Dom Bavaro had been thinking of working from home so he could better care for his daughter. This was before the pandemic, and remote work was not as popular. The car rental business he ran meant that he spent time running around. “It became too much of a demand and too much of a circus,” he said.
So he did what everyone was doing and moved the business online. But he quickly realised that the key to success on the internet for a little-known business owner like him could be affiliate marketing. To do this, he needed to create content on the internet constantly.
He started posting videos on YouTube about his journey “building a six-figure affiliate marketing business.”
At the turn of the last decade, affiliate marketing became increasingly popular. Creators with sizable followings posted their affiliate marketing links and invited followers to buy products that they had tested. This was what Dom had wanted to tap into.
But over time, he realised a simple truth: that he didn’t need to be a content creator in the traditional sense of creating a “brand” to build an affiliate marketing business. He just needed to have an audience that came for his content. So he started making anonymous—or, as it is known on the streets, faceless—YouTube channels, which he grew to a sizable audience, who he sold affiliate links to.
At the time, running a faceless YouTube channel was just as hard as running a channel with a face. He had to create the channel and run it consistently or hire a team to make and post videos. But when AI became smarter, it changed the game. He could send prompts to chatbots that created content that he posted, cutting down his workflow.
“I think AI is making the opportunity bigger,” he told Techloy in a recent interview.
Since 2022, as AI became more mainstream, faceless YouTube videos targeting niche audiences have exploded, with some videos having as many as a million views. But Dom says even that kind of attention and following can be fleeting for a channel without a face.
“I’m not sold on the prospect of having a single faceless channel around for 10 years,” he said. “Instead, I want to build a channel to the point where monetisation is enabled, collect leads, and then sell it to someone who wants to monetise the list it’s building. If I can repeat this process over and over, I can adapt to changing trends without having to shift the audience of a channel I’ve had for years.”
Faceless accounts have long been a slur, branded as people who chose anonymity to post mean comments on the internet—trolls who spewed bigotry they could not stand by. But Dom says that is not always the case. AI has opened up the opportunity in the space, with more people opening up about owning faceless channels. Clips from TikTok to X show how to use AI to grow faceless YouTube channels and build passive income with an affiliate marketing link.
Many e-commerce brands have affiliate marketing programmes, where they invite just anybody to register. Members are given a unique link. If anyone buys a product through that link, they earn a commission.
The result is not just more young people entering space. They now run multiple channels simultaneously.
For Dom, aside from affiliate marketing, he said that there is another reason he runs multiple accounts now that he can. He doesn’t want to say the wrong thing and be "cancelled."
“Having a faceless channel, in my opinion, is a good hedge against my on-camera brand being cancelled. If my channel is faceless, it’s operating independently of my personal brand,” he said.
Though AI has made it easier for Dom, growing a faceless account still has its difficulties, especially when it comes to subscriber growth.
“People will follow other people long before they follow a faceless brand,” he said. But over time, he has come to learn what works with audiences, increasing his chances of success.
“Definitely stories,” he said. “How-to and explainers generally don’t work because the AI generating the visuals never gets it right. But a story—especially fiction or ones about ancient times—uses representative images and leaves a lot to the imagination. People are there more to listen than watch.”
But he is optimistic that things will change with more AI advancement. “This generation of AI isn’t good enough to do motion graphics and explainers as well as humans, so the channels with human input and voices will always outperform the AI-first channels,” he said.
Dom typically posts videos that audiences are already interested in. He goes for topics with high volumes of watch time and makes videos that give a fresh take. He saw success making videos about the Battle of the Bulge, a major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during the Second World War.
“The algorithm will serve the new video to a big portion of the original video’s audience, and since it’s a topic they already like, they’ll engage with yours too. This will then send your video far and wide,” he said.
To sustain this, he created a software tool that he tells to “write a new script with a slightly different take.” When the script is ready, he feeds it to the AI that makes the video.
YouTube channels like MKBHD and Dave2D have attained success from making videos on just a single or a few channels. But that has not been the case for Dom.
Faceless channels like his, according to him, can make as little as $100 a month from Google AdSense, Google’s advertising revenue sharing program for creators. But the upside is that they take very little effort, and he also spends very little on paying for AI subscriptions.
“Motion graphics and voiceover are the two most important skills that you would pay the most for,” he said.
Since the AI boom started, many young people have flocked to it, making these faceless channels. Some, like Dom, have seen a modicum of success in it. But many have been unsuccessful. Dom says that the trick is to keep at it.
“So many people say ‘I didn’t get good results so I stopped’ after only a few weeks, when in reality it takes a few months to get something going. They also—I myself included—stop being consistent when it ‘isn’t working'," he said.
“I know that sounds generic, but it’s the hardest part. If the script and the thumbnails are dialled in, the channel will grow.”
David Adubiina
