How I Became the Top ICP Creator on YouTube
I want to explain how I became the top crypto YouTuber for the ICP and Internet Computer Protocol terms. Right now you can search "Internet Computer Protocol" and you're almost guaranteed to find my videos. I checked with vidIQ, and it says Jerry Banfield is the top creator on both of those terms. What's actually super interesting is that it's not even my "Jerry Banfield Crypto" channel anymore. This is my original channel, and I literally just deleted all of my videos on ICP a couple of weeks ago. Within two weeks, my videos were once again the top videos on ICP.
I don't know about X. I just post videos on X, and to me X doesn't matter as much because people don't spend as much time watching there. The amount of time people spend watching my videos on YouTube is incredible. So to me, YouTube is the most important platform for communicating some deep information, not just shallow stuff. It's the most important platform to be number one on and to have the strongest voice.
This is not financial advice, and I'm not a financial advisor. I'm simply sharing my own experience. I hold something like 10,000 ICP worth of ICP and altcoins on ICP. I got to be the number one ICP creator because there was literally no one with a bigger audience than me who went all in on creating ICP content. There are other awesome creators in this space: Bobby O, Blockchain Pill, Zero to Hero, Six Figs, Aaron Bremser, and Coin Nation HQ. There are other creators I watch and respect who do a great job. But I'm the one who is most consistent at cranking out content about ICP. Aaron cranks out a lot of content, and Zero to Hero cranks out a lot as well. Coin Nation is working on building an app. Blockchain Pill does higher-quality edited videos. I wish Bobby O would do more videos. But I think I'm the only one who actually does YouTube full time. Everyone else has other jobs, or like Aaron, works for KongSwap. So I believe I'm the only creator who's full time, and I think I've made more ICP videos on YouTube than any other creator. I'd even wager that if you added the top two creators together in terms of the number of videos they've made, I've made more than the top two combined.
The main thing I've done in ICP is simply crank out more videos than anybody else about it. I've cranked out tutorials, I've cranked out hype videos, and I made sensational clickbait titles.
Getting Into Bitcoin in 2014
To explain how I originally got into this, we need to back up even further. I got into Bitcoin in 2014. I made my first video about Bitcoin in December 2014, showing how to use cash to buy Bitcoin with a new service that eventually went under. I even sold Bitcoin for cash back in the day, directly out of my bank accounts. Pretty gangster, having people go to the bank, make cash deposits into my account, and then sending them the Bitcoin. Pretty cool.
So I got into Bitcoin in 2014 and started making videos on it right away. On this original channel, I grinded out hundreds of crypto videos, maybe even 500, that got millions, even tens of millions of views. I got a ton of views on this original channel. I did tons of crypto videos between 2015 and 2018, just hundreds and hundreds of them. I did a video on Ethereum mining back at the beginning of 2017. That was a good video if you actually followed up on it, and it got hundreds of thousands of views organically. I did crypto trading tutorials. I was one of the first people in the world to do crypto trading tutorials and to talk about Ethereum mining. I did all kinds of those videos, and I got into Dash heavy and Steem heavy. I made lots of money in crypto, especially in 2017 and 2018.
Getting Disgusted With Crypto
But then I got really disgusted with the crypto market. I got high enough into Steemit to see the inside of an altcoin that was popular, and it was nasty. It was all lying, cheating, and stealing: pay me here, pay them there, do what I tell you, or else. All kinds of nasty stuff, exactly the kind of thing you'd imagine goes on. It was like watching a show like House of Cards. You had to line people's pockets to get them to do anything for you. It was all about image and what you were presenting publicly versus what you were doing behind the scenes. It was horrible.
Then I watched all the crypto get rug pulled in 2018 and go down. I watched a team I had invested in, met in person, believed in, and hyped up, Steemit, rug pull the project, sell it, and watched it go to zero. I thought, this is disgusting. This whole space is disgusting. So I quit making crypto videos for years after that. My thinking was that the space was so disgusting I couldn't stand to be a part of it. It didn't align with my values.
Getting Sucked Back In
But then I got sucked back in. The one friend who got me into Bitcoin launched some garbage coin and kept telling me I should give him some money. I gave him $300 just to shut him up and get him to go away. Then in 2022, his horrible junk coin did an average of a 50X for me and actually hit a maximum of 100X. I sold some at smaller profits and then sold some at the 100X. So I got a 50X in 2022 that I cashed out on. I had put in $300 in 2021 and didn't think about it for a year. He told me it was going up and going crazy, so I started making videos about his junk coin again and showed how I turned $300 into $15,000. That got me hooked back into crypto.
