The Content Creator Delusion
If you're creating content, you are operating in a bit of a delusional environment where you think you're just going to upload videos and somehow make money doing this. I have friends who are getting millions of views on Instagram and getting zero dollars back monetizing that. They don't even realize what they need to do. I try to tell them: you need to get your videos on YouTube, and you need to make a business system. And they don't do it. I dated a woman who quit her corporate job to focus on doing content. She spends hours every day working on content and makes zero dollars. So many people are operating under this idea that if they just keep uploading videos, they'll make money.
I'm here to tell you — I've been doing content creation full time since 2012, which is 14 years — you're utterly delusional if you think you're just going to upload videos and make money without a clear business system, and without doing the things you need to do to make money. Content creation has become the new nine to five, except unlike a nine to five, it doesn't pay most of the people who do it. As someone who's making thousands of dollars a month just uploading videos online, I am unusual.
Find Someone Who's Already Doing It
The easiest thing you can do, if you really want to make money with content creation, is find someone who's already doing it who can help you. I've got the easiest thing set up anywhere, because I want to make it super easy — and easily affordable — to help you. If you're a content creator, I believe it's the best money you can spend in content creation. I just launched this community because, to me, if you want to make money with content creation, the foundation of what you need to sustain it is a community — a community of people who care about your videos. I set up my Skool community in the last month, and I had all kinds of other systems before it and sold online courses. But to me, the future of monetizing content is going toward communities, and right now Skool is one of the best places to host a community, which is why I'm hosting mine there — you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and be part of it. I'm grateful somebody new has joined every day for the last four days.
If you want to do content creation, you need somebody to look at your content and give you feedback, and I'm happy to do that. You go into the community and you post what you're doing. For example, this woman I dated showed me her Instagram, and I said, look, you're getting hundreds of thousands of views — but how long are people watching? She said about 30 seconds. I told her: you need to get people watching longer and making a deeper connection with you, and the way to do that is YouTube. YouTube is a platform for professional creators, plus you can get people to actually watch your content. You can use your shorts to get discovered. But ultimately, if you want to make money creating content, you need to have depth.
Depth Beats Shallow, Transactional Content
Most content is shallow and transactional, and that only works if you can get the masses to watch. If you want to make content based on shallow, transactional entertainment that doesn't build a relationship with people — that doesn't build the desire for people to want to join your community or pay you for coaching — then you've got to get huge quantities of people to watch. And if you're going to do that, you need to push certain narratives and certain types of videos, which most content creators, once they find out exactly what's required, will find kind of gross and not want to do. Think about the most sensational creators you see right now — think about the things they promote and the way they do their videos. That often takes a lot of skill and teamwork to even get done. It takes getting yourself in the right circles and paying for it — paying the right people for coaching.
If you're not going to do that, then you're stuck with your main value proposition: you get out here and create videos that help people. And if you're going to help people, you usually need to have depth with people. Depth means you need to make super fans — people who spend hours and hours watching your content. That's hard to do with shallow posts on X, or Instagram Reels, or TikTok, or Facebook videos. You can have someone watch 30 seconds of your video every day for a month, and if they've done that, they've only spent 15 minutes in a whole month watching your videos. It's hard to make much of a connection with somebody doing that. What you want to do instead is make videos where one single viewer could watch 15 minutes in a single session.
Community First, Coaching as the Upsell
One of the best ways to make money is having a community. To me, this should be the foundation for content creators, which is why my community is my primary offer instead of coaching. But one of the easiest ways to make lots of money — thousands of dollars a month — is actually to sell coaching. You need to be an authority for that, and coaching can be very seasonal: you can make ten-plus thousand dollars one month and make a thousand the next, depending on the algorithm and all that. What you want to do is help people with something, and coaching is a great way to do that.
I've had videos in the past where people watched one single video of mine that they spent 15 minutes watching, and then they paid $300 to talk to me for one single hour on Zoom. That is what you want to be doing as a content creator. But think about the problem I had to solve for them. In many of those cases, I was trashing garbage cryptocurrencies, and then they would pay to have me go through and audit their whole crypto portfolio. I was solving a very specific, painful problem, and I was one of the only honest people out there sharing stuff like that. I still have my Crypto Reviews channel where I do the same thing every day, and that channel just prints hundreds of dollars every month in ad revenue, and it generates coaching calls.
But it's very seasonal. Right now, crypto is in a down market, which means even though that channel has gotten 156,000 organic views — and that's quite a lot of watch time, tens of thousands of hours people have spent — it has generated very few one-on-one calls in the last few months, because the market is down and everybody feels bad. Then when the bull market comes through, or when people get into the market, my calendar just fills up with people spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars for calls, and I'll make five, ten-plus thousand dollars in a single month from people all scheduling calls.
That's why, to me, coaching is something you ideally want to sell as a part of a community. The community is your consistent monetization, and then inside my community I have upsells to coaching, and I sell the coaching via direct message. That way, somebody in crypto, where the market's down, can join affordably right now, and then when they get all excited and want me to review their whole portfolio, they can just DM me and I'll send them a link to schedule a call with me. And sponsorships are another serious way to make money.
