Researchers decided to check the real volume of AI slop on YouTube by scrolling through 500 Shorts from a clean account.
📊 Results
- 21% of the feed is pure AI generation
- 33% is brainrot
- This type of content earns creators roughly $117M per year
The most popular channel in the sample is the Indian Bandar Apna Dos (videos with an anthropomorphic monkey). It has 2.45M subscribers and earns ~$4.25M.
The European Anomaly
In the top 100 trending channels in Spain, researchers found 8 slop farms with a combined audience of 20M people. The US and Germany follow.
What About the Rest of the Internet?
An AWS study showed that ~57% of all text on the web is already synthetic (to be fair, that includes machine translation).
The only thing saving us from total derealization is that models still struggle with long context. But once generative AI learns to produce not 15 seconds but 15 minutes of coherent video — the internet will change irreversibly.