Yesterday I filmed 120 YouTube Shorts in two and a half hours of real time. In my studio I have OBS set up on this monitor, and I just hit the button to record, use AI to generate all the backgrounds, swap out the background, talk, and upload. I don't edit any of them. It'll probably take me about two and a half more hours to upload these videos. But what you might really be interested in is why. Why would I film 120 YouTube Shorts at once?
The Highest-Leverage Activity
The big reason is that I'm constantly looking for the highest-leverage activity I can do with my time as a content creator. I have six YouTube channels, and I've been a full-time YouTuber since 2011. I deleted all my channels last year because I was so burnt out, and I was putting my time into a bunch of low-leverage activities — like live streaming video games for several hours at a time. There's nothing wrong with that if you've got the time, but if your priority is growth as a creator and full-time income, you've got to be very careful about which format you put your time into.
For example, I've got over half a million organic views in the last four months from starting six new YouTube channels. Doing YouTube Shorts actually gets more views per amount of time — but if you want to talk about money, long-form videos bring the most money in. I have a spreadsheet where I track every video I've done: I've now filmed 630 videos, with about 70 or 80 of the shorts still to upload today. That averages 7.1 videos a day and 76 minutes of content a day. And yesterday is a big outlier — I hadn't filmed more than about 26 videos in a day before.
Now I'm trying to see: if I put out a serious, consistent quantity of shorts, will it increase my discovery? I'm already getting solid discovery — over 6 million impressions on my long-form videos. Most of what I've filmed has been long form, probably about 400 of the 630, and I'd only done some tests with shorts. What I've found is that my long-form videos get consistent discovery, consistent minutes watched, and — consistently — people going to my website.
Long Form Builds the Relationships
I've got one of the best setups on my website anywhere for immediate help. A guy paid $39 on his credit card to talk to me for 10 minutes — it's called Talk to Me Now. Three minutes after he bought it, I texted him on WhatsApp, and three minutes after that we were on WhatsApp's version of FaceTime. There's a 30-minute option and a one-on-one Zoom call as well. My long-form videos have been doing a great job of building deep enough relationships that viewers want to come spend money with me — whether that's joining my Skool community, the tips I've got up, or the chat I just launched, where MAP Technical Forecasting on the leaderboard just bought the chat for the first time and now has access. You can chat with me directly on jerrybanfield.com without any third parties in the middle. I want to maximize getting people to my website, getting income in, and giving more direct help to my audience. When I talked to that guy on WhatsApp for 10 minutes, it helped me know what kind of videos I should make — it keeps me very close to my audience.
The challenge is that my long-form videos have diminishing returns. With six channels, if I do one long-form video a day, I get pretty solid discovery. But if I start doing more than that, my discovery drops a bit and I start cannibalizing my own reach. Whereas YouTube Shorts have been going out to a lot of new people. I go into YouTube Studio and ask it: are YouTube Shorts helping grow my channel? The answer comes back that Shorts are reaching new viewers. I just hadn't put much time into Shorts so far — because if you don't have a bunch of long-form videos or a library of shorts to watch, what difference does it make if you reach new viewers? If you don't have a business system ready when viewers actually find you, there's not much point in getting discovered. Well, now I'm at the point with my business system, my videos, and my content that when you discover me, you can watch a whole lot of content and spend money at my website. So now it makes sense to go get more discovery.
The Data From My Vlog Channel
But my discovery process needs to be fast. I had a slow shorts workflow before — filming shorts, taking a while to generate thumbnails, dumping them into Claude and adding captions — and I've stripped out all the time-wasting. Here's the data from my vlogs channel, my @jerrybanfield channel, which is my third-fastest-growing channel right now — it's going to be monetized soon at this rate. My long-form videos there have 19,000 views while my shorts have only 8,000 by comparison — but I've done 106 long videos and only about 10 shorts. The shorts are getting more new viewers and more new discovery from a relatively small number of videos. I know it shows 43 shorts right now, but that's because I just scheduled 30 more on the channel. In the last 28 days, 13 shorts got me out to 2,700 new viewers. And if I can crank out 120 shorts in two hours, with the average short getting around 1,000 views and most shorts viewers being new viewers, that sets me up to grow my subscribers.
