I'm getting the most amount of views I've ever gotten on YouTube, and here's my secret: I'm ignoring the YouTube Studio analytics. If you're new here, I'm Jerry Banfield, a full-time YouTuber with eight YouTube channels, all of which you can see on jerrybanfield.com. And I went into a deep dive today on a question I'd never really asked myself: how many YouTube views do I really want?
Out of being on YouTube for 13 years, I finally thought to get ultra-specific on exactly what I want YouTube to do for me. In the past, I made very clear goals, like I want 100,000 subscribers, I want a quarter million subscribers, and I got those goals. But since then, I've actually kind of just been throwing videos up and not thinking about, well, what do I want, and why do I want it, and what would it feel like to have it?
Getting ultra-clear on what I actually want
So I've gotten excited. I've gotten extremely clear. Dear YouTube: I am intending to receive one-plus billion impressions per month on YouTube. So I'm going to just be right here, not even going to look at the analytics, and I'm going to upload videos and trust you to deliver.
Now, this is a manifesting secret that almost everybody gets wrong. What most of us do as YouTube creators is we show up and we upload videos, and then we check our analytics. Every day. How do I know? Well, I've been on YouTube 13 years, and I've done it a whole lot, just this morning, actually, and I realized I'm doing it wrong.
The financial bottom that taught me this
In every area of my life where I've defied the odds, this same principle was at work. For example, I hit a financial bottom, the worst financial position I've ever been in, in 2019, through my own decisions. And at that point, I stopped looking at my bank accounts and credit card statements and all my debt. I stopped even thinking about them, and I started thinking about how wealthy I was, that despite making so many bad financial decisions, I still had money for everything that really mattered, like food, like the house, like having a car. I even could pay to get massages, despite, just before that, borrowing money on credit cards to make minimum payments.
Now, I'm in the wealthiest position I've ever been in by far. I am already a millionaire in my own mind, and the external reality is going to manifest that soon, any time now. And then I look back and ask: what did I actually do to make that work? I stopped looking at the problem. I basically just ignored the problem and focused on, internally, I'm a millionaire. Internally, I'm wealthy, and this is my identity. Almost anything you try to change in life will be blocked unless you change your identity around it.
Walking the dog and asking myself: what is enough?
So, on YouTube, I've been coming at it and constantly feeling like, when I look in the YouTube Studio across my eight channels, some of them, the last I checked, get millions of impressions every month. Others barely get thousands, or a few hundred thousand impressions a month, and I've always been feeling like it's not enough.
And I was walking my dog this morning, and I was like, okay, what would be enough? Jerry, what is enough? At what point would you say, that's enough, I don't need any more than that, this is plenty? Where would you draw the line? If you looked at your YouTube Studio analytics and could have them say anything you wanted them to, what would they say?
This is such an important part of getting more YouTube views that almost no one ever addresses, because this is basic, deep-down manifesting, and the first step you really need to do is to be clear about your end destination. Where am I going? My end destination is getting billions of impressions every month for 10-plus years on YouTube. That's where I'm going.
And why? How would I feel? I would feel massively wealthy on YouTube, that my videos are being delivered to every single person that might want to watch them, that no one who might love my videos is missing them, exactly like I feel with money. I have all the money I need today, and then plenty more. One billion impressions a month, that's enough. I don't think any more people than that need to see my videos. And really, this would probably be millions of people seeing a bunch of my videos every month repeatedly, rather than a billion people seeing them once. But I thought, well, how much do you really, really want?
Why I look at my intention more than the Studio
And then the secret is, I look at this intention more than I look at the YouTube Studio. Because we get caught in these reinforcement loops. The pattern is: you look at your YouTube views, and it's not enough. So you grind and hustle and struggle. But all of that grind and hustle and struggle was based on that first look. You looked at your views initially, and they weren't enough, and you're trying to change that. But your identity is still a small YouTuber that's not getting enough views.
And no matter how hard you work, your identity stays put. Even as channels get bigger, my identity always stayed the same. I still felt like a small YouTuber who wasn't getting enough views, even at the height of popularity of my main YouTube channel. And right now, I'm actually getting more views than I've ever gotten, despite most of my channels being new. None of my channels that's getting a substantial amount of views is more than a year and a half old, and yet I'm getting the most views ever. But still, most days I look at my analytics and I think, this isn't enough. This isn't what I really want it to look like.
So finally today, I asked: what do you want it to look like? And if you focus, in any area of life, on exactly what you want it to look like and internalize that this is who I am, then everything starts to move. I'm already getting a billion impressions a month on YouTube. After all, if this is day one, the impressions could start coming in at any time. The first month of a billion impressions is starting any time. And the key to start it is in here first.
