After five thousand plus videos uploaded to YouTube since 2011, I finally understand one really important thing. YouTube is a quantity game. And the main thing you have got to watch out for is burnout. Just trying to upload quality videos, stay in one niche, and be a coach is not sustainable for most people. You will get bored and you will quit. I know, because I have done it. And if you want to go viral, a lot of the time it stinks. You will get a bunch of negative attention. It will feel awful.
The way I have found to make YouTube sustainable is to just grind out as many videos as you can and then bring people to a community, the way I do with mine on Skool. If you are reading this and you want that kind of home base for yourself, come join the Jerry Banfield Family with us and see how it works from the inside. Then only pay attention to what the people in your community are saying. If you are uploading videos, it does not matter what all the random comments say, because those people have nothing invested in you. You do not even know if they are real people. They may be bots, or they may be haters sent over by a competitor. The only people you need to listen to are the ones who are actually willing to support you as a creator.
The mistake I made chasing money and views
One of the biggest mistakes I made uploading all those videos in the past was focusing so much on just making money rather than having fun, and so much on raw quantity of views rather than building a group of 100 to 1,000 true fans who absolutely love my content. When you read tens of thousands of negative comments hating on every single thing you do, it really adds up and it can leave you feeling like everything you create is crap.
And if you depend on YouTube by itself, the algorithm can leave you behind. You always want to bring people somewhere off of YouTube as your main gathering place. But I do not believe in selling a course anymore these days. I made that mistake after I started blowing up on YouTube in 2015, when I sent everybody off to buy all these online courses. The problem with the courses is that they did not do a good job of creating community.
Proof of human is the whole point now
With AI cranking out content faster than ever today, soon AI will be able to make a video just about like the ones I make. There are already a bunch of niches full of fake videos from someone who has just had AI post them automatically and generate them. You are already seeing it across coaching and self help, all these AI videos coming out. What you want with your videos is real proof of a human being.
To do that, I have been able to upload five thousand plus videos to YouTube by hardly editing any of them. You just want to get your videos out and have your raw, authentic, fun humanity in there, so that when people watch, they know you are not a bot and they know you are not reading off some script. I am literally talking off the top of my head. I have OBS running in the background and I am just talking, because I know this material cold. I have uploaded so many videos that I have had all of my videos trained into one custom AI, because I cannot even remember all the stuff I have filmed.
After uploading five thousand videos, I realized one of the easiest things to do. If you see a video working in your niche, like the YouTube coaching niche, I just take somebody else's title and film my own version of it, maybe modify the title slightly, make my own version of a thumbnail, and copy what I see working. But do not get locked into one niche. If you are going to do YouTube full time, you do need to pay the bills, but you want to pay the bills in a way that is sustainable. You do not want to just do anything to get views.
What selling out cost me
There were times when I sold out, when I just did anything to get views. That led straight to burnout and to feeling like crap about my own work. I accepted slimy crypto sponsorships. I sold online courses on subjects I did not even know how to teach, because I had paid somebody else to create the course and then I marketed it. Then I had all these followers on YouTube following me for stuff I do not know how to do, and I could not create anything without paying that guy to make more and more videos. I had videos go viral playing video games I actually hated playing.
When you are uploading, it is important that as a creator you show up even when you hate it. I deleted all of my videos on YouTube last year because I was so frustrated and burnt out that I did not love what I was doing anymore. But I realize now that is fine. It does not matter if you hate doing YouTube. If you are as good at it as I am, you just keep doing it anyway. If you are at some job, you are going to hate it sometimes no matter what you do. I remember Andre Agassi's book Open, where he says, I hate playing tennis, I do not want to play tennis. I feel that way about YouTube sometimes. But I just show up and create now, and I have 5,000 videos because I filmed on good days, on bad days, and on ugly days. I filmed when I could not stand to film, and I filmed when I was so excited to film.
This morning I could not wait to film. What inspires me is seeing the junk other people make. I watch other people's videos and I think, I am going to make my own version of that and it is going to be better. Maybe it is not better according to most people. But quantity is not subjective. Nobody is going to debate that I have uploaded five thousand plus videos to YouTube. You can debate whether my videos are quality or not, but quantity is critical as a content creator.
