You don’t need a face, a studio, or a single subscriber to start making money on YouTube. You need one thing: a channel idea that already has proven search volume and zero serious competition. In this post I’m breaking down exactly three of those ideas, with real examples of tiny channels pulling thousands of views, the affiliate math on each one, and the fastest path from zero to your first dollar.
These aren’t theoretical. Every channel Alston showed in the video had under a thousand subscribers and was still racking up tens of thousands of views. The market is there. The question is whether you’re going to walk into it or keep watching from the sideline.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- Three faceless YouTube channel ideas you can start without showing your face or buying equipment
- Real examples of small channels (under 1,000 subscribers) getting 17,000 to 56,000 views per video
- How to find keywords in each niche using free search tricks and paid tools like Ahrefs
- The affiliate income math: 36,000 views, 1% click rate, $5 commission = $1,800 from one video
- Why affiliate marketing beats the YouTube Partner Program when you’re just starting out
- A Patreon game-night model that builds community and recurring income on top of ad revenue
- The Amazon Associates commission trick that turns a $7 product into a $4 commission
- Not sure which niche fits your background? Find your match at finder.platformproof.com
Channel Idea 1: TV Show Quiz Videos
The first idea Alston showed in the video was TV show quiz channels. The example on screen: a Grey’s Anatomy quiz video with a title like “Ultimate Grey’s Anatomy Quiz Season 1 Through 3.” It was a four-minute video. Small channel. 693 subscribers. The video sitting right below it had 17,000 views and the channel only had 44 subscribers. That is not a typo.
The reason this works is that fans of a TV show consume everything related to that show. They don’t stop at watching the episodes. They go looking for quizzes, trivia, Easter eggs, and recap content. You’re not competing with the show. You’re serving the fans of the show, and there are millions of them.
The production setup is genuinely simple. You build the quiz slides on Canva, which is free. You record a voiceover reading the questions and answers. You don’t need to appear on camera at any point. The channel “Trivia Party Games” was doing exactly this with a 10-minute Grey’s Anatomy quiz video that was outperforming channels with nearly 1,000 subscribers.
The niche isn’t limited to Grey’s Anatomy. Alston searched The Office quiz and Handmaid’s Tale quiz on the same day. The Office quiz search returned results with 36,000 views from a channel with only around 4,000 subscribers. Handmaid’s Tale quiz had a channel sitting at 141 subscribers that was still pulling traffic. Every popular TV show is a potential sub-niche you can own.
You can also go deeper within a single show by publishing a quiz for each season separately. Season 1 quiz. Season 2 quiz. Season 3 quiz. Each one is its own video with its own search traffic. That’s ten or more videos from a single show before you’ve even touched a spinoff or a companion series.
How to Make Money With TV Show Quizzes
The YouTube Partner Program is one option. You need 4,000 watch hours and 1,000 subscribers to qualify. But Alston was clear in the video: he thinks affiliate marketing is a better first option because you can start earning from your very first video without hitting any subscriber threshold.
For a Grey’s Anatomy quiz channel, Alston searched “Grey’s Anatomy merchandise” and found Amazon results immediately. Amazon has an affiliate program (Amazon Associates). Etsy has an affiliate program. He also checked ShopABCTV.com, the official ABC merchandise store, to see if they had a partner program. The way to check any retailer: scroll to the bottom of their website and look for an “affiliate program,” “partners,” or “work with us” link. You can also search their parent company name plus “affiliate program” in Google.
Here is the math Alston walked through in the video. Take a video with 36,000 views. If 1% of viewers click an affiliate link, that’s 360 clicks. If each buyer spends $5 and you earn $5 commission, that’s $1,800 from one video. Even at a more conservative 0.1% click rate, you’re still looking at 36 buyers per video. Scale that across 100 videos and the numbers grow fast.
A third option Alston mentioned is a Patreon or membership model. You build a community of quiz fans, charge a monthly fee, and host live game nights. The winner gets a prize that’s directly tied to the show, like a boxed set of The Office or a Handmaid’s Tale collector item. Fans of a specific show will pay for a recurring, community experience built around that show. It turns a YouTube channel into a subscription business without requiring any physical product of your own.
Channel Idea 2: Would You Rather Videos
The second idea is “Would You Rather” content. This one surprised a lot of people who think it sounds too simple, but the search data Alston pulled from Ahrefs told a different story. The phrase “would you rather” gets 835,000 searches per month. There are over 30,000 related keywords in the niche.
On YouTube, one channel called The Quiz Show was sitting at 1.3 million views on a single would-you-rather video. Another video had 1.2 million views. These are not small numbers, and the channels producing this content are not massive operations.
The keyword targeting is especially powerful here. You don’t compete on the broad “would you rather” term. You go specific. Alston pulled “would you rather questions for couples” as an example: 7,000 searches per month on Google alone. On YouTube, the top result for that phrase had 146,000 views and only 8,000 subscribers. The video right below it had 7,100 views from a channel with 5,000 subscribers. Below that: 3,000 views from a channel with 1,000 subscribers. Every result is a small channel. The niche is not dominated.