> Hate me or join me
No hate, no join. I doubt this is going anywhere. You seem to be in a stage of fishing for things to do[1] which is a great place to learn new skills but not that great to actually get anything done. Been there, done that.. a few times!
Personally I'd pick something easier to do if you're after cash rather than skills, get yourself eased into making stuff. Spam the hell out of YouTube or whatever later, haha
You gotta keep in mind this is just one channel that got successful at spamming YouTube in this way, of probably thousands of channels trying, and managed a channel best of 79k views on a video. What's that in 2022 YouTube CPM? $60-100 or so, depending on which bucket of ads you get put into? That's like 10x less than making a decent 10 minute tech tutorial.
Much less effort once the code is written, sure, not much more reward. That's not factoring in your script randomly breaking and needing maintenance.
Back to Van de Paar - there's only a few videos with that level of viewcount, the rest topping out around 20k or so. I imagine the channel has some terrible watch time stats too as people will be jumping past his little piece to camera to get the answer they were searching, then dipping as soon as they got the answer or realised the video was guff. That probably wont do you any favours long term.
To also note that the high view counts are videos that have all been up for over a year. Don't be thinking this is quick money!
It's true you have a greater chance of hitting a lottery video by spamming 2 million videos into the void but even that's not guaranteed if nobody ever watches the video in the first place! Focus your brain cycles on video titles and the thumbnail once you've got the code bit down. If nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, algorithm doesn't care about the video, nobody is suggested the video, nobody clicks the video, nobody watches, etc.
You're in high likelihood only going to learn how to play with ffmpeg and improve your code skills off the back of this. Good luck with that bit, it should be fun! I love tinkering with ffmpeg :)
If you do go for it I'd love to know how the end result pans out time and tech wise! Was the juice worth the squeeze? If you'd done minimum wage somewhere else would it have turned out better financially? I bet that article would get some front page HN attention! :)
E: Oh man don't even get me started on the admin side of things if you find yourself on YouTube's radar. Did you know if your Adsense account gets banned.. that's it? You can't re-register, can't appeal, you're just done now. Can't ever use Google ads as yourself again. Not on YouTube, not on your website. You gotta register a new legal entity (LLC etc) if you ever need them again.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31385531