I also got demonetized off of Facebook in 2022 after I changed my race, and Facebook did not want to allow that narrative to go viral. So they silenced me. Thankfully, all the other platforms let it go out, and it got out. After losing my main source of income, I was looking for a way to get back into making some money, so I got back into crypto, especially after that 50X, which happened to land a little while after I got demonetized.
I started looking around and trying to research crypto, and I started cranking out a bunch of videos again on this Jerry Banfield channel. But I was getting disgusted with the algorithm. My channel at the time seemed to be shadowbanned or something. The algorithm was just terrible and not putting my videos out, and I was really frustrated. So I made a brand new crypto channel, thinking this new channel would really go all the way for me.
A New Channel and a New Commitment
I made this new crypto channel at the end of 2022. I committed to being a better crypto YouTuber, that I wasn't just going to lie, cheat, and steal like most everybody else. I was going to tell the truth and lead by example. I wasn't going to tell somebody to do one thing while doing the opposite myself. I wasn't going to say buy while I was selling. I had this original idea that I'd buy $50 a day in crypto, just buy a coin for $50 and hype it up. Every day, I started grinding out videos on this new channel.
The new channel has since been rebranded to Jerry Banfield Live, because I never again want to get stuck just doing crypto videos. But originally it was Jerry Banfield Crypto. For months, I made videos hyping up one coin after another. I'd buy Bitcoin one day, Ethereum the next, Solana the next. I bought Solana under $10. I bought Hedera. This was in the middle of the bear market, maximum fear, and there I was starting a new portfolio from zero, buying $50 a day in crypto.
The Crypto Mafia and the Bots
Then the crypto mafia people, with all their bots, started pushing my videos. I started getting a big organic audience because of that. With one of these coins, yeah, I call it the crypto mafia or the crypto matrix. From what I can see, these are organized crime operating in crypto, launching coin after coin, supporting certain projects that use networks of bots to push videos on YouTube. You don't even talk with them, except one of them did pop into my live stream one day, which I'll get to in a minute. You just make videos about certain coins with certain things in them. If they like your video, they'll hammer it with bots, and the bots make sure you get a real audience off of it.
I could tell you the exact names of certain cryptos where all they have going for them is that. But I'm not going to name names anymore, because I can't show proof. I did see proof on my own channel, though. From what I can see, these crypto mafia people, whom I've never met or talked to outside of my live chat, blew my channel up with all these bots because I was doing a great job pushing a lot of their coins.
But then I started to feel massively dishonest again and to get disgusted with myself. I realized I was just doing the same thing I'd done before, except it was actually working better. I knew I had to stop. So I started to look through my portfolio, and I realized a lot of these coins I'd been hyping up were junk. I was getting rich off of hyping these coins up, but as an investor I could see that the more coins I kept buying and researching, some coins were clearly better than others. I needed to only focus on the ones that were actually good and not just hype up the dumpster fires. Then I realized that almost every coin I'd bought and hyped up was junk.
So I started saying that, very rough and raw. I'd say, hey, this coin I bought last month sucks, I changed my mind, I'm selling it, and it's going to zero. I did that with a few of the coins that these crypto mafia people apparently hold in big amounts. One of them came on, and I could just feel it. He came on my live stream about one specific coin and said, "You're going to regret saying this about that coin." Right after he typed that chat message, my channel got taken down by an army of bots. It instantly took my channel down. No violations, fully monetized, everything was going great, and an army of bots reported it for illegal activity and took it down.
It took YouTube a week to sort it out, and honestly, I don't think I would have got my channel back even though I wasn't doing anything wrong. This is a channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I got my silver play button for this channel. This channel even helped me get back my crypto channel. I sent this channel to YouTube and said, I've been on YouTube 12 years, I have zero policy violations ever, this is just BS, some bot army attacked my channel. YouTube took a week and put my channel back up.
Once I got it back, I thought, you want to play like that? You already hit me with your bot attack. I'm going to make sure I identify the absolute best projects in crypto. In the process of trying to figure out what the absolute best project was, I had originally been into Bitcoin for a while, but a viewer on my live stream said, "Really, Bitcoin? There's got to be something better than that." And that's when I found it.
