Marketing School - Digital Marketing and Online Marketing Tips

This Is How Creators Use AI To Hack the YouTube Algorithm

11 min
Mar 23, 202627 days ago
Listen to Episode
Summary

Eric demonstrates how creators are using AI to reverse engineer successful YouTube channels and automate content creation at scale. He shows how he analyzed a channel publishing 74 videos per day using AI, then built an automated system to create clips from Marketing School episodes with minimal human intervention.

Insights
  • AI can analyze YouTube channels through APIs to determine if content is AI-generated with 99% accuracy
  • Volume-based content strategies work as lottery tickets but may hurt long-term algorithmic performance
  • AI tools can reverse engineer successful content strategies and create automated SOPs in minutes
  • Human refinement of AI-generated content is crucial for long-term channel success and quality
  • AI penetration remains low despite significant advances, suggesting massive future potential
Trends
Mass AI content generation on YouTube with 70+ videos per dayAutomated content pipeline creation using AI analysisAI-powered reverse engineering of competitor strategiesShift from manual to AI-assisted content clipping and editingIntegration of multiple AI tools for end-to-end content workflowsCost reduction in content production through AI automationAI-generated SOPs for content marketing processes
Companies
YouTube
Platform being analyzed for AI content strategies and algorithm optimization
OpenAI
Referenced through Claude API usage for content analysis and automation
Google Drive
Used as storage solution for organizing AI-generated video clips
Whisper
AI transcription service used in the automated content pipeline
People
Alex Hormozi
His YouTube channel was analyzed as example of high-volume AI content strategy
Jensen Huang
Quoted saying every company needs an AI strategy to validate the approach
Quotes
"every company needs to have an open claw strategy"
Jensen Huang
"74 uploads in a day. No. No human can do that."
Eric
"the fact of the matter that you can sit on your couch and do this, reverse engineer something, have it tie into your goals and have it do the work and like gift wrapped it for you. That to me is the unlock here."
Eric
"algorithms hurt you if you just keep pumping out crap"
Neil
Full Transcript
2 Speakers
Speaker A

Using only 20% of your business data is like dating someone who only texts emojis. First of all, that's annoying, and second, you're missing a lot of context. But that's how most businesses operate today, using only 20% of their data. Unless you have HubSpot, where all the emails, call logs, and chat messages turn into insights to grow your business. Because all that data makes all the difference. I would know because I use HubSpot at my company. Learn more@HubSpot.com it looks like he's publishing like 10 videos per hour. Check this out. I just pulled it up. Okay, so Neil, you see on the screen, so six minutes ago. Okay, one hour ago. One hour ago. One hour ago. Look. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And so 10. And then two hours ago, 11, 12. So 12 videos in the last two hours. And so he's publishing all this at volume. And I'm like, what the heck is going on? Right? So I take the link from this channel and I just dump it into my open claw. And I'm just like, dude, what is going on with this channel? Right? Is this all AI generated? And it analyzes the channel through the YouTube API, and it's like 99% chance this is all AI. Okay? And I'm like, tell me how this channel has been performing over time. So I want to show you my interactions with OpenClaw and what it actually built. Because this week you heard from Jensen Huang himself, every company needs to have an open claw strategy. Okay? So I'm like, oh, thank God. The last seven weeks of me spending time on this, this crap has not been a waste of time. Okay, so let me, let me. Let me show you my screen over here. Okay. You see this?

0:00

Speaker B

Yes.

