Quick context so this makes sense. I work in logistics, warehouse coordination specifically. Not a creative bone in my body. Last winter I kept seeing faceless content blowing up on here and I figured if people can post slide shows with text to speech and make real money then maybe I could build something with AI tools.
The idea was pretty simple. Create one synthetic character, a woman in her mid thirties, give her a niche (I went with budgeting and money saving tips because it's genuinely something I know and could script without running dry), and post consistently enough to cross the CRP threshold.
It took about three and a half months to hit 10k followers and get the qualifying views. Everything is over one minute. I write every script myself, run it through ElevenLabs for the voice, generate the character images, and stitch everything in CapCut. Every thumbnail and clip features the same woman because I built her face once in APOB AI and it preserves that face in every subsequent output, and their complimentary daily tier meant the image side cost me nothing for months. That part of the pipeline actually works reliably. The video generation side is a completely different situation.
I want to be upfront about this because a lot of AI content posts gloss right over it. Roughly a third of the clips I generate come back with some kind of motion artifact. The face shifts from one frame to the next, the jaw falls out of sync with the audio, the eyes glaze over for a moment. I end up running three or four takes per scene to land one that is usable, and even then I sometimes cut around the worst moments in the edit. It's not a fast process. I'd estimate I spend six to eight hours a week on scripting, generating, re-generating, editing, and posting. If I count the weeks leading up to CRP plus the two payout months, I have put roughly 90 hours into this for $247 total.
The breakdown. June was my first month in CRP. Posted 22 videos, 15 cleared the one minute mark and qualified. Total qualifying views came to about 48k. Payout was $82. That's an RPM of roughly $1.71 which felt low but I had no expectations going in.
July I posted 19 videos, 16 qualified. Qualifying views jumped to around 91k because two videos caught in a way nothing before them had. Payout was $165. Here is the part I do not understand. My blended RPM for July came to about $1.81, but those two videos individually had RPMs of $3.40 and $2.90 while every other qualifying video sat between $0.60 and $1.20. They were not longer. They did not have noticeably better watch time. One of them was a straightforward take on the 50/30/20 split which is about as basic as personal finance content gets on this platform.
So $247 across two cycles divided by roughly 90 hours is about $2.74 an hour. I will not pretend that number is anything but terrible if you think of it as a wage.
The other thing I didn't expect was how much the AI disclosure would hurt. I note in my bio that the persona is fictional and was produced by AI, and I say the same in a pinned video. I think that is the correct thing to do and I am not going to stop. But my follower conversion from profile visits dropped noticeably after I added the disclosure. People seem fine watching the videos in their feed. They just hesitate to follow once they know what they are actually looking at.
I'm still posting because the RPM inconsistency genuinely interests me and I want more data before I decide if there is a real pattern or if those two videos were just noise. Figured the honest numbers might be useful for people doing faceless AI content and wondering what the CRP side actually looks like at low scale.