizarre variety of subreddits (in addition to the thousands of ‘normal’ ones), here are a few of the odder ones I’ve encountered:

r/EnlightenedBirdmen – a subreddit about a fictional war of birds vs humans
r/ZombieSurvivalTactics – various tips and strategies for how to survive a zombie apocalypse.
r/CarpetsforAirports – a subreddit for people that like airport carpets (I’m not making this up)
r/MyEvilPlan – people discuss their evil schemes of revenge or pranks and get constructive feedback and advice.
r/PointlessStories – stories from people who haven’t done or seen anything interesting to talk about.
r/FifthWorldProblems – dedicated to the hypothetical problems experienced in a world that exists outside of normal reality, sometimes with hilarious results.
r/BreadStapledToTrees – pictures of bread stapled to trees (Yes, this is a real subreddit. No, I have no idea why this is a thing.)
r/DarkStockPhotos – as its name implies, it’s a bunch of dark, creepy stock photos.
r/ChairsUnderwater – just as you imagine, this is pictures of chairs under water.

To give you a head start on where to find material for your videos, you might want to check out these subreddits featuring stories:

r/relationships and r/relationship_advice – adorable romantic anecdotes, complicated family ties and even dangerous liaisons.
r/AmItheAsshole – a redditor recounts a situation they’re in and everyone else decides if that person is being a jerk.
r/confessions and r/confession – confessions ranging from silly and sweet to horribly dark.
r/tifu – “today I fu**ed up” is filled with stories of immediate panic alongside stories of regret and even a few lighthearted tales.
r/legaladvice – people telling stories of things going sideways or far worse and looking for legal pointers. (This subreddit is for informational purposes only and is not intended to constitute actual legal advice.)
r/JUSTNOMIL – “Just No, Mother-in-Law” is a subreddit for people dealing with difficult mothers, mothers-in-law, and other maternal figures, with tales ranging from bizarre to tragic. There’s a whole network of similar subreddits.
r/TalesFromTechSupport and r/TalesFromRetail – packed with stories of difficult customers, often featuring their satisfying comeuppance, as well as tales of regret and victories.
r/IDontWorkHereLady – tales of innocent bystanders accosted by aggressive customers who mistake them for employees.
r/LetsNotMeet and r/creepyencounters – tales of frightening places populated by dangerous or simply strange people.

Whatever your niche might be – entrepreneurship, gaming, gardening, pets, etc. – there are subreddits for you to discover.

You can sort the posts on subreddits by how hot or new they are to find the best posts for your purposes.

It’s important to choose a subject and stick with it, rather than jumping around from entrepreneur posts to gaming to ‘am I the jerk’ type of posts. As with anything else, choose your niche and target audience and then stay focused on that niche.

To convert the text-to-speech, you can read and record it yourself, or use a text to speech tool such as one of these:

Amazon Polly – A cloud-based service that uses advanced deep learning technologies to synthesize speech.
Balabolka – A free, downloadable app for Windows that supports multiple file formats and voices.
Capti Voice – Aimed at improving accessibility, it supports a wide range of file formats and offers educational tools.
Eleven Labs – High quality free text to speech online. Use AI text to speech to create realistic AI voices for games, videos, podcasts, and more for free.
Google Text-to-Speech – Available on Android devices, this tool integrates seamlessly with various apps and services.
IBM Watson Text to Speech – A robust, AI-powered service providing natural-sounding voices and multiple customization options.
iSpeech – Provides a variety of voices and languages, suitable for both personal and professional use.
Microsoft Azure Text-to-Speech – Part of the Azure Cognitive Services suite, offering high-quality voices and extensive language support.
NaturalReader – A versatile text-to-speech tool offering both online and offline capabilities, with a range of natural-sounding voices.
TTSReader – A free, browser-based tool that supports various languages and offers simple, straightforward functionality.
Voice Dream Reader – An iOS app designed for reading and accessibility, featuring customizable voices and settings.

Copy and paste your text into your app and it does the work for you, often with a wide choice of voices including custom voices.

Seriously, there are so many text-to-voice tools out there, you’ll want to try a few to find the one that works best for you.

You’ll find the text often needs a little cleaning up before you paste it in. Look for typos as well as anything that doesn’t clearly communicate the intention of the writer.

As you create these videos you may want to find one voice you particularly like and use that voice throughout all of your videos for consistency.

When your audio is finished it’s time to make your video. Just like text-to-voice generators, there are a ton of video tools you can use. To keep things simple, let’s just talk about one – Lumen5.

With Lumen5 you’re letting AI do most of the work for you, meaning you spend less time creating videos and more time doing whatever else you want to do, including making even more videos.

Remember in our example of YouTube’s ‘Am I the Jerk?’ channel, they’ve got 4,185 videos uploaded. That is a LOT and if it weren’t for automation they never would have been able to create a tenth of those videos.

That said, quality is in my opinion MUCH more important than quantity. But with Lumen 5 or a similar program, you’re going to create videos people enjoy listening to AND watching.

Just an aside, Lumen 5 now does text-to-voice as well, so you could use Lumen 5 for everything if you like their voices.

Lumen 5 will use footage and stills that correlate with what is being said, and it will make those visuals flow as though you spent hours putting it all together.

When your video is made you can preview it and even add captions that show over the top of the video. And you can do editing and polishing until you get it just right.

And remember, YouTube is simply one option of many. You can upload your videos to Instagram, TikTok, your site and any place you choose, depending on your targeted demographics and goals for the video.

The key here is going to be consistency. You’ll need to create numerous videos to figure out what works at getting the traction and views.

Don’t upload just a few of these and then say it doesn’t work. Figure to be in it for the long haul, creating at least a couple of videos per day and tweaking as you go.

When you find a certain kind of video or a particular topic gets a little more traffic, then post more of that. Consistency and persistence will build your audience, but it takes time.

Do all the little things to make your channel work, such as making your thumbnails consistent and eye-catching, using great titles, asking for the like and the subscription and so forth.

No one starts with a million subscribers, but by being consistent and learning what works, you can build your channel into something hugely profitable over time by investing just an hour or two per day.

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