The numbers I actually run
If you want to take content creation seriously, do not tell me you are going to upload three videos a week and that it is going to be your full time income. In my opinion that is naive and ridiculous. Look at my spreadsheet and how many videos I crank out every week. I filmed 16 videos yesterday. I filmed 25 videos the day before. This is the third video I am filming today, and it is not even eight o'clock in the morning yet. I grind out videos no matter what is happening. When I have my kids, I grind out videos when they are not here. When they are here, I hang out with them and I generate my next titles and thumbnails, so that as soon as I step into the studio, bam, we are just doing videos.
If you want to make your videos faster, AI makes it so much easier. AI just grinds out thumbnails. I have tried doing my own little ghetto thumbnails and they are terrible compared to AI. AI thumbnails get higher click through rates. AI thumbnails are colorful. The one for this took a minute to generate with AI, and I generated about 10 of them back to back this morning, first thing when I got up.
If you want to take YouTube seriously, from what I have lived through, you should be prepared to upload 5,000 videos. I started six brand new channels this year and I have now uploaded 467 videos since May 18th. I have a half million views on those videos and all of my metrics are accelerating. Most of my watch time is up anywhere from 10 to a hundred plus percent over the last month. I have two channels monetized already. I am close to getting the third channel monetized, I just need the watch hours I have already earned to catch up. This YouTube coaching channel is on the way to being the fourth monetized channel. I have a dating channel and a gaming channel that are on the way to being monetized too. I am on my way to having six monetized channels by the end of the year or soon thereafter, within a year of starting from scratch.
I am already making thousands of dollars a month when you add up the ad revenue and the income from the Jerry Banfield Family, plus the people who message me for one on one calls. I have not even had a chance to take any sponsorships yet, because I just started and everything is so new. But I believe I am on my way to getting paid thousands of dollars to have videos sponsored as well. To be clear, this is my own experience and what I expect for myself, not financial advice and not a promise of what will happen for you.
Why I stopped staring at analytics
I know it is all about quantity. You show up, you grind, and you upload again and again, and you get better. The main way I get better is that I try to film and upload faster. From everything I have seen on my own channels, I expect that if you do 5,000 YouTube videos you would be in a very strong position for a full time income, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and millions of views. That is my expectation based on my own numbers, not a guarantee for anyone else. And you probably do not even need to do 5,000. I have a half million views, mostly long form, with about a five minute average watch time per video, and that is on 500 videos, actually less than about 500 when you add in the ones from before I started tracking on that spreadsheet. So if I upload 10 times as many videos, I would personally expect at least five, if not 10 or 20 million more views. The more shorts I crank out, the more views I get, which brings more views to my long form, which brings more people into the Jerry Banfield Family, more one on one calls, more sponsorship opportunities, maybe an invitation to do some coaching, consulting, or public speaking somewhere. All kinds of opportunities come my way. And all I have to do is keep increasing the number of videos I create.
So I focus more on how many videos I am uploading, how fast I am creating, and how I can get these videos out faster. I spend more time getting my numbers of videos out than I spend looking at the analytics. I have learned that after 5,000 videos the analytics do not matter much, because you cannot control them. All you can control is how many videos you are cranking out and how fast you are cranking them out. I make my process as fast as possible. I try to minimize any wasted time, so I do not edit at all unless I am using old livestream gaming footage and having AI edit a two hour livestream down to a 10 minute gaming highlight video. I am doing that on hundreds of old livestreams right now to build a gaming channel from scratch out of old content that is all mine. That puts me in a position to stream and play new games once I already have an audience there.
Six channels feeding one community
What I have learned is that you just need to focus on what you are contributing, and make videos across all different subjects so you do not get bored. Ideally you have a couple of paycheck channels, but ideally all of your channels feed into the same thing. I have six channels and they all feed into the same invitation to join the Family, because of social proof.
Now that we have 25 people in there, and I only started this in the last month, it is easier to get the 26th person than it was to get the fifth person or the sixth person. Some days we have had five people join in a single day. There will be days in the future where probably 10 or 20 people join in one day, and we will get this thing up to hundreds of people. Maybe one day I will have a thousand true fans in there and I will be making tens of thousands of dollars a month directly from the membership, which I expect would be much more than I make in ad revenue. My membership revenue has already equalled and exceeded my ad revenue within the first month of starting it.
These are the essential things I think you need to learn, and you do not need anybody's course for them. These are the most important lessons on YouTube today. And the best thing you can do to get help is to join the Family, introduce yourself, share your YouTube channel, message me, ask questions, and ask for feedback. I have been on YouTube 15 years and I am here to help you.
I hope to see you inside with us. If you want more of this, keep going with my YouTube Coaching playlist, where I keep sharing everything I am learning as I grind these channels up from zero.