I got divorced last year, and since then I've been dating and starting a brand new YouTube dating channel. I've been turning all of my dating stories into content that is quickly building an audience that loves my videos, and that content has been shown 186,000 times already in just the last 28 days on YouTube. Hundreds of thousands of people have seen my dating videos on a brand new channel, and what I'm doing goes against what you see a lot of other people doing. So I'm going to explain this strategy, so that if you're a YouTuber and you want to get the best results with your videos, you can do the same thing.
What I'll do is look at the analytics and the videos and explain my strategy, because what a lot of you are doing is making these generic video titles, and AI can just do that now. What I've done on my dating channel that's special is I make very human videos. So let me look through some of these videos and show you what's worked best, because getting a thousand views on a cold, brand new long-form video is absolutely amazing, and it's bringing people to jerrybanfield.com.
I've also got an option up for YouTube coaching if you want me to help you, and I have dating coaching as well. I've been on YouTube for 15 years. I've built six new channels, gotten millions and millions of impressions, which will soon be called views on YouTube, and I've built up several channels from scratch.
What a brand new dating channel looks like five months in
When I first started this newest channel out, it was getting less than 100 views a day, and then it started getting 100 views a day on average. But this new channel has now gotten 416,000 impressions just since March, which is five months, with an average view duration of four minutes, which is awesome. Plus, I've gotten 18,000 more views on my shorts, and I've got a few thousand views and 50,000 impressions on my livestreams. So this channel is on the way to being my fourth new monetized channel started from scratch this year. At this rate, give it a few more weeks, maybe a month, and this channel is going to be monetized.
If anything, the channel seems to be growing faster on average. The views are down a little bit because of shorts views, but the watch time more than doubled in the last month, views are up more than double, and subscribers are up more than double. So this channel has got nice momentum.
What I'm doing on it that's special: sharing my own story
Most of you, if you're going to start a dating channel, would start a channel that is preaching, that's telling people what to do. And to be sure, I've certainly made some of the first videos on my channel that way, although I did also do "I'd rather get no Hinge matches, my real profile." But this is what a lot of people do with their videos: "Men are missing opportunities." "Men don't stay single." "Why dating apps..." "Do Hinge roses work?" "Why Hinge users..." Men do this, men do that. A lot of the worst videos on my channel have been these more generic sounding videos, where they're tutorials, or they're "study dating instead of suffering through it." They're telling people what to do.
But my best videos are like the one from six days ago that's already gotten 1,400 views. That is a video telling my exact experience. Same thing here: "I spent $350 on Hinge." "I started cold approaching women." And here's a story: "She sent me seven texts when I went quiet, then I ruined it." Now, there's one, "Single men are being lied to about dating," but that's kind of the exception among the top six of these videos. "I thought I was respecting her. She felt rejected." A couple in there are more general videos, but then this one, "She tried to kiss me. I backed away."
So my top videos on this channel have consistently been these story videos, and I've done less of them. More of my videos have been the how-to kind, or "your single life sucks," why things, how things. The best thing that's working on this channel is sharing my authentic stories. I did something. I experienced something. She did something. These are very human.
Your human experience is what AI can't replace
What I'm seeing on YouTube today is that if you want to grow a channel, it needs to offer the most human experience possible. Right now, if you're creating generic self-help kind of videos, like how to do this, what men should do, general statements, AI is able to make videos like that, and almost everybody else is saying the same thing. But when you start sharing your unique human experience, for example "I stopped pretending to be friendly with women," I guarantee you this title works so much better than if I'd have said something like "Stop pretending to be friendly with women" or "Why being friendly with women doesn't work," because that sounds like everybody else's titles and AI can easily generate videos that explain all that stuff.
What's not easy to replace is a real authentic human experience, and what's uncommon is people directly sharing from their own experience. Especially in dating, almost everybody's just reacting to other dating content and telling people what to do. It's uncommon to have somebody that actually says, hey, I did this, then that happened, she did this, and then I did that. That's much more relatable.
That's why on a lot of these videos, when I first started doing more generic videos, the watch time was much lower when people were just seeing my videos and me telling them what to do. My watch-time data gives specific evidence of this. My watch time on earlier videos was often much lower and people were just not even watching, even though some of the videos were shorter. People were not vibing with them that much. I did some livestreams in there, but then I started shifting to an approach of "here's what I did, let me tell you the story," and the average view duration started to go up a lot as people were very interested to hear what I did.
The click-through rate has also gone up. In my analytics, while I was talking about more general experience and grinding out videos, the average click-through rate was like one or two percent. A lot of people weren't even that satisfied with the videos I was making, because they were just more generic, tradable advice. You could just ask ChatGPT and it gives you the same kind of crap. But then I started shifting to making videos talking about my experience and what I did, and the click-through rate goes up on that, too.
One reason the click-through rate goes up when I'm sharing my authentic experience is that it's more unpredictable. It's not so preachy. It's easier to listen to. People are more curious. Whereas when I'm out there just telling people, well, here's what you do, and here's why, and this is about women, and this is about men, it's basically most of the other dating content, and it's boring and transactional. When I'm making videos saying, "I spent $350 on Hinge, then I deleted it again," that's a story. That's my real experience. When I say "I started cold approaching women, it worked immediately," that's a clear story and a clear human experience and a clear curiosity gap. Okay, I want to hear the story of that. Whereas if I put a video out saying, well, you need to cold approach women, here's why, there are a hundred other videos like that already on YouTube. It doesn't stand out.
