How I Made $2,847 Last Month from Faceless YouTube Shorts (Full Breakdown)
No subscribers needed to start. No camera. No editing skills. Here is a painfully honest breakdown of every income stream, what actually paid, and what was a waste of time.
Alright Let Me Be Honest With You
I am not going to tell you that faceless YouTube Shorts made me a millionaire. They did not. But they paid my car insurance, my streaming subscriptions, my grocery bill, and left enough for a nice dinner out every week. From videos I made sitting on my couch in sweatpants.
Last month: $2,847. From a faceless channel I started 8 months ago. Zero face on camera. Zero professional equipment. I use an AI tool that makes the videos for me in about 3 minutes each.
Here is every dollar, where it came from, and what I would do differently.
The Income Breakdown
| Income Source | Monthly Revenue | Effort Level |
|---|---|---|
| YouTube Partner Program (ad revenue) | $187 | Passive |
| Affiliate links (investing apps) | $1,640 | Low |
| Notion template sales | $520 | Set it and forget it |
| One brand sponsorship | $500 | Two emails |
| Total | $2,847 |
You are looking at that $187 from YouTube ads and thinking "that is embarrassingly low." You are right. Shorts ad revenue is genuinely bad. But that is not the point. The Shorts are the funnel that drives everything else.
How Each Revenue Stream Actually Works
YouTube Ad Revenue: The Disappointing One
YouTube shares ad revenue from ads shown between Shorts in the feed. The RPM for Shorts is roughly $0.04 to $0.08. Compare that to $5 to $15 for regular long-form videos. Yeah.
I got about 2.8 million Short views last month. That turned into $187. Basically pocket change. But it is passive pocket change that shows up every month as long as people keep watching your old videos.
Affiliate Links: Where the Real Money Lives
My channel is about personal finance for people in their 20s. In my channel description and pinned comments I have affiliate links to two investing apps and a budgeting tool.
When someone signs up for one of those investing apps through my link, I get somewhere between $30 and $75. Last month, 34 people signed up. That is $1,640 from maybe 15 minutes of work setting up the links months ago.
The Shorts do not mention the apps directly. They teach financial concepts. Viewers who find the content valuable go to my channel page, see the links, and some of them click. It is not aggressive selling. It is just being useful and having a link available.
Digital Products: The Sleeper Income
I made a Notion budget template. Took about 4 hours to build. I sell it for $9 on Gumroad with a link in my channel description. Last month it sold 58 copies. That is $520 minus fees.
The beautiful part is I made this template once and it keeps selling every month. When a Short goes semi-viral, template sales spike for a few days.
Sponsorships: Surprisingly Easy to Get
Once you hit around 50k subscribers, brands start reaching out. I emailed a financial literacy app and offered them a dedicated Short plus a pinned comment mention for a month. $500. They said yes within a day.
The Production Cost: Almost Zero
- AIShortGen subscription: $29/month
- Canva for thumbnails: $0 (free tier)
- My time: about 45 minutes per week batching content
- Total cost: $29/month
Revenue minus costs, I am netting about $2,800 per month from a "hobby" that takes less than an hour per week.
The Timeline Nobody Tells You About
Months 1 and 2 were garbage. I made about $0 and got maybe 500 views total across all my videos. I almost quit three times.
Month 3 is when one Short randomly hit 180,000 views. That one video brought in about 4,000 subscribers overnight. After that the algorithm started treating my channel differently.
Month 5 I hit the YPP requirements. Month 6 I started making real money from affiliates. Month 8 was $2,847.
The point is: months 1 and 2 suck for everybody. If you quit during that phase, you will never know what month 3 could have looked like.
What I Would Do Differently If Starting Over
- Pick a niche with expensive affiliate programs from day one. I started with "general interesting facts" and pivoted to finance after 6 weeks. Those 6 weeks were wasted.
- Make the digital product in week one. Even with zero subscribers, having a product link ready means you capture sales from any early viral hit.
- Post every single day without exception. I skipped weekends for the first two months. Bad move. Once I went to 7 days a week, growth doubled within 3 weeks.
- Use AI from the start. I manually edited my first 40 videos. Each one took 30 to 45 minutes. Once I switched to AIShortGen, I could make 7 videos in the time it used to take me to make one.
Can You Actually Replicate This?
Yeah. If you do three things: pick a niche with monetization potential, post daily for at least 90 days, and do not overthink the production quality.
Your first video will probably get 47 views. That is normal. Your twentieth video might randomly explode. You will not know which one it is until you post it. So keep posting.
Start with AIShortGen for free, make 5 reels today, upload them, and check your analytics tomorrow morning. That is genuinely all it takes to begin.
Written by Ahmed Shanti
Founder & CEO of AIShortGen
Building AI tools for content creators. Writes about short-form video strategy, AI-powered content creation, and what actually works on TikTok, Reels, and Shorts.