This blog post on YouTubers was written by AI – learn more about AI blogging for your business.

YouTube is a popular platform that everybody should be on. With over 35 billion monthly views, it’s second only to sister site Google as the most visited websites on the entire planet, according to Similarweb.

And the idea of success on YouTube is relative – you only need 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of watch time to begin monetizing at least $100/month for your work through the YouTube Partner Program and Google Adsense.

Of course, that’s easier said than done, and you’ll work for a year or more to get those numbers. And it takes great visual content to reach people. I mean, you’re competing with people and production studios with 4K cameras and infinite budgets.

Just look at the tools people like Justine Ezarik and Linus Sebastian have at their disposal.https://youtu.be/pIs77g86WhA

It’s hard to compete for people’s attention against these kind of visuals. Then you have people like Daniel Hardcastledoing special effects you’ll never pull off without years of training.

He teamed with Rusty Cage to create one of my favorite videos on one of the most visually appealing channels in Nerd City. It’s a must-watch channel to learn more about YouTube’s visual culture.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ll8zGaWhofU

But there are plenty of YouTubers who figured out slick ways around this so they don’t have to show their faces.

And there’s an entire gaming culture around motion-tracking animation that’s taking all this to a whole other level.

Let’s start with the relatively easiest ways to go about it:

Honest Trailers

Honest Trailers is a YouTube series from the Screen Junkies channel featuring parodies of various movie trailers and TV series from Hollywood.

They satirize every major movie trailer that comes out by muting the voices in the trailer and dubbing over with their own choices of words to lampoon the movie.

Jon Bailey does the voice-over work, and it’s his ability to perfectly time the characters’ mouths to make them say whatever story he wants.

It takes a lot of work on the writing end, but on the visual end, they’re harvesting theatrical-quality video from Hollywood’s biggest studios to make this channel work without showing their own faces.

Now obviously parody provisions in copyright law allows this, and studios generally are ok with it because it does encourage people to watch the films. 

It becomes a two-way promotion in which Hollywood is inadvertently promoting the channel while the channel promotes Hollywood. And this is just the start of the secondary industry around mainstream footage.

WatchMojo

WatchMojo also takes advantage of heavily produced Hollywood (and Bollywood, Dollywood, and others) footage to keep themselves off camera.

The team created their own visuals for the countdown, and they’ll show quick enough clips to stay within copyright laws.

Each video features more Hollywood video than audio, only letting sound play to emphasize a point in the narration (must often done by Rebecca Brayton).

Building out top 10 listicles of things people already search for is a common method of gaining clicks. People generally love these lists, and they were popular in magazines and newspapers long before the internet.

And it’s not just Hollywood video content that’s harvested these days, as many video sites exist, and some channels are popular and successful just by harvesting those.

Primink

There’s a lot of tea to be spilled these days on YouTube. Channels like WavyWebsurf, Nerd City, PhillyD, and iDubbbzTV LOVE to spill tea and popcorn-worthy moments from the creator community.

But Primink does it without showing his face on camera. He tells his stories like a documentary and uses a cartoon avatar to replace him.

This means he’s only doing voiceover work while using various videos and images gathered from around the web.

Like everything else above, the format works because of excellent writing. I’m pretty sure he’s underage, and the best we know about him is his name is Kile.

I highly recommend these videos to learn the stories behind some crazy viral moments from around the web.

And even though his avatar isn’t animated, tools like Vtube, Animaze, Live2D, and Adobe Character Animator give you the option of replacing yourself with an animated avatar, which many gamers do on their streams (especially in Japan).

Kira Omori Ch.

At 50k subs, Kira Omori isnt a household name. But she’s in the YouTube Partner Program, and I’ve been binging her videos on how to successfully create a 2D animated puppet.

Unlike a 3D model, a 2D puppet requires a lot of drawings to get everything right in the face. Here’s the chart of facial expressions from the above video.

With all of these expressions drawn for the mouth, eyes, and eyebrows, you can pretty realistically replicate the movements of your own face on a 2D character.

Check out her video above to see how she did it. Her channel has a lot of regular vlogs and other typical YouTuber content. But she does it through her cartoon avatar.

I’m in the process of creating one myself because I don’t like having to be on camera. But it’s still a lot of work up front to get everything animated and rigged.

Once that work is done, you’ll also still need a great webcam for the facial recognition, a Leap Motion Ultramotion hand tracker for hand and arm movement, and a pretty decent gaming computer to run everything smoothly.

There are some mobile apps that can accomplish much of the streaming basics, and you can hire people on Fiverr to set things up if you need.

VladTV

Vlad Lyubovny (aka DJ Vlad) is a Ukrainian American hiphop journalist who is more likely to show his face on other people’s channels than his own.

Unlike other hiphop podcasts like Joe Budden, Wack100, GGN, Hot Ones, or No Jumper, he’s an off-camera interviewer. This means the people he’s interviewing (rappers, comedians, etc.) are the stars of the show. 

In this case, Vlad is filming original video and simply choosing to remain off-screen. He makes his subject the focus, much like a documentary interview.

And he often posts the long-form interview along with clips based on targeted questions that usually get more views while drawing people into the longer video much like a trailer does for movies.

Of course, scheduling interviews with PR reps and managers to gets annoying. You’ll have a lot of people flake on you. But if you get the right person to say the right things at the right time, you’ll blow up.

These are just some of the ways I’ve seen people pull off successful YouTube channels without showing up on camera.

Full-blown animation, still images with visual effects, harvesting content legally, hiring actors, and even deepfake AI are all options as well.

The key to pulling it off is excellent writing and voice over work. As long as you have those down, you’re golden.