Selling AI-made video ads to brands

The claim

“everyone’s trying to get followers. the money is somewhere else.

the real business:

→ you don’t sell the influencer → you sell the ads it makes → to brands that already pay for creatives every month”

@arceyul, 5 October 2026, 44,769 views (excerpt from the middle of the tweet; full text read at²)¹

The page judges the scheme, not the people who tweeted.

The ads are “UGC” videos: short phone-style clips of an ordinary-looking person talking about a product, now made with AI tools. Only two of the 10 tweets we collected put a figure on what the seller earns, and neither is the tweet quoted above; both come from the two smallest accounts, which we do not name¹. One says brands pay $1,500 to $10,000 a month¹². The other says five clients at $2,000 a month, with 20 to 30 ads each, is $10,000, reached in 45 days from nothing¹².

The sums

The prices are real. The tweet’s $2,000 for 20 to 30 ads is $67 to $100 an ad (our sum)². Brands offer human creators a median of $200 a video across 155 public listings¹⁷. One agency, Admiral Media, says monthly retainers (fixed monthly fees) for AI ad production typically range from EUR 4,000 to EUR 21,500³.

The buyers are brands with large ad budgets, not brands in general. In one benchmark of 6,015 ad accounts on Meta (Facebook and Instagram), brands spending $50,000 to $200,000 a month there test about 29 new ads a month on average (our sum)⁷⁸. Admiral Media says its ideal clients spend “US$50,000+ per month” on adverts⁴.

Finding them is slow. An email-tool vendor reports an average reply rate of 3.43% among its own users¹⁸. If one reply in 20 becomes a client (our assumption), five clients take about 3,000 emails (our estimate)¹⁸.

It is a full job, not automatic income. On a tool vendor’s figures, 100 to 150 ads a month for five clients is roughly 70 to 160 hours of production (our estimate)⁵. If the five clients exist, that makes $10,000 about $60 to $140 an hour before costs and tax (our estimate)⁵: a good hourly rate.

What happens to most people who try

We found no data on it: no payment-verified income page, no seller proven at the claimed level, and no written-up failure with numbers. A writer who traced the claims about how well these ads perform reached a similar result: “Almost every AI UGC performance statistic I found traced back to a company selling a AI UGC tool”²³.

Sellers of AI video ads on Upwork, a freelance marketplace, showed lifetime totals from about $3,000 to about $90,000 across 11 to 226 jobs, at about $8 to $20 an hour; we saw these in search-engine summaries, not on the profiles⁸¹.

The upside

• An AI-made advert for the company Kalshi, shown during the 2025 NBA Finals. Its maker, PJ Accetturo, said it took about $2,000 and two days³¹³². His fee was not disclosed³². NPR calls him an advertising veteran, and he said: “Just because this was cheap doesn’t mean anyone can do it.”³²
• Studio fees. His studio told Semafor it charges “around $100,000” for a 30-second commercial; this is the founder’s statement, not checked against records³³. These are film-style commercials, not batches of clips with an AI-generated actor.

For someone who already edits video or runs paid adverts, a realistic good result (our estimate) is regular marketplace orders, at the low prices above, within a few months⁸¹. A first retainer of $1,500 or more within a year is a hope, not an estimate. We found no documented case of $10,000 a month in 45 days.

What it takes to compete

Those documented at retainer level had something first: a long career in advertising and directing³²³³, or an agency with a client list³.

Meta offers AI ad tools inside the ad account, and tools sell direct at $39 to $99 a month¹⁰⁴². In one benchmark, about 5% of Meta ads become “winners” (ads that spend at least ten times the account’s median), so the value is in judging which ads to test and keep⁸.

Costs: about $100 to $400 a month for tools (our estimate)⁹¹⁰¹¹.

Early signs:

• Do you already have a route to brands with five-figure monthly ad budgets³⁴?
• After 200 to 300 personal approaches, has anyone agreed to a paid trial¹⁸?

A reader with editing, advertising, animation or copywriting skill, and the patience to sell for months, is trying something that people are paid for. A reader with none of those can find low-priced marketplace work, but has no documented example to follow to a retainer.

Who else makes money from it

Eight of the 10 tweet authors’ profiles link to a tool, training, community, agency or service site of their own².

The clearest revenue belongs to the tool sellers. Arcads, an AI video tool, is listed at $15 million in annual revenue in April 2026, on its chief executive’s statement, not audited³⁴.

Paid communities on the subject that we read charge $27 to $99 a month, and none of their sales pages shows verified member earnings^36697076.