This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
Chasing Views, Hitting Burnout
The frustration grew so heavy that I began resenting the fact that I even had more than one YouTube channel. The Jerry Banfield Live channel—rebranded from my crypto channel—was doing so poorly that I eventually gave up on it. After a few weeks, I deleted the whole channel and went all in on my original one.
That original channel, the one I had my silver plaque for, the one that had once defined my identity online, seemed cursed. Somewhere along the way, YouTube had shadow-banned me. I didn’t have proof, because YouTube never tells you if they’ve done something like that, but the numbers told me enough. Even when I did something outrageous—like live-streaming changing my race—the video barely got 12,000 views. Before the shadow ban, something like that would have pulled in hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions.
I didn’t know if it was because I had been posting nine videos a day in 2019, or because I ran five-day-long music streams in 2017, or if YouTube had simply decided that I was a “naughty boy” who deserved to be buried. Maybe it was just the algorithm punishing me for having a huge variety of subscribers who had stopped watching, dragging down my overall viewer satisfaction score. Maybe it was something manual, some switch flipped by someone inside the company. Whatever the reason, my views were drastically lower than they should have been. Videos that easily pulled 5,000 or 10,000 views on my crypto channel would limp along at 500 on my main one.
I tried harder. I pushed out up to six long-format videos every day and as many as 20 shorts. I threw everything at it—autobiography shorts, crypto shorts, music shorts. I started playing this game called Blue Prince, which was fun as hell and seemed like the kind of thing I could build momentum with. Other creators were blowing up on it, and I thought maybe I could too. I posted at least 20 shorts about it as well as some long format videos but nothing worked. Nothing gave me the views or the money I thought I deserved.
By this point, I was only making a few thousand dollars a month, despite pouring nearly all my time and energy into YouTube. The burnout hit a new level. It reminded me of the very last thing I did on Facebook before deleting my page with millions of followers where previously I had said I would never stream Warzone on Facebook again. Yet, out of sheer desperation for views, I streamed Warzone just to try and feel something again. The shame hit me instantly afterward, and I deleted the Facebook page. It was the only way I knew how to stop being that pathetic.
YouTube ended the same way. My last three days of being “all in” were spent live-streaming Warzone solos on my original channel. I wanted one more shot at winning on the new Verdansk map. I had seen that the game now used bots, which made solos surprisingly fun. Just a week earlier, I had uploaded a video saying Warzone sucked and no one should bother with it. Then I played it and, to my surprise, it was fun again. So I dove back in, streaming for hours.
The rush was unreal. I hadn’t played first-person shooters in over a year. I had been sticking to strategy games like Blue Prince and card games. Jumping back into Warzone hit me like a drug. It felt like what I imagined meth or cocaine must feel like—this jittery, high, euphoric, aggravated state. I’d never done those drugs, but that’s what it felt like in my body. For three days, I binged Call of Duty: Warzone. One of those days, I even broke it up with a two-hour crypto podcast in the middle of a seven-hour stream, five of those hours just grinding Warzone solos.
On the third day, the last game I played, I came in second place. I had done everything right in terms of strategy, but my skills were rusty. I hadn’t played enough games recently, and my aim wasn’t sharp. The final fight was against someone who either had insane skill or was cheating, and they shredded me. Losing that match crushed me, but what scared me more was what came next.
I almost rationalized skipping my children’s theater show. They had been in a summer camp all week in St. Petersburg, Florida, and the big performance was that afternoon. I told myself it wouldn’t matter if I was there. My ex-wife and her family would be there, so who would notice? I had already played three hours of Warzone that day, but I was itching for more. If I skipped the show, I could squeeze in another two hours and maybe finally get that win.
Thankfully, some tiny shred of self-awareness stopped me. I turned off the stream and went to the kids’ show. Sitting there, I felt hollow. Depressed. It was the same empty, used up feeling I’d had decades earlier, back when I went out on a date with that girl from the grocery store after binging video games all day. I had burned myself out before the real moment even arrived. All my dopamine and adrenaline had been spent in front of a screen, and I had nothing left to feel good with.
On the drive home, a car pulled out in front of me, and I leaned on the horn. Then, instead of blaming them, I thought: “Of course you’re acting that way. You just spent 10 hours playing Warzone in the past couple of days. It makes sense you would be acting this way.”
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Games playlist.