This 22-year-old college dropout with an AI powered YouTube empire makes $700,000 a year and works just 2 hours a day

The modern internet is less interested in demanding attention than in simply occupying it. 

Adavia Davis understands that better than perhaps anyone else. Since dropping out of Mississippi State University in 2020, the 22-year-old has built a thriving content-creation business out of what has come to be called “slop”— the high-volume, AI-generated background noise that thrives in the gaps of the attention economy. Davis’s most successful videos aren’t meant to be watched, shared, or even remembered. Often, Davis told Fortune, his viewers are asleep.

In short, Davis has assembled a sprawling network of YouTube channels that operates as a near-autonomous revenue engine, requiring only about two hours of oversight a day. He currently runs five active channels, but his broader portfolio includes multiple Minecraft channels aimed at children as well as channels devoted to funny-animal compilations, prank videos, anime edits, Bollywood clips, and celebrity gossip. Most lucrative is a “Boring History” channel built around six-hour “history to sleep to” documentaries, narrated by what sounds like a languid David Attenborough.

The channels belong to a genre that has come to dominate YouTube, known as “faceless” content—videos designed to be scalable, easily replicated. Nearly all of Davis’s videos are generat...