1:29

Speaker A

Okay, so again, I'm like, hey, if you use API and look at this channel, what are the odds all this clip content is using AI? And how would we reverse engineer this? Okay, so it's like 99% chances AI clip. The data is a smoking gun. 74 uploads in a day. No. No human can do that. Right? Identical descriptions on every video. Okay, fine, Great. And so I'm like, I'm not gonna read all that crap. Okay, Then I'm like, okay, I'm just not gonna read that. How has this channel grown over time? Is this a viable way to grow? And then it's like, here's the full Picture created in 2025. 58,000 subs. 8.2 million total views. And it's like, it shows the trajectory over Time. So you can see in February he published 500 videos, got 4.3 million views from it. Okay. And then 341 in March to date. And then it's like the pattern is clear, here's what's happening. Average view is declining. But I'm like, is it viable for growth? And it's like, yeah, volume is lottery ticket. So it does all this analysis. And then I'm just like, okay, whatever. And then I'm like, can you just do this for me? And it's like, yeah, you know, if you spend the five to ten dollars a day, we can do this for you. I'm like, just gimme an MVP version. Okay. So Neil, all it does, it shows me this entire process. It signs up for all these different things or it uses them. And it makes me, based on our clips from marketing school, it makes me six clips that, that have nice titles that are at the right moment as well. And it neatly organizes them into Google Drive.

1:30

Speaker B

I'm curious what the results will be in the long run. My hypothesis with her Moses is yes, sure, every once in a while there'll probably be a video or two that's a lotto ticket that gets tons of views. But the algorithm is gonna say, hey, your channel puts out a lot of stuff. It's not performing well. We shouldn't push you as hard is my guess on what's gonna happen.

2:47

Speaker A

There's a good chance you're probably right. But I wanna call out the fact that I can literally just take a channel, reverse engineer it, and then it creates a process and it dumps all these clips in here. I sent it to the editing team because Neil, you like if we made like a highlights channel. Your highlights channel, my highlights channel, whatever. It's. It's not. If you have the AI doing all the work, it kind of just doesn't matter. Right? So. Cause it's, it's a channel that's not affecting your main one. And so it basically creates an SOP for me. And then I'm like, the fact of the matter that you can sit on your couch and do this, reverse engineer something, have it tie into your goals and, and have it do the work and like gift wrapped it for you. That to me is the unlock here.

3:07

Speaker B

Yeah, I think the technology is amazing. And the cool part about this is you can take this and you can improve upon what was done with that strategy. Because as Eric agreed to, and Eric knows this, and just like I know this, we've both been doing the marketing game for a long time. Typically algorithms hurt you if you just keep pumping out crap. I'm not saying that content that he's pushing out is crap, but if you're putting out 80 videos a day or whatever the number is, it's hard for every single one to be amazing in quality. So if you can take that strategy and take some human hours, call it even like an hour, two hours and fine tune it a little bit. Like Eric even mentioned when he was showing me his. I'm assuming he's not using the same description over and over again. Right? It's more of a fine tuned version. So then as you start adjusting you can take a version that maybe I wouldn't say hermosi spammy. He's just mass producing. I would consider it, quote unquote, some AI slop. In theory, if you produce a higher quality version of it, you can actually do something that can gain long term traction and potentially even drive revenue from it.

3:44

Speaker A

Yeah, I actually think, I will say I watched some of the videos and I think they're pretty good because Neil, you know, he does the workshops in Vegas, right. So there's a lot of content he can pull from that. And then you and I obviously have a lot of a big library of content we've done or you know, events we've spoken at. Right. And I would say even the early days, the first three, four years of marketing school, that's probably the US front loading our marketing knowledge. And now this is more like news related, right? So let me show you an example here. My point of calling this out, like I was just showing Neil the video on the moments, it's pulling, it's not doing a bad job. And I showed my, my internal content team this and they're like, this is actually really good. It gives us like a lot of, we call them atoms, like the right moments. But Neil, after that I was like, oh well, you know, we kind of don't do it. Well, let me finish this part first and I'll answer your question. So like, but then I was like, hey, we can do it for the mid form stuff, but why don't we do it for short form? There's a lot of stuff we can do for short form because I don't think we do a good job of finding the right moments. And so my point is you watch something, you refine the idea to Neil's point and then you can even make idea babies from it. But go ahead Neil.

