Channel Researcher/Idealizer (YouTube)
Position Overview
- Job Title
- Channel Researcher/Idealizer (YouTube)
- Employment Type
- Project-based
- Location
- Remote
- Reports To
- Creative Strategist
- Compensation
- $50 to $80 USD per approved topic
About the role
Every video we make starts with a case worth telling, and finding those cases is the bottleneck. Most of what looks promising falls apart on contact: the story is exaggerated, the footage does not exist, the clip has been deleted, or a competitor covered it two years ago.
Your job is to find real, unsettling, usable cases and prove they are real before anyone spends time on them. You are the filter that stops the rest of the team from building on sand.
You are not doing the deep dive. Once we green-light your finds, a separate researcher takes them further. Your value is in breadth, speed, and judgment: how much good raw material you can surface, how fast, and how reliably it survives scrutiny.
Each assignment follows the same cycle: a brief with reference videos, a 24-hour scouting window in which you deliver 35 to 40 segments using our template, a green-light of 30 or more, then handoff to our deep-dive researcher.
You will be expected to know the landscape, including Chilling Scares, Nick Crowley, and Farrel McGuire, well enough to tell instantly whether an idea has already been used.
About us
NIA Production is a YouTube conglomerate. We own, build, and operate our own channels in-house. Every channel we run is ours.
We are 90+ people strong and growing rapidly. Most of our team is hybrid and we hire globally. We move fast. We care about results, and we hire people who think the same way.
Responsibilities
- Search across platforms and the less obvious corners of the internet to surface real clips and real cases, not listicle material that has already circulated.
- Deliver 35 to 40 genuinely different segments per topic, so we get real options instead of one idea in eleven variations.
- Verify three things before a segment reaches us: the story is real and traceable to a credible source, the footage still exists and can be downloaded, and no competitor has covered it.
- Judge whether it will work on screen. You need at least 2 to 3 minutes of core footage, and you need to be able to say what the specific moment is that makes it land for a viewer.
- Submit in our template with links, timestamps, why it fits, why it is unsettling, and how it supports the narrative. Pass 100% of the checklist every time.
- Hit your dates, because production downstream is scheduled around them.
What this role is not
- Not deep-dive research. You prove a segment is worth the investment; someone else makes it.
- Not a writing role. No scripting, no narration, no drafting.
- Not a volume game. You are paid per approved topic, so sending twelve weak ideas to sort through is worse than useless. Filtering is the job.
- Not passive. If a topic we assign is thin, say so early instead of delivering twelve mediocre segments and letting us find out.
Requirements
- Strong internet research instincts. You know how to find things that are not on the first page of Google, including archived pages, deleted uploads, reverse image search, and old forum threads.
- Basic source sense. You can tell a primary source from a repost of a repost, and you do not treat the second as the first.
- Familiarity with this YouTube niche and its major channels, enough to recognize covered ground immediately.
- An eye for what actually unsettles a viewer, and the ability to explain why in specific terms rather than saying a clip is creepy.
- Reliable under a 24 to 36 hour clock, with clear written communication and no chasing required.
Nice to have
- Any past research work where you had to verify information.
- Awareness of what footage is usable in an edit, not just what exists.
- A real, pre-existing habit of going down internet rabbit holes, especially in the YouTube landscape.
What success looks like
- Your approval rate climbs and holds. Most of what you send is usable.
- Nothing you submit is later found to have been covered by a competitor.
- Nothing you flag falls apart when the deep-dive researcher picks it up.
- Your segments are diverse enough that we can pick 5 to 7 without them overlapping.
- Your turnaround dates hold consistently, so nothing downstream waits on you.
- The amount of feedback you need decreases topic over topic.
Ready to apply?
Applications are reviewed as they come in. We read every submission.