When you're small, social proof works against you
And then when I start telling someone else what to do, they often are like, what do you know? Who are you? Especially when you're smaller on YouTube, you have the authority of social proof working against you. So if you're a smaller channel on YouTube, your human experience is your hook. That's why, for titling this, it's about my human experience building a brand new dating channel up with my authentic stories.
This is why it's hard to grow channels lots of times, because of the fewer views you have on a video. Sometimes when you start a brand new channel, some of the videos get more views because the channel is brand new. But once that new channel advantage wore off, my videos kind of sucked in terms of the views they were getting for quite a while. Some of those are older, and my newer videos will actually get many more.
Rewriting my own titles as stories
Here's an example of a video I did: "Study dating instead of suffering through it." If I had put the title on this one to say "I started studying dating instead of suffering through it," that's so much better than telling someone else what to do. A lot of people are tired of getting told what to do. Or this one, "How I text before a first date: build anticipation or end it." If I'd titled this video instead "I blew it texting this before a first date," I guarantee you that gets probably double, if not much more than that.
Instead of "Flaking on dating apps," or "Flaking is normal, don't take it personally," if I say "She matched me on Hinge, she was so enthusiastic, she gave me her phone number, and then she flaked on the date," I guarantee you that gets significantly more views. Because the first version is something AI could generate. It's what everybody else is saying. What people are not doing is sharing their actual lived experience.
For example, "Feeling unlovable in dating is a trance you can break." I told a really nice story in that video, but the title essentially hid the story. If I had written the title as "I felt unlovable in dating, and here's how I felt better," or something like that, it tells the story. Same with "Dating a lot doesn't mean you're desperate." I could go back and change some of these titles at this point, but I might as well just make new videos, because I already did thumbnails and it's so easy to make videos. I don't know that it's even worth changing these; I'll just make more. But that one, I guarantee you it gets more views if I say "This woman said I'm desperate because I'm going out on all these dates." It's a story, it's a hook.
Some of these did better, and here's an example of where I started shifting to this: "A single mom ghosted me, my dating coach said send this." In my analytics those videos went 60, 160, 260, and this one 278 views when I made it a story. "Make dating fun again" didn't do as well. Then 337 views on "I spent $10,000 on a dating coach, still single." Very clear, and some of these started getting momentum. This one didn't have as good a story, "I can't date like I did 15 years ago," and I went kind of back to the generic approach after it. And obviously sometimes you can come up with something that works anyway, though that one would probably have worked better if I'd have said "Why I only date average women" or "I'm done dating beautiful women" or something like that.
Stories get views, and they get reactions
That one probably would have worked better; it was a good hook. But then I start sharing my exact experiences and all my videos start to get more views. And then something else happens: somebody actually reacts to my dating content. The more you do generic things like "Women go crazy for average men who do this," the less likely people are to react to it, same as something like "You can't find love while trying not to get hurt." Some of those actually dipped in views compared to the ones that were taking off.
Then look at how "I thought I was respecting her, she felt rejected" took off. Or "I deleted Hinge three times. Here's my profile." These started to kick off. But not only that, people started reacting to these videos as well. Podcasts and another channel started reacting to my dating videos, because when I start telling my own stories, that gets attention and that gets reactions. When I'm just doing what feels like AI-generated how-to content these days, with generic clickbait titles and hooks, that doesn't draw reactions that often either.
But when I start doing videos like my newest ones, "I went out with 20 women in 2026," "Dating's broken, men need to fix it," "I'm learning to let women wonder if I like them," "I was better at dating before I tried to be nice," "I stopped pretending to be friendly," I did this, people are reacting to these a lot more. That then gets me free views additionally and brings in new viewers to my channel from other channels.
Why this matters if you're building from scratch
I've shared this to help you see that if you want to build a channel from scratch, this to me is essential to get a nice foundation. As you get bigger and you have more perceived social authority, you can change more to telling people what to do. But still, in most cases, telling stories is harder to replace, easier to stand out with, and in my experience is generally going to work better, because almost everybody else is telling you what to do. Very few people are coming out and saying, this is what happened to me and this is my story.
If you found this helpful, I am a full-time YouTuber. This is all I do, at my website at jerrybanfield.com, where you'll find links to all six of my channels at the top. Any of you who spend money to buy anything get to be on the leaderboard, and I show you off in almost every video.
The first thing to buy is my lifetime chat access, because you can talk to me every day and ask me any question. I check it every single day. The community is in there with you. There's no moderation on this. It's just a chat on my website that I control, and there's no third parties moderating it, which is amazing.
For the best experience, I have dating coaching, with Zoom calls and text support in between, and no monthly commitment. It's absolutely fantastic if you want to dive much deeper and work on yourself. I help men, I help women, I help old, I help young. Anywhere you're at, you can find love in your life. Everything is totally customized. No program, no BS set of courses to go through. I listen to you and I share from my experience.
If you use Skool, I've got a dating community and a whole Family on Skool on all different topics.
If you want a one-on-one call and to schedule that in advance, I have that as well. And if you have something urgent you want to talk about and I'm online, you can jump in and talk to me in as little as 10 minutes.
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Thank you for reading this. I hope it was helpful, there's more in my YouTube Coaching playlist, and I hope to see you on jerrybanfield.com soon.