Going all in on Internet Computer Protocol
I had already bought ICP and I'd already hyped ICP up when I first started my channel. It's one of the first cryptos I bought and talked about. But then, after researching it for hundreds of hours more, I thought, wow, this is the real deal. This is the crypto. After my negative experiences going all in on Dash and Steem, I really didn't want to do it again, but I finally got to a point where I felt I couldn't have any integrity if I didn't go all in on Internet Computer Protocol. So I sold my Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and DeSo. I sold all of them and put it into Internet Computer Protocol at what I hope is the absolute ICP bottom.
Then I started grinding out ICP videos every day. At one point I even tested putting out something like 12 ICP videos a day. I've filmed at least 500 videos talking about ICP, and I've done hundreds of hours of live streams about it. I don't think there's any other content creator in the world who has put as much time on video as I have about ICP. So in this case, you could argue I've certainly put the effort in.
I've gone all over the place since then. I did a bunch of "going to zero" videos that pulled traffic from some of these dumpster-fire coins and pointed people toward ICP. I reviewed hundreds of cryptos, said they were going to zero and were terrible, and steered that attention over to ICP. I got so burnt out on it, though, that last year, in 2024, I quit doing all of YouTube for a month. But then I realized there was not going to be any easier way for me to make money than doing ICP videos. So it was back to ICP videos.
I also got paid at the beginning. For the first half of 2024, DFINITY was kind enough to give me $25,000 to support my videos. But keep in mind, I'd already made around 100 ICP videos before that for free, and I've since made hundreds more without getting any support. So I came back to ICP crypto videos and I've consistently been doing them again for the last eight months.
Cleaning up my old content and protecting myself
I did delete all the videos, though. On this original channel, I deleted all the videos two years ago and just put music on it. And on the live channel, I deleted all the old crypto videos because back then I wasn't doing anything to protect myself legally. I wasn't using disclaimers. I wasn't telling people how much I held in every single video. Now I make sure to use disclaimers. I make sure to tell people I'm holding a bunch of ICP so there's no confusion as to where my position is and what my potential motivations are. Yes, lots of other crypto YouTubers don't practice any of that, but if I can prevent potential legal issues, I'd rather do that. Prevention is worth a pound of cure.
So I went all in on ICP content over the last year, and I've committed to making videos that are first and foremost good for you. One thing that really helped me: on my Jerry Banfield crypto channel, which is now Jerry Banfield Live, I had been getting obsessed with the amount of views I was getting, constantly chasing the algorithm, instead of just being an ICP content creator. The downturn the ICP price has taken means all my views go down. Being the top ICP creator at the beginning of 2024, when the views were blowing up and the facial recognition story came out, my channel got a whole bunch of views. But now it ends up not being worth as much, although I did get $5,000 from Water Neuron yesterday for a creator grant, and I've gotten around $10,000 from other projects in the last couple of months.
I also have people schedule calls for $300 an hour. When things are going well, I make tens of thousands of dollars more a month doing the same basic stuff I'm doing right now. I just asked my wife for $22,000 so that I've got enough money where I don't have to worry about views and the ICP price for at least a year, and so that I'm prepared not to have to make a profit at all. I can make tiny amounts of money, like $1,000 a month in ad revenue, and still be fine.
Why I turn down the easy money
Keep in mind, I am turning a lot down. If I worked for the crypto mafia again, I wouldn't even have to talk to them if I just pushed their coins in my videos. I know what many of the coins are, and I know how to find them if I'm not sure. I could make millions of dollars more a year than I'm making right now. All I'd have to do is push their coins. I know which coins they are and exactly how to push them. Add a copy-trading exchange and I could make hundreds of thousands more dollars a month doing the same stuff I do today, except I'd just have to look in the mirror and hate myself again.
For me, as a sober alcoholic with 10 years in Alcoholics Anonymous, it's not worth the risk. I might drink again if I went around making a bunch of money while feeling like I'm a scumbag contributing to people being ripped off. I create videos on Internet Computer Protocol because, in my experience, this is the absolute best project in crypto. That's why I've become one of the top content creators on it: I'm a full-time creator, I've been on YouTube 14 years, and this is the main subject I've created content on for the last year and a half.
So I appreciate all of your love and support, especially those of you who've switched over from the Jerry Banfield crypto channel. I really appreciate the influx of people to what had been a dead channel for most of the last year. I've put together my ICP Crypto playlist so everything is in one place, and it's been great to see so many people from ICP get into the other content too. Thank you for all you've done to help make me the top ICP crypto YouTuber. I intend to keep doing live streams about ICP at least once a week, and then to pull a whole bunch of videos out of those and post them as well.