I want to walk you through how I'm valuing my time as the top Internet Computer Protocol creator. This has been a big struggle for me, and I hope sharing it will help all of us work together better. If you want to see clear metrics, I'll lay those out, because I think they matter to the conversation.
If you search for the top creator on YouTube, that's where the attention is. On X, the amount of time people spend per impression is very small. For example, my videos get watched 20 times as much per view on YouTube as they do on X. So even if somebody had 10 times as many impressions on X, that's not relevant in terms of the actual time and attention. YouTube is the main platform that matters. X is fine for updates, but YouTube is the number one place where people are getting information and making real decisions about which cryptos they hold.
If you search for ICP crypto, which is a main term, I'm the top channel for that. I'm the top channel on Internet Computer ICP. When you search Internet Computer Protocol, I'm the top channel. When you search Internet Computer, I'm the top channel. No matter how you search it, I come up first. And even compared to the official channel, DFINITY, who put out plenty of content but don't put out as many videos as I do, I have five times more views than the official DFINITY channel. I have double the views that Zero2Hero gets on my videos.
The struggle of valuing my time
My struggle has been simple: how do I value my time? I'm a full-time creator. I love what Bobby O does with his channel, and what Zero2Hero and CoinNation HQ do, but they all have jobs. Zero2Hero has a job. CoinNation HQ is a full-time developer. Bobby O has a job. This is my job. So I want to make good money, because this is my work.
I've had my hardest struggle as an ICP creator. One of the main reasons I quit earlier this year, or last year, about six to eight months ago, is that I was not making enough money. I was not enjoying my job because I was struggling with the monetization model. I've tried a bunch of different monetization models over the last few years, and I've found what I think is the best one so far. I want to share the lessons I've learned out of all the stuff that didn't work.
What actually worked
Let's start with what did work. DFINITY gave me $25,000. After I made roughly 100 videos about Internet Computer Protocol for free, they gave me $25,000 in the form of two community grants. But they rejected my last grant. It looked like a blanket rejection that everybody got, because it was the same one James Allen was showing on his channel. I do DFINITY community grants, and they also want me to be a good boy and not go talking a bunch of junk about all these other coins. That doesn't work with me, and here's what I've learned: if I'm going to work for free, I'm going to flood something. I'm going to talk about how something sucks if I'm doing it for free, because nobody gets paid to talk about how things suck. But investors on YouTube need to hear why coins are terrible, because almost everybody hyping things up is getting paid to hype things up.
I've made a ton of videos hyping Internet Computer Protocol up, and projects built on it, totally for free. Of the videos I've made about Internet Computer Protocol, and there have been over 500 of them, most have been for free, or at least half. Maybe around 200-something of them were for the DFINITY Community Grants. About 27 of them were for OpenChat. So maybe half I got some kind of funding for. But I'm looking at the future, wondering what I'm going to do going forward.
What didn't work
One thing I tried that did not work was just allowing any project to give me money in exchange for promoting their coin. For example, I tried a little ICP coin marketing group. Over 20 projects joined it within the first month or so. I made a couple thousand dollars, because I only charged $100 to get in. But a bunch of those coins were junk and went to zero. It took a lot of my time and energy to look at every one of these projects, follow them on X, and research their coins. So I know I don't want to keep promoting projects that don't have absolutely strong fundamentals going forward.
At the same time, I'm not willing to give away my time for free anymore. I've got the largest audience in ICP in terms of the amount of time people spend watching on my channel. If you want to count impressions on X, I don't pay attention to that. So I'm not going to promote any old project for free to the largest ICP audience on YouTube, because that's disrespectful of my time. My work has value.
I got pissed off today because somebody in OpenChat went onto one of my proposals and ran their mouth, saying my work doesn't have value, that I'm overcharging for my videos. If anything, in my experience I've been drastically undercharging. I've made videos that moved coins millions of dollars in market cap. For example, Decide AI: I charged them maybe $300 for a video that moved the market cap up millions of dollars. Nothing else happened in the 24 hours after I put that video out. The price went up 50%, and the market cap went up millions of dollars. And I got $100. So I've been giving a lot of these ICP projects great deals, fantastic deals.
I'm the number one person on OpenChat who's referred people to OpenChat. The only people even close to me have been blatantly cheating the referral system, which is obvious if you watch how they do it: they'll try to cheat it for the airdrop one month, then make a new account and try to cheat it the next month. None of the other ICP YouTubers are even on the top 10 leaderboard. It's just me. I'm grateful OpenChat has been kind enough to give me a few thousand dollars worth of OpenChat in the past. They're the second biggest project for me. And third now is Decide AI. As soon as I said I'd do some more videos for them, after they saw how one video, where I didn't even talk about price action or hype the price up, just talked about the project, they said, sure, do you want to do 11 more videos for 10 times as much money? I'm grateful they immediately gave me $3,500 worth of the tokens.
Getting choosier and demanding what I'm worth
What I can see going forward is this: I'm going to get even more valuable in the ICP ecosystem, which means I need to be very choosy about which projects I talk about, and I need to demand what I'm worth on the projects I do talk about. When I see somebody who's put their heart and soul into a project, launching a service nervous system, my first thought is, I'd love to do an interview with them. But then what happens, as has happened in the past, is that I end up driving sometimes millions of dollars in value. I'm not buying it myself, but I'm in the middle of a chain reaction that results in millions of dollars flowing into their project, and then they don't give me any of the coins. In the worst case scenario, like with BoomDAO, they rug pull the coin, and I'm in the middle of something I didn't get compensated for while all the investors got ripped off.
That means I need to set my bar much, much higher for projects I'm going to talk about. To do that, I first need to get clear on which projects I really like myself, absent any possible compensation. For me, that has come down to six projects: OpenChat, Decide AI, Trax, ICP Swap, Water Neuron, and Gold DAO. Those are the six projects I use every day in one way or another.
Decide AI is connected with OpenChat to verify that the people getting my giveaways are not bots, through their facial recognition service. You go over there, verify you're a unique person, it gives you a check mark, and then you can claim a giveaway. That's really helpful, because it drastically cuts down on people who make a thousand bot accounts and ruin giveaways. It's not perfect, but compared to doing it without verification, it cuts bots down by 70 to 80%, which is really useful.
OpenChat I use every day for my community, though I'm going to talk about an issue there in a minute. Gold DAO is one where I provide liquidity, and I'd like to sell some of my ICP, when it pumps, into gold instead of straight into US dollars. So it's a project I both provide liquidity on and am very grateful exists, and I want to use it more. Trax is where I upload my music, and I've actually made more money off of Trax than all the other platforms besides YouTube combined: Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and so on. ICP Swap is where I provide liquidity. And Water Neuron is where I've used nICP, swapped that to get an APR, and earned short-term interest back into ICP. So these are the projects I use every single day.
Proposing a share of tokens for marketing
With these projects, I have a lot to give. I've already given a ton to OpenChat, and I intend to keep doing it. What I've done for these projects is make proposals asking for a share of tokens in exchange for doing marketing for each of them. That's fair, because the people on the team doing the developing and building are getting paid for that. And the people doing the marketing, like in a big company with all its marketing and salespeople, they get paid too.
In my opinion, I'm the best option for marketing in the ICP ecosystem. If you have a different opinion, you're welcome to share that. My marketing is scarce. I can only handle so many projects that I keep top of mind. And I'm an expert at digital marketing. I'd challenge anybody in the ICP ecosystem who thinks they know more about marketing than I do. I've been doing digital marketing since 2011. I've been a top 10 Udemy instructor, a top Facebook gaming partner, gone viral on TikTok with multiple videos, gotten over a million views on YouTube videos. I've created more than 10 channels on YouTube. My X account has almost 10,000 followers, all organic, with very little attention paid to it. I know what I'm doing with marketing.
Why one-off promotion does not work
The main thing these projects are getting wrong with their marketing is they think they can just pay for a one-off video and that it's going to make a difference. Yes, Decide AI paid for a one-off video and the price went up 50%, but do you know what happened a few days later? The price dumped 30%. You need constant branding and constant reminders. While one-off videos will convert a small percentage immediately, the main way you actually do work in marketing and branding is when you've made 10-plus impressions with somebody. In my experience, people often need to see your videos 10-plus times to really engage and connect with you.
Think about how you browse. You often don't even click a video until you've seen that creator 10 times. Even if you do click and watch a video, you usually need to watch at least 10 videos from someone before you'll take any kind of action, like joining a Patreon or researching a coin yourself. For me, going to Alcoholics Anonymous, I had to attend something like 20 or 30 meetings before I even bought the book and got a sponsor. That's 20 or 30 hours I spent at AA meetings before the most basic principles of the program even started to sink in.
So these projects in the ICP ecosystem, in the first place, don't even want to pay for marketing unless it's the top of a bull market. And then they only want to pay for little one-off things. But what I've learned is I don't want to do one-off promotion anymore. What you really need is consistent, repeated promotion.
Look at the top crypto YouTubers
If you want to see how that works, look at the top crypto YouTubers. Do you know why they don't mention ICP? Because DFINITY hasn't paid them to. But do you know who has paid them? XRP, Solana, some of these exchanges. The coins they mention all the time are the ones that have paid them. And they put their logos on videos over and over again. Even if they're not talking about Solana in the video at all, they put the Solana logo up there with an up arrow on it, or a price, or a percentage. When you do that on 100 videos, and even if people only see 10% of them, you've sent a message out.
Even if somebody only sees a fraction of the videos you've put out over and over, it sticks in their mind that you like Solