What the tracker counted on November 4
The radar at lab.ytdeepsea.com published a set of videos on November 4 where a single character lives across episodes. The count runs on videos the tracker found: it walks the feeds and adds up what it caught, so the numbers read as a floor estimate. The picture is clear anyway. Six formats, each with a recognisable character, a short episode and a conflict the viewer gets in the first second.
Here are all six, in order, each with a line on why it matters.
Fruit: rescue and a plot twist
The biggest format in the set. Nine videos from five accounts, about 30.7 million views in total, the best one took roughly 10 million on TikTok. An account with 15,000 followers landed 1.45 million on a single video, close to a hundred times its follower count.
The plots are simple: a piece of fruit gets into trouble, a second one rescues it, a twist arrives by the middle. Nothing more is needed, since viewers come for familiar characters and for the way they get out of trouble this time.
Why it matters: a fruit takes minutes to draw and animate, while a recognisable hero delivers what a one-off video never does. A habit. The advice in the tracker's note is blunt: lock three characters and ship three episodes in a row.
The risk sits in the same place. A repeated plot wears thin fast. Three episodes test the format, they do not build a year of it.
Cats in one-minute episodes
Six videos from five accounts, about 16 million views, the best one at 4.4 million. An account with 14,000 followers earned 2.77 million. Episodes run about a minute.
Why it matters: a minute fits exactly one conflict, which makes it easier to hold viewers to the end. A cat also removes the acting problem, since viewers forgive its face and body language far more readily than a human one.
The Hindi vegetable family
Potato Alu, a carrot and the rest of the household. The stories stay domestic: cooking, love, trade. An account with 2,080 followers earned about 1.18 million on one YouTube Shorts video.
Why it matters: the same cast gets dubbed into other languages, so the audience grows without a new round of generation. A family on screen hands you ready roles, with a mother, a father, kids and a neighbour, and the conflict writes itself.
A dessert girl and a parody of a music video
On TikTok, the account Ai Dreamora with 43,000 followers released three videos at about 1 million each. The comments ask which dessert she used to be, and that question is the script for the next episode.
The second story runs on Bilibili: an AI music video contest, parodies of "Trouble Maker" pairing characters who never belong together, four accounts, about 8.8 million views.
Why it matters: both point at where the next episode comes from. For the dessert girl the comments write it, for the parody the familiar track and the unexpected pairing do the work. The second route is faster and runs into music rights, since someone else's song in a commercial video survives until the first complaint.
AI characters played by the AI models themselves
The sixth format is not about fruit or cats. The models took the lead: DeepSeek drawn as a fat blue fish, with Doubao and Claude beside it. Seven videos from seven accounts, about 6 million views.
What all six cases share fits in one line: a recurring character, a short episode, a clear conflict. The part that matters most is scale, where small accounts pull millions. Two thousand followers and more than a million views sit next to each other in this set, and nobody treats that as strange.
That leads to a position. Serial form is what works. A single striking image will not hold a viewer: they watch, they are surprised, they scroll on, because there is nowhere to return to. They return to a character they already know, after a few stories together.
For a brand this is an argument to build a mascot and run episodes around it. A mascot starts working once people recognise it without a caption and without a logo.
AI video ideas from six formats
What can be taken into production without a studio budget.
First, three characters and three episodes. One hero does not make a series, ten heroes make nobody recognisable.
Second, a minute. The format fits a feed and Shorts, and the script covers a single conflict.
Third, household stories. Cooking, trade, an argument over something small work in any country.
Fourth, dubbing. One cast can live in several languages, which is the cheap way to grow reach without growing production.
One doubt. All six cases came from China, India and English-language TikTok, each with a different feed, a different episode length and a different speed at which viewers bond with a character. In other markets the format needs a test on your own account, with the foreign numbers kept as a reference point.
Cartoon production with AI: three rules for a series
Character consistency gets settled before episode one: reference sheets, angles, wardrobe, a set of emotions. A hero that shifts between videos turns the series into unrelated pictures, and viewers stop recognising their own.
An episode needs a hook at the end. A minute leaves no room to warm up, so the conflict arrives in the first seconds.
The script comes out of the comments. For the dessert girl a question from the feed became the next episode, while the vegetable family pulls roles out of everyday life.
Volume decides the rest. A series for a brand is its own job: cartoon production starts with three characters and an asset library, vertical video ads run on one template and a predictable cost per unit, and long-form runs belong to an AI YouTube channel. For the reference work behind a stable hero, see our guide on character consistency in AI video.