If You're Not Getting Paid, You're Getting Pimped
If you are thinking you're going to make money later, most of the time you're not. Because if you're not on track to be getting deep connections and deep investment from an audience — an audience watching a lifetime of your videos and being super fans — then you're not going to be able to sell a community, you're not going to be able to sell coaching, and you're not going to be able to get sponsorships or ad revenue. And those are the main ways you're going to monetize. You need a business system if you're going to be a content creator.
The worst part is that if you're just creating content and not getting paid, you are putting all your time and energy — which is really valuable — into something that's building value for someone else. All the time people put into doing videos on Instagram that they don't get paid for, they're building the value of Instagram as a company. You're draining yourself for it. You're telling yourself you're doing something useful. But the way I look at it, you're getting pimped. That's what's really happening. If you're not getting paid for your content, you're getting pimped: you are out there tricking and giving away something that's valuable, and you're getting nothing in return for it while your pimp takes everything. That is a bad deal.
So if you're a content creator, it's time to come out of the delusion and say: look, I'm here to make a business system out of this. And in order to have a business system, you need to offer some serious value and help people with hard problems they're having — not just do interviews, or just talk with people, or just share your opinions.
The One Kind of Content Worth Doing for Free
Now, there is value in creating a vlog, which is why I have my Jerry Banfield channel where I just create a vlog. I think if you're going to create content, the one thing you should do is create a vlog — a vlog where you tell what's going on in your life every day — and don't even worry about monetizing it. Creating the vlog, for me, is something that's good for me to do. It's good for me to talk about my life and to admit the mistakes I made — like, I shouldn't have messaged this woman at 6:48 a.m. It's good for me to share my real, authentic life like that, and it's good for the viewers to get some real human stories. These are real human stories about my life, and I would love to watch more people's vlogs like this. It can be difficult to even find someone else doing vlogs just like this, because people get sucked into trying to make money and do all this other stuff, and you can't even tell they're just describing their life. So a vlog, to me, is the one kind of content that's worth doing even if you don't make any money off it.
But it is kind of delusional to think you're just paid to exist. If you really want to get paid, you need to be helping people solve difficult problems. The main channels I get paid from are my two crypto channels. And why? Because my crypto channels solve very hard problems: people are investing huge amounts of money in crypto, and mostly losing it and wasting their time.
Solve Specific, Hard Problems
My channel shows that, in my opinion, there's one crypto that doesn't suck and everything else is a waste of time. I cut through huge amounts of BS in crypto and save people a lot of money. I show them the one crypto I've come to believe is valuable and that they need to know about, and then I go through and review all these other junk cryptos and help people see how they're just being ripped off and being lied to on all these other coins. So if you want to get paid as a content creator, you need to be helping people solve very specific, hard problems.
AI Is Already Putting Surface-Level Creators Out of Business
And it's getting more and more difficult with AI, because AI is eliminating the need for lots of content creation. I can just go into ChatGPT and generate a thumbnail, I can talk to ChatGPT about all my video ideas, and I can ask ChatGPT all kinds of questions. For example, I went through with ChatGPT and did a lot of work on my dating profile. I sent in all these different pictures and did a whole bunch of stuff with my dating profile in ChatGPT. And that means I don't need to watch these dudes on YouTube who are telling me what I should do with my dating profile, because ChatGPT is looking through my actual profile and my actual pictures, giving me real feedback right now, and telling me exactly what to do. That eliminates the need to watch a whole lot of content. And even though the AI doesn't always get it quite right — sometimes it's delusional or messes up — it eliminates the need to watch most surface-level content. So if you're making surface-level content, the AI is already putting you out of business.
Therefore, you need to make deep content that really resonates with people, and then offer people a sense of belonging and personalized help and coaching. And when you've got a community like that, you have a chance to monetize — especially as this community I've just started gets over hundreds and hundreds of members. As I get together everybody who really cares about my content, that makes me more and more attractive to sponsors. It allows me to cross-promote all my videos better and monetize all my channels instead of just my crypto ones.
I'm in a position where I am making thousands of dollars a month now, just starting off from four channels in the last four months, and I'm in a position to keep making thousands and thousands of more dollars every month. Because I solve clear problems. I have depth with my viewers. I give my viewers a place to build an actual relationship with me, instead of just having this surface-level, transactional entertainment.
Why I Watch My Community's Content
Almost all the content I watch is from people who are following me, and that's part of why I've set the community up. As a content creator myself, it's very important to be careful about what content I take in. If I take in junk entertainment and transactional content on YouTube, I tend to put the same kind of content out. But the more I just watch content that all of you create — where you've shared what you're doing to get my attention — the better I know my audience, and my content becomes laser focused. These last few videos I've made are because I know people in real life doing content creation, and these are videos for them, essentially.
Look: you're delusional about your content making money. You are wasting your time. You're not going to make money later unless you know exactly what it takes, and you're doing it. You're not just going to upload videos, get views, and make money unless you're one of the top 1% — unless there are certain little things, or narratives, or things about your personality that just completely align with the algorithm. So 99 times out of 100, you're not just going to upload content and get paid. I even see some people who are uploading a lot of content and getting a lot of views, and they're still not getting paid.
This is what it takes to get paid online. So get in there, join the Jerry Banfield Family, and let me get to know you.
And if you want to keep going deeper on building a real business system around your videos, I share everything I've learned from 14 years of doing this full time in my YouTube Coaching playlist.