4:49

Speaker B

So if you can go back Eric, for any of those listening, what Eric was showing you is a Clip of him. There was this chart on X that actually shows AI penetration and it's actually very low compared to, you know, what people actually think. And it shows. Look at how far we've gotten from AI with so little penetration. Like what's going to happen when it actually gets penetrated. I believe that was what the clip was from. From last week or the week before marketing school. You can correct me if I'm wrong, Eric, but it sounded like that hotel.

5:48

Speaker A

Do you look like you're in here? Is it the Hong Kong one?

6:18

Speaker B

Hong Kong, Yeah, I think I was in Hong Kong.

6:22

Speaker A

Yeah.

6:25

Speaker B

But the point I'm getting at is like it was a good clip. It sounds like AI went through the whole video to find the clip.

6:25

Speaker A

Is that correct?

6:32

Speaker B

Eric pulled it out and then what did it put as a description or title or anything?

6:33

Speaker A

The title is 84 of people have

6:37

Speaker B

never used AI yeah, so that's a great title. And yes, it could be improved. But you have to keep in mind this is AI doing it. So it's not a bad first take. Does it do a description for you as well? If not, you can create one.

6:39

Speaker A

I think it does a description, but Neil, let me just show you this. So after it did that, it made an S. I had it make an SOP for me and there's like, this is. It's like a 17 page SOP. So you can literally dump this into whatever, you know, AI tool that you're

6:51

Speaker B

using to break down what the SOP is for everyone listening.

7:04

Speaker A

Look here. Let's have Gemini summarize, summarize this document. See, this would be a good moment, Neil, where it's like, hey, this would be a good lead magnet. But like I don't want to spend the time to make a lead magnet. Right.

7:09

Speaker B

Yeah.

7:23

Speaker A

So.

7:24

Speaker B

So Gemini did a good job of titling it. It said this is a SOP for end to end. I think YouTube publishing using AI clipping or something like that.

7:25

Speaker A

Yeah. So this pipeline has been validated by MVP results which produced 15 standalone clips for three 60 minute leveling up episodes in about 30 minutes wall clock time. The strategy is based on the success of Hormozy Highlights channel, which achieved 8.2 million views and 58,000 subscribers in six months by publishing approximately six videos a day. A lot more than that now. So the process, I'll just make this really easy to not bore people. First step is to download. So downloads the YouTube URL to an MP4 file. Okay. Cost per episode free. I like how it has the cost here too, Neil. Number two, it transcribes. So it uses Whisper, which I don't know what that is by the way. Transcribes the mp4 file to a JSON with word level timestamps. This is free local CPU. Okay. Segment. Then use the Cloud API. This is the secret sauce. This costs $0.50 to a dollar per episode, which is actually pretty expensive. I hope it doesn't cost that. And then analyze the transcript to identify the three to five best segments for clips. Applying criteria like a clear hook, complete thought and an ideal length of 3 to 15 minutes. So this is like more like a mid form clip. And then it cuts it up using ffmpeg, that's free and then uploads YouTube data API that's also free. So I do think with this cloud API one these costs are going to come down over time too. Or you can use like a, like a, you know, like, like an open source model if you want.

7:33

Speaker B

Yeah. By the way, you read something in there, it says 30 minutes of wall clock time. What the heck is wall clock time mean?

8:46

Speaker A

Yeah, so this is interesting because I, whenever I work with an AI, I tell it to give me two timelines. So Neil, I, I tell it to give me the human timeline and the AI timeline. So wall clock time is really just human timeline because okay, you know how the AI is trained on human work, right? It's like, oh, this is going to take like you know, two weeks or whatever. I'm like, no, stop giving timeline, start giving me human timelines, give me AI timelines. How long is it going to take? It's like 15 minutes. I'm like, great, do that.

8:52

Speaker B

Because I was like 30 minutes. I'm like, this couldn't have taken AI 30 minutes to do this. It should have been quicker.

9:16

Speaker A

Yeah, well, I don't know. I mean it does look through a lot of different things, but who knows because it pulled 15 clips and like all that stuff like so anyway, I just wanted to show that all that to say guys, that is it for today and we'll see you tomorrow sat.

9:21