Channel Strategist

WHO WE ARE

NIA Production is a YouTube conglomerate. We own, build, and operate our own channels in-house. Every channel we run is ours.

You can see our work at https://www.nia-production.com/

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.

This role is remote, but we need someone who can come to Da Nang, Vietnam for a periodic amount of time per year. NIA covers housing and travel expenses for onsite periods.

THE NETWORK

The Abyssal Network explores the depths of disturbing and obscure topics. The format is the iceberg. Every video starts at the surface with something the viewer has heard of, then descends level by level into material that is darker, rarer, and harder to find, until the viewer ends up somewhere they did not know existed.

Three channels run under it:

1. Abyssal Detective. The flagship. Lost footage, disturbing cases country by country, dark internet mysteries, and the strangest accounts and corners of social media.
2. Abyssal Detective 2. Disasters and accidents. Footage recorded before a disaster, last moments, industrial and workplace accidents, rail and transport accidents, and the incidents that were investigated once and then forgotten.
3. Abyssal Observer. The disturbing side of entertainment. Films, television, and the industry around them: what got made, what got buried, what was withdrawn, and what happened to the people involved.

Abyssal Headquarters on Patreon is the paid layer. The uncensored cuts and the deepest level live there. So packaging on YouTube does two jobs: it earns the click, and it makes a share of the audience want the version YouTube will not host.

RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Topic Strategy and Channel Routing

• Find, evaluate, and greenlight every topic. Each one passes three tests: is there real depth here (enough verified material for a full ladder), does the surface level pull a click from someone who has never heard of us, and does the descent go somewhere the audience cannot easily find on their own. All three must be yes.
• Route each topic by territory. Lost footage, internet mysteries, and strange accounts to Abyssal Detective. Film, television, and entertainment to Abyssal Observer. Disasters, accidents, and last moments to Abyssal Detective 2.
• Decide which series earn a next volume and which are exhausted, and keep all three territories fed through a monthly portfolio review.

2. Story Architecture and Production Direction

• Build the level ladder before a script exists: how many levels, what defines each one. Ordering is about escalation, not about which entry is most graphic. Escalation in our structure means that every single segment needs to be objectively more disturbing than the one before it.
• Brief the team members against the ladder and the creative vision, then review the intro/hook. Does the intro promise a real descent inside 60 seconds, does every level earn its place, is the tone restrained where the material is heaviest. Did the whole video actually execute the creative vision planned for that specific video?

3. Accuracy and Editorial Standards

• Be the verification gate. Every segment traces to a real source: reporting, court and inquest records, accident and safety investigations, archives, trade and broadcast records, or footage with a traceable origin. Anything unverified is cut or labelled as unverified inside the video.
• Own the line on real people. Abyssal Detective 2 deals with real deaths, named victims, and families who are still alive. You decide what is shown, what is only described, which recent tragedies we avoid entirely, and how final moments are handled. Written down, applied consistently.
• Own the monetization call: how a heavy entry gets covered, what leaves the YouTube cut for Patreon, and when a topic is not worth the risk at all.

4. Packaging Coordination

• You own the title and the promise, locked before the script is written. The senior packaging designer owns the thumbnail, its visual direction, and the testing.
• Brief them on the angle and what the video is actually selling, then give creative input on their concepts. Your review question is one thing: does this packaging promise the video we are making?
• When a test fails, diagnose it with them. You own the editorial half of that answer, they own the execution half.

5. Performance, Systems, and Team

• After every video, read CTR, retention level by level, comment sentiment, sharing, and Patreon conversion, then apply what you learned to the next ladder.
• Turn what works into a written playbook: the topic filter, the ladder rules, the verification standard, the editorial lines. The pipeline should not live only in your head.
• Work with and manage senior writers, designers, editors, etc. throughout the whole production cycle. Coordinate with the producer, who is responsible for the logistics. You are in charge of the creative vision.
• Review predicted performance vs. actual video performance after being posted and note reasoning.

WHAT THIS ROLE IS NOT

This is about the kind of person you are, not just the tasks.

• You do not think darker automatically means better. You understand that the descent is the product and that a graphic entry in the wrong place breaks it.
• You are not a list maker. You are not here to collect entries and stack them. You build an arc out of them. If a video could be reordered at random without losing anything, you failed.
• You do not let a good story survive a bad source. If it cannot be verified, it is cut or labelled. You do not keep an entry because the level is better with it.
• You are not squeamish, and you are not numb. You can spend hours in accident footage, inquest reports, and the worst corners of the internet without flinching and without losing your judgment about how to treat the real people in it. Restraint here is an editorial skill, not a personality trait.
• You do not treat your own taste as fact. A retention curve can prove you wrong. You accept it when it does.
• You are not a lone wolf. You do not make yourself valuable by being the only one who understands the system. You build so someone else can run it.
• You are not an order-taker. You do not wait for a brief. You come in with a point of view and you can defend it.

REQUIREMENTS

Must-Have:

• Demonstrated understanding of YouTube content strategy: topic selection, title and thumbnail packaging, retention on long-form video, and what separates a video that performs from one that does not.
• Strong editorial instinct for escalation and pacing. This format lives or dies on whether the descent feels real. You need to be able to feel when a level is out of order.
• Obsessive attention to factual accuracy, and the discipline to cut or label anything you cannot source.
• Working knowledge of YouTube's advertiser friendly guidelines, plus practical experience keeping sensitive content monetized.
• Ability to read channel analytics (CTR, impressions, retention curves, audience retention by segment) well enough to judge what a video actually taught you.
• Comfort working with primary material: accident and safety investigation reports, inquest and court records, archive catalogues, broadcast and film records, and footage of uncertain origin that has to be traced.
• Ability to run a pipeline at volume (8 videos per month across three channels) without quality degrading. Systems thinking, not just creative instinct.
• Ability to direct writers, researchers, editors, and designers, and to give notes that are specific enough to act on.
• Self-directed. You receive the brand bible, the team, and the tools. You drive the pipeline independently.
• Proactive growth mindset. Be proactive and obsessed with self-improvement, pushing to get better each day.
• You genuinely enjoy hard challenges. You are the kind of person who is drawn to that rather than worn down by it.

Nice-to-Have:

• Lost media or internet mystery research background or interest: archive digging, reverse image and footage tracing, following a thread across dead forums and dead links
• Genuine familiarity with the iceberg format and the channels that do it well.
• Background in data-driven YouTube strategy: topic mining, outlier identification, format testing.

RESULTS

Success in this role is measured by:

• CTR and average view duration on the videos you greenlight climb and hold, not spike once.
• Retention does not collapse at level transitions. The back half of your videos keeps people.
• Zero fabricated or unverified entries published as fact. Every claim in a published video can be traced to a source on request.
• Videos ship monetized. Limited-ad and age-restriction rates stay low without the content getting soft.
• No takedowns, strikes, or family and estate complaints caused by how a real victim was handled. When a call is close, it was made deliberately and it was written down.
• All three territories stay fed. No channel goes quiet because the topics were easier to find somewhere else.
• The pipeline holds 8 videos a month across three channels without quality slipping.
• Patreon conversion grows alongside views, not just views alone.
• Series decisions are made early: proven series get extended, dead ones get killed before they cost us an upload slot.
• A written playbook exists that someone else on the team could run, and it explains why the format looks the way it does.
• You communicate clearly, coordinate well, surface problems early, and take ownership of whatever is assigned to you, including testing new formats and helping train the team.