These shorts brought in thousands of new viewers and hundreds of returning viewers. With shorts you really need quantity — if somebody watches one of my shorts and likes it, they should be able to binge 10 or 20 of them. But you also don't want to put out too many per day. So right now I'm scheduling one long video and two shorts a day on this channel, and I filmed 48 shorts just for this channel yesterday — all kinds of random stuff. I didn't study other people's hooks; I just told all kinds of random stories, 30 to 50 seconds long. This is setting me up to get lots more subscribers, and now the channel has a lot more depth: someone who finds it has an ongoing vlog series to watch and could end up binge-watching five or ten-plus hours of my content. I'm especially looking for outliers. Those 2,700 new viewers became 11 subscribers — that's 11 people who might become regular long-form viewers, which helps my long-form videos go out further.
The Math on 120 Shorts
Compare the activities. Yesterday I could have filmed probably 10 more long videos. But with all my long videos already scheduled — six videos a day across all six channels — does it make sense to put two more hours into long form? Or does it make sense to film 120 shorts in two hours and upload them? The shorts give me a bunch of discoverability, the discoverability helps my long videos, and it becomes a reinforcement loop: people who find my long videos may watch my shorts, and I've noticed a significant percentage of the audience watches both. It's a whole lot more reinforcement and potential session time. I could have done a two-and-a-half-hour live stream in this time, but I'm expecting at least 100,000 views out of these 120 shorts. Do the math — multiply that 2,700 by 10 for simplicity and that's 27,000 new viewers, hundreds of new subscribers, thousands of returning viewers. That should be enough to push me over the threshold for monetization. And realistically, the more shorts I do, the more views and subscribers I'll get compared to doing small amounts. The channels doing really well push huge quantities of shorts — several a day, for years — combined with long form. It's an engine: the long form and the short form feed each other.
The key is using the least amount of my time to make all of this. There's no point editing these shorts or chasing viral hooks. I made all of them as talking heads so they all focus on me. I know from past experience online that if you can't sustainably keep doing something for a long time, it bites you — I built a channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers on videos I couldn't easily replicate. I paid freelancers to make hacking courses and sent people to Udemy to buy them, but when a whole bunch of money came in, the guy wasn't available to keep making videos, and then I had to find somebody else, and then I had to make the videos. I went viral with League of Legends videos — but I don't even like League of Legends the way the original coach did. I ended up with hundreds of thousands of subscribers on content I couldn't replicate. What I'm doing now — videos of me talking — I can always do. Yes, I could get better short-term stats doing viral clip reactions, but those present a lot more problems and take so much longer: in two hours I'd barely make 10 of them, and I'd be promoting somebody else in my videos. Instead I cranked out 120 shorts — that's two shorts a day on all my channels for 10 days, all featuring me. If any of them get tens or hundreds of thousands of views, I can replicate that all day, every day. I'm very aware now that you only want to build things you can keep offering — because if you build things you can't keep offering, you've essentially wasted your time.
Talking Heads Are Copyright-Proof
With just talking-head videos, I don't have to worry about somebody copyright-claiming or striking my channel, and I don't have to worry about YouTube's reused content policy — every single video is unique to me. So I'm really excited to see how this test goes: the two and a half hours of filming plus the two and a half hours it'll take to upload — what results do I get from five hours of my time? On some other days I've spent five hours filming and only gotten six, eight, nine long-form videos out, and the amount of discovery from those days was very limited. If you get one thing from this, it's to think obsessively about how you can minimize the time you invest and maximize a reproducible, consistent output.
I also wanted to try this because these 120 videos could all be uploaded to TikTok or Instagram as well. I could give them to my followers in my Skool community to upload and let them keep the income, or I could set up AI to upload them all to Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook Reels myself. Right now I've got so much going on YouTube that I don't know if I want to mess with that — but almost all of these videos are timeless. A friend of mine just got banned from YouTube over something that seemed ridiculous, and the more short videos I have, the more content I have ready for other platforms if I ever need to invest in them. I'm so excited to see how this experiment goes — and I'll keep sharing every result from tests like this on my YouTube Coaching playlist.
If you're a content creator, the number one thing I would do is come talk to me. I'm one of the most creative, experienced people you will find on YouTube — I've been through almost everything. I had more subscribers than MrBeast up until 2016, when he passed me — and, well, he's gotten way ahead since then. If you want to talk with somebody, I'm super accessible. Unlike a lot of these other people, I'm super real: I show you everything I'm doing, and I'm building my entire business out on the blockchain with AI right now, which is by far the absolute best way a content creator can build everything. I can help you with all of this, and I'm here for you. Go to jerrybanfield.com — let's talk. Thanks for watching, and I hope to get to know you better soon.