Your Content Will Probably Never Make Money
Your content will probably never become a business or make money. Many of you are putting thousands of hours into creating all these videos, and in most cases you're going to make zero dollars, or close to it. You're not even going to break even — the money you spend on everything you need to do your content generally will not even cover what you earn. This is a wake-up call to reality, and if you do want to make money as a content creator, you're going to need to do some specific things and know how that works.
I've been thinking about this because I dated a content creator for a few weeks. Well, she says she's a content creator, but she's not making any money. She quit her corporate job, has a little side hustle doing some contract labor, and then she spends all this time creating these videos on Instagram. They're nice videos — although technically I've never watched one myself, because I don't have Instagram. I told her, "Tell me all your analytics." She said, "Well, I'm getting hundreds of thousands of views." And I said, "What? You have an average of like a 30-second watch time." So she's getting hundreds of thousands of views, people are watching an average of 30 seconds, and that's about 50,000 — call it, generously, 60,000 — minutes of people watching. Meanwhile, the time she puts into her content in a month adds up to about a thousand hours. The problem is that getting 30 seconds of time from random people does not generally add up to making any money.
If you want to make some real money online, one of the easiest ways to start is to solve a real problem for people and then offer coaching. You can start up immediately with that — you need something to sell. The problem with that is you need to demonstrate your authority, which often takes certain signals and a lot of work just to even get to the point of selling something.
The Reality of the Grind
If you want to make ad revenue — which is a great way to monetize — consider my situation. I have a couple of channels on YouTube I just started. I deleted everything before that because I got so burned out on content creation myself last year, in 2025. I'd been a content creator full time for over a decade, and it's such a grind. You have to do certain things if you want to get paid, and you will be getting $0 back if you don't do those things and act how you're supposed to act. A lot of people get in, they see people like me who've done this full time for a decade, and they think, "I'm going to just do what he does." Well, if you want what I have, you've got to do at least some of what I do. And what I do is get people to spend a lot of time watching my content.
Think less about number of views, especially on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook, where "views" are pretty worthless. Having somebody watch 30 seconds of a video is not enough to get a critical level of reaction and emotional investment, and if you don't get that level of emotional investment, you're not going to be able to monetize at all. So many of you are spending your time on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube Shorts trying to get all these views, but you're not going to make any money doing that — especially if you've checked the analytics and you're not getting paid. This woman I went out with didn't even realize it was possible to just get paid directly off your videos. I get paid directly off my videos on YouTube, and YouTube, to me, is the number one platform if you want to be a professional creator. The number one way to get paid is to make long-form videos that solve real problems for people, and what you're going to need for that is a lot of watch time. Consider the example from this woman: hundreds of thousands of views is far above average, but it was making her $0 a month, and she didn't even have any prospects on the horizon for how to earn from it. Now, if she had continued wanting to date me, I'd have been happy to show her all this information. Instead, I'll just put it out for free to everybody.
What a Channel That Prints Money Looks Like
Here's what you really need if you want to get paid. Take a channel I made 130-some days ago on YouTube. On the surface, with 57,000 views, you might think someone getting hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok or Instagram would be making a lot more money. But no — this channel just prints money, and I started it up from scratch in March. The viewership and the watch hours immediately went to something very consistent. In the last 28 days, this channel — one of my six channels — has 5,000 watch hours. That's because what you need is people watching and spending time on your videos. My videos on this channel average five and a half minutes per view, and if you do some math, that's ten times as much per viewer as having someone watch 30 seconds of an Instagram video or a TikTok video.
What YouTube doesn't make so obvious is the impressions. While this channel has 50,000 views, it has 520,000 purely organic impressions — meaning my videos were seen 520,000 times on YouTube on this channel in the last 28 days. Over the last 90 days, 1.6 million times. I also tested the strategy of not doing anything — just doing live streams and taking about a week off — and the numbers dropped right away. That's a valuable lesson with content creation: you've got to continue to create all the time. You need to be prepared to just grind out content endlessly like it's a job, and if you can't grind out enough content in about three or four hours a day to fully monetize and to get a serious amount of attention, then you're not going to be able to do this full time.
For example, that's why I don't edit my videos — it takes too much time — and therefore I've just learned to speak off the top of my head. This woman I was dating spends all this time editing her videos, but then she's not getting any money back out of that. I told her, "You've got to stop editing your videos, or let me use AI to edit your videos." You need to get more content done faster, and then you need to monetize it.
Obviously, if you're going to monetize, the easiest thing to do is have it set up so you can just make ad revenue. Keep in mind, it takes me less than an hour a day to throw a video up on this channel, which brings in about $10 a day in ad revenue. For example, yesterday I made a video — "Reading the Bible Changed How I See the ICP Price Chart" — a 15-minute video that took me 30 minutes of actual time. So if I make $10 a day in ad revenue, that's about $20 an hour to make a video. However, that is just the ad revenue on YouTube alone. What you're going to need is a lot of additional monetization.
