Introduction

With this project, I wanted to answer an essential question: can I be a huge Youtuber without any of the work? Can I get millions of views and subscribers through automating the Youtuber processes with some carefully created cleverness? Youtubers today are at the whims of the Youtube algorithm, which pressures creators to be constantly pumping out entertaining videos, driving many Youtubers into creative burnout. I'm going to be exploring the idea of curating entertaining content on the internet and using a consistent video format to provide to Youtube. To do this, I scraped Reddit meme content and some scripted video editing to create effortless meme video compilations.

Reddit Content Scraper

Step 1: Get content. I needed at least 10 minutes of content to satisfy the Youtube algorithm overlords, as well as funny or interesting short form videos. Unfortunately, still image memes wouldn't be ideal here since they would require some text to speech and maybe even hiding parts of the meme so as to not ruin the punchline. All items that would require manual editing. And who actually wants to do work?

To achieve this, I used the Praw (Python Reddit API Wrapper) python package, and targeted the top posts of the week in the r/perfectlycutscreams subreddit. This content was perfect since all posts would be videos and all would "hopefully" generate some sort of laugh or unexpectedness.

Other Thoughts

I could have taken the automation process to its fullest extent by automatically running the script on every Monday and posting the video through the Youtube API. However, I decided against this because it would give me time to review the video for any nsfw content that the depths of Reddit can manufacture.

Demonstration

Here, I show the process of creating a 60 second "perfectly cut screams" video compilation. However, you can define your required video length to be as long or short as you want, as well as which subreddits to scrape from. This is all defined in the "SelectedSubreddits.csv" file.

Results

Even though this idea shows a lot of promise, it still requires a lot more sophistication in its automation or simply more manual effort from a human. There were issues like inconsistent video quality, boring video clips, and even nsfw submissions as mentioned before. Both of the latter items would require its own challenging machine learning algorithms to classify all the videos accurately and automatically. However, I am sure that I am not the first to think of this idea, and Youtube channels that are heavily automated in a similar fashion definitely exist, but also have a huge advantage in producing consistent and entertaining content for the Youtube audience.

Also, I figured out that borrowed content like this can't be monetized on Youtube anyways. Dang...