The modern internet is less interested in demanding attention than in simply occupying it.
Adavia Davis understands that better than perhaps anyone else. Since dropping out of Mississippi State University in 2020, the 22-year-old has built a thriving content-creation business out of what has come to be called “slop”— the high-volume, AI-generated background noise that thrives in the gaps of the attention economy. Davis’s most successful videos aren’t meant to be watched, shared, or even remembered. Often, Davis told Fortune, his viewers are asleep.
Davis told Fortune that his network of videos generates roughly $40,000 to $60,000 a month in revenue. His operating costs—primarily small salaried teams overseeing the different niches—run at about $6,500 per month, he said. The margins are 85% to 89%, extraordinary by tech standards.
Fortune reviewed screenshots from Davis’s social media analytics dashboards, as well as recent AdSense payout records, which show tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in monthly earnings from individual channels, equating to annual gross revenue of roughly $700,000. He talked to Fortune more about what is turning into his career, how it got started, and why college wasn’t part of the equation for him.
Growing up on YouTube, Davis was a product of the platform’s golden era. When he was 10 years old in 2014, he said, he would spend six hours a day scripting and editing Minecraft and Fortnite playthroughs. He said he mourns the passing of this era, a time when creators were driven by “a love of the game, not necessarily to sell something.”
But by 2022, the launch of ChatGPT shifted the internet’s market logic. Davis said he saw the writing on the wall early: The era of the personal brand was being eclipsed by the large-scale-content farm.
“I didn’t start YouTube to make AI videos,” he said. “I started YouTube for fun at first. Then I started to make money with all the kids channels and the compilation channels, and then, if all my competitors are uploading more than me, and I’m waiting on my scriptwriter to get done, then I’m just falling behind.”
Davis turned fully to making YouTube channels with the new AI tools at his disposal, with the internet that he grew up with now gone forever, in his opinion.
“The ethics have gotten really, really bad from these higher-up companies that have their number one goal as attention,” Davis said. “Because attention is the number one currency. Whoever has the most influence controls the most.”
Today’s platforms are no longer marketplaces of ideas so much as engines of extraction, he said, designed to capture attention by any means necessary. He described the system that he’s monetized as very “psychological,” even destructive—“trying to destroy minds to make them easier to sell to.”
Davis explained his understanding of the business model as YouTube needing to cater to advertisers, “the puppet masters” of the platform, in order to stay alive. The only way to survive the system, he argued, is to understand it, or even teach it. (In fact, Davis said that he offers an online course for people looking to supplement their income, including his belief that “social media is a social science.”)
“When you understand psychology, everything else just falls into place,” he said.
Others are more mischievous. In compilation videos, Davis sometimes turns to shock tactics such as a sudden flash of a spider on-screen for a split second at the beginning, just long enough to make viewers rewind and check whether they actually saw what they think they saw. In short-form clips, he has intentionally misspelled words on-screen to bait viewers to pause, comment, and correct him, stretching watch time in the process.
“I do everything in my power to trick watch time,” he said. “Because that’s the metric that’s going to pay you at the end of the day.”
So far, Davis has had something of a first-mover advantage, given how early he was to spot the arbitrage opportunity and also his long-developed intuition for the sort of video that performs well.
But now, with AI advancing beyond scripts into video production and further collapsing barriers to entry, competition has grown fiercer. He said the biggest career mistake he ever made was posting a promotional video for TubeGen showing how he made his long-form Boring History sleep videos using AI. Within days, Davis said that he saw scores of copycats posting similar videos, crowding out the niche that he had built and monopolized until then.
But more threatening than the individual imitators, he said, are the companies with capital. Davis describes himself as “kind of a doomer” about the future of the space, estimating that individual creators have until around 2027 to meaningfully profit from AI-generated long-form YouTube content.
After that, he predicted the “sharks” will arrive: large media companies with the capital to industrialize any format the moment it proves lucrative. “At that point,” he said, “you’re just competing against the big fish.”
Davis pointed to a World War II history channel that he admired, full of thoughtfully produced videos that seemed to come from a student, posting every other day. Once an unnamed media company noticed the niche, it began uploading three times a day. Those sorts of videos cost roughly $110 to produce, he estimated, whereas posting at the media company’s speed would cost over $300. “You can’t compete unless you have the budget,” he said.
Still, he said he was optimistic that he’ll find a way to “seep through the cracks,” as he has for three years now. Rather than inventing new genres, Davis said he looks for small edges inside formats that already work. Most recently, he has been experimenting with a twist on a familiar setup: pairing narrated Reddit posts with looping Minecraft footage—but instead of a classic Reddit story, swapping in narrated horror stories for the “psychopaths,” as he put it, who like to fall asleep to them.
“The proof of concept is there,” Davis said.
But Davis hopes that one day, soon, none of his content will be much in demand at all. As AI content floods the internet and trust erodes, he believes authenticity itself will become scarce and therefore valuable. He already sees a growing audience for creators who reject heavy editing and algorithmic tricks.
“It’ll get worse before it gets better,” he said, but eventually, “true longevity is going to come within brands and real influencers with real faces.”
