I wanted to know what running a YouTube channel actually takes. Reading about it felt like cheating, so I ran one for five weeks.
Watch 2 Min AI on YouTube →The channel is still live, frozen exactly where the experiment ended.- Jul 8 - Aug 11, 2023
- All of it - brand, mascot, the cuts, edits, uploads
- 19 shorts, 11,570 views, a working feel for the algorithm
The premise: AI wisdom, distilled to two minutes. A chat-bubble robot mascot, a channel system, and a posting schedule I had to actually keep. The content was the vehicle; the experiment was the machine around it - what the algorithm rewards, what editing costs, what the work really is once you are the one doing it.
First lesson, immediately: a two-minute video is not two minutes of work. I never wrote a script. Every short started as long-form content that I cut down to its sharpest two minutes - finding the moment, the edit, the captions, the title that could survive the feed. Nineteen times in thirty-five days.
What the algorithm taught me
Distribution is spiky, not fair. Four of the nineteen shorts took off - 1.7k to 2.3k views each. The other fifteen sat between 25 and 900, same format, same effort. And reach is not an audience: 11,570 views converted to exactly 30 subscribers. The feed rents you attention. It never hands you the relationship.
The channel today, frozen where the experiment ended: 19 shorts, still collecting the occasional view.
Nineteen videos in, I had what I came for: a feel for the machine no article had given me, and real respect for anyone who feeds it weekly. The channel stays up as the receipt.
still live. i check on it like a tamagotchi.