YouTube Researcher

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 ----------

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.

WHY THIS ROLE EXISTS
Every video we make starts with a case worth telling. 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.
Our channels in this category, and the direct competitors we benchmark against:
Chilling Scares
Nick Crowley
Farrel McGuire
You will be expected to know this landscape well enough to tell instantly whether an idea has already been used.

HOW THIS ROLE WORKS
Each assignment follows the same cycle:
Brief. You receive a topic plus reference videos that establish the tone and style to match.
Scouting (24 hours). You deliver 35 to 40 segments per topic using our template. Rough but smart. For each one you prove four things: the case is real, it is genuinely unsettling, there is enough usable footage to build around, and your links plus timestamps let us verify it in minutes.
Green-light. We approve 30 or more segments from your batch.
Handoff. Approved segments go to our deep-dive researcher, who builds the full package. You may get short follow-up questions, then you move to the next topic.
Feedback. You act on notes fast, so each segment batch needs fewer feedback than the last.

RESPONSIBILITIES
Find the segments. 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. Each topic needs 35 to 40 segments that are genuinely different from each other, so we get real options instead of one idea in eleven variations.
Check that they hold up. Three things have to be true 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. Screening against Nexpo, Nick Crowley, and Farrel McGuire is your job, not ours.
Judge whether it will work on screen. A strong story with 20 seconds of usable video is not a segment. You need at least 2 to 3 minutes of core footage, and you need to be able to say what the specific ---------- nt is that makes it land for a viewer.
Deliver it clean and on time. 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 are not building the full source package, the timeline, or the script beats. You prove a segment is worth that 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 us 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

Must-Have:
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. Clear written communication, 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. Hard to fake, obvious when it is genuine.

RESULTS
Success in this role is measured by:
Your approval rate climbs and holds. Most of what you send is usable, rather than most of it being filtered out by us.
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, whether that is a claim that does not check out or footage that turns out to be unusable.
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.

APPLICATION

We require a simple test project to gauge fit for the role. It is one topic, and it is the only reliable way for us to see how you actually hunt, since a CV cannot tell us whether you can find what is not on the first page of Google.