Almost every other YouTube video ignores identity
Almost all the other videos on YouTube are conditioned on not changing your identity. If you're identifying as a small YouTuber who's not getting enough, nothing you do is going to change that. Only changing your internal identity will, the identity of a YouTuber getting a billion impressions a month. That's a big, big boy or a big girl or whatever, a big extraterrestrial, whatever you are. That's a big YouTuber. I think almost anyone would agree that if YouTube's showing your videos a billion times in a month, you're big. There's no doubt about that.
So to me, this is what's coming. This is what's coming to me. And this is what I've already changed my identity to be. I am now a YouTuber getting a billion impressions a month. And here's what's crazy: as long as I don't check the YouTube Studio, there's no conflicting evidence.
Now you might think, Jerry, that's ridiculous. It'll never work to just look at this intention instead of looking at your YouTube Studio. Wrong. It does work, and it works every time. Almost nobody actually does it, though.
How it works: your subconscious can't tell true from false
So here's how it works. When you set it up like this, your brain's taking in this data that, man, I'm getting a billion impressions a month, because your subconscious doesn't differentiate, for better or worse, between the true and the false. Whatever you take in, it accepts as reality. This is how so many people in the last few years have got tricked into something, into positions that obviously looked ridiculous to others of us, because you take stuff in and, even if consciously you think it's a lie, your subconscious still believes it.
So even if you look at your YouTube Studio data all the time, it makes it hard to break out, because what you're inputting into your brain is that I'm a YouTuber that gets whatever is not enough to you. A thousand views a day, a thousand views a month, a hundred thousand impressions a month, whatever is not enough to you, if you keep taking that into your brain, your brain's definition of who you are becomes that. So the point you create from is your identity.
That's why I'm looking at this intention more than I look at my YouTube Studio data. Now, I know uploading is unavoidable. I could have somebody else upload my videos, but I'll upload them myself. The key thing is that I see this more than I see what you might argue are the real analytics in my YouTube Studio. Because when my brain internalizes and programs itself after seeing this enough times, and believing it enough times, my brain internalizes that I'm a big YouTuber that gets a billion impressions a month. And then the videos I create will be created from that mindset.
That's where all these other videos I've watched on how to get YouTube views miss it. Nobody gets that right. Nobody explains that what's most important is when your mindset is already where you want to go, and you're operating from that mindset. Then your actions will match what you need to do, intuitively and often magically. Things will happen that you couldn't have grinded or hustled or forced to happen, because that's now your identity. When your identity is what you want to be, and that's who you already identify as, your actions and the world will match that. I keep these conversations going in my YouTube Coaching playlist, and it ties right into why I believe most YouTube advice is built for views, not income.
For example, it says in the Bible, let the weak man say, I'm strong. Because when you say I'm strong, that's what your body starts to manifest. When you say I'm wealthy, that's what your external reality will begin to manifest. Even if you are broke and in utter poverty, if you start feeling and saying I am wealthy, everything will change to support that.
This is my new YouTube Studio
So this is what I'm doing now. This is my new YouTube Studio. This is all I look at. I don't look at any of my other analytics in the YouTube Studio now. I upload videos, and this intention is my analytics. Because I have no interest in looking at my analytics in the YouTube Studio until they say this. And even when they do say that, what difference does it make? I've already set that as my end destination. So what? I already am there in my mind. I already feel today the same way I would feel getting one billion impressions.
This is also where, if you've ever wanted direct access to how I think through this stuff in real time, you can join me in the Jerry Banfield Family and ask me anything.
Why I chose impressions instead of views
And you might ask, well, why did you choose impressions? Because my goal is to deliver value in my titles and thumbnails by themselves. Thought leadership. I don't need people to actually watch my videos. Even if my click-through rate is 0.1 or less than 1%, I still would get millions of views, which is plenty. But my goal is that I want to communicate with people, and impressions communicate with people. So I chose impressions. That's my bottom line.
Most people on YouTube care so much about views. But it's your thumbnails and your titles that do the work. I've seen video titles and thumbnails that I still remember today that I didn't even watch the video for. So my goal, even for all the people who scrolled past this, which is almost always the case, I don't care if you're Mr. Beast or whoever you are, the people scrolling past your videos are the majority. My goal, my intention, my identity, is that I make those one billion impressions count. That when people scroll by my videos, it communicates an idea that's useful, that's helpful.
Which is why I titled this, "I'm getting more views on YouTube by ignoring the Studio analytics." Because even if people scroll past that, the idea was successfully communicated with just the title and just the thumbnail. It's the same reason I'm convinced that you only need one view a day to go full-time on YouTube if you build the right identity behind it.
So I'm really excited. I'm really excited that this is the next step in my YouTube journey, the step that's taken me the longest to take and to get clear about. And out of anything that happens in the future, this is the most key thing. Without this, nothing else would have happened.