Sponsorships, Super Fans, and Depth
What this channel does is give me the chance for sponsorships. On the same basic channel I had before — before I deleted it — I got a $25,000 sponsorship in 2024. That changes the math quite a bit on my channel. With sponsorships, if you have an audience on YouTube, what people care about are your views and especially your watch time, because when you've got people spending thousands of hours watching your content, those are dedicated, loyal viewers who keep coming back to your videos over and over again. On one recent video of mine, 86% of the casual viewers had already seen a video from me before — regular viewers take a bit more time to build, but those casual viewers already trust me. That makes sponsorships very valuable.
What you need to develop an audience is super fans: people who watch your content, and you're generally going to need people to watch hours of your content. That's hard to do if you're doing little short videos. It's hard to do with vertical videos unless you go gigantic and just get a huge, huge audience — and that's difficult to do unless you're pushing certain narratives and doing the most clickbait crap you can imagine, which takes a lot of effort and experience, generally, to get right. So one of the easiest ways to monetize is to first put your content in the right place in the right format: YouTube horizontal videos are the right place and the right format.
I'm on my way to having my third brand-new YouTube channel monetized — my third channel created in the last four months. I need another couple thousand watch hours, and I've already gotten a lot of those, 500-plus of them; it just hasn't caught up yet. There's another channel where I'm doing vlogs: 12,000 views, a thousand watch hours. On the surface that might look equal to — actually, it's far superior to — hundreds of thousands of views on Instagram or TikTok, because these are people who often have watched a lot of hours of content. That probably represents about 500 people who've watched two hours of my content. It is going to be much better to have 500 people watch two hours of your content than to have 100,000 people watch 30 seconds of your content, because 500 people putting in two hours is depth — and what you need to make money is depth. You need super fans. You need people ready to pay you. That vlog channel has 168,000 impressions, 11,000 views, and again an average view duration of five minutes.
So what do you do once you have a real audience? This is why I have six YouTube channels, and I put a video out on every channel every day. Then I try to put some shorts out and do some live streams also. Yesterday I uploaded 17 videos — 185 minutes of content. Nine videos the day before — 114 minutes of content. Thirteen videos the day before that, with somehow also 114 minutes of content. This is what it's really like to be a content creator. I've published 410 videos since May 18th: 5.3 videos a day, 75 minutes of video a day.
Quantity Plus Depth Equals Sponsorships
What you need to do is just crank out a quantity of videos in the format that will get people to watch consistently and build depth. Once you build depth with people, you're going to be in a great position to get sponsorships, where companies will come to you and say, "We'll give you $25,000 to consistently promote our brand over the next several months."
Why Community Is the Best Way to Monetize
The other thing that's fantastic for monetization is to build a community. Community is valuable because people are missing a sense of belonging. People want someone to identify with. If you've watched hours of my videos, then we should have a two-way relationship, because the problem with content creation is that it's one-directional: I'm just talking, and I don't get to see you. And being a content creator, interacting with all the comments — especially when you start getting the level of attention I've got — takes on a life of its own. I've got thousands and thousands of hours of people watching my content. If you add all my channels up, people spend close to 10,000 hours watching my content, and I just started these six channels four months ago from scratch. That's a lot of time. It's also a lot of nasty hater comments, a lot of junk comments, a lot of irrelevant comments, a lot of advice, a lot of suggestions — and a ton of praise and validation.
So what's important is to have a community. You get ad revenue on YouTube, you get sponsorships, and then you can also sell coaching — one-time coaching. But to me, the best thing to do is sell a community as the gateway and then sell private coaching inside the community. To me, one of the best ways to monetize immediately is to set up a community on Skool, which is why I've created the Jerry Banfield Family. Community is important because you bring together all those people who spend hours and hours watching your content into one single group. Then there's a sense of belonging, then there are two-way relationships, and then there are even three-way relationships, where you get to know me, I get to know you, and then we get to know the other people in there as well. I'm grateful I've just started this community within the last month. The best strategy is to put a really cheap price on it to get people in the door, because you've got to get those first 100 or so members into your community — then you can raise the price if you want. And I offer coaching at escalated tiers, like premium and VIP tiers.
Get a Mentor Who Tells You the Truth
If you want to be a content creator online, you need a mentor who has done this full time and can cut through all the BS and hopium and say: look, most of you are going to put a bunch of time into content creation only to realize you totally wasted your time. So join the Jerry Banfield Family, get in there, show me what you're doing, and I'll look at it and give you the truth about what you need to do and what you need to change. I'll be happy to watch some of your videos if they're on YouTube — I don't have any of the other platforms. See how this works from the inside, and then you will have a better chance at replicating it yourself.
I guess I do have X, but I don't watch much on that, and you shouldn't be a creator on X. YouTube is the place to be a content creator — it's why everything I share in my YouTube Coaching playlist centers on it. In my experience, Instagram is for amateurs who are mostly wasting their time. And TikTok is a viable platform, but you've got to do what the algorithm demands, and often that's going to be live streaming and selling stuff.