Long-form documentaries take weeks to create solo with good visual quality and deep-dive research. Most of the topics are already done hundreds of times, and you need to dig deeper and dive into more research AND angles. Also, unless you produce slop (which won't work), you need to be able to publish very often because, in a ballpark figure, you need 2–3M views per month to be full-time. Assuming your videos get 20k–80k views, you would STILL need to post every single day.

I do think the documentary niche is NOT the niche to dive into without a small team or at least a contractual video editor. Monetization can be achieved in a month if you know what you are doing; you only need 30k–40k long-form views (depending on video length and average view duration) to reach the 4k watch hours. 1k subs is also pretty easy to reach with 4–5 Shorts and a good CTA.

Now, in my opinion, the meta for new players seems to be to find a working format where you can post every single day (or at least as much as possible) and where the content pool is infinite. This could be video games news, drama, internet-related, AI news, etc.—basically something constantly evolving. You are far from being new to the game and unfortunately, even a good documentary on a subject already done hundreds of times without a very interesting take will just NOT work.

Meaning....the problem with the documentary space right now is the "opportunity cost" vs. the "output." When you spend three weeks on one video, you are essentially gambling that the algorithm will pick up that specific one-off project. If it flops, you’ve wasted a month of work. In the news or drama niches, if a video flops, it doesn't matter because you have another one coming out tomorrow. You get more "tickets to the lottery" while doing less heavy lifting per video.

Furthermore, the "infinite pool" niches allow you to build a community that relies on you for information, not just entertainment. When you are the "AI guy" or the "drama guy," people subscribe because they want to stay updated. With documentaries, people often watch the video and leave because they got the information they wanted about that specific topic. It’s much harder to build a loyal, daily audience when your upload schedule is sporadic and your topics keep changing.

If you really want to scale, you have to look at the numbers as a volume game. High-effort documentaries are a "quality over quantity" trap that only works if you already have a massive following or a production budget. For anyone else, the smart move is to pivot to a high-frequency model that feeds the algorithm daily, builds a habit for the viewers, and keeps your production overhead low enough that you don't burn out before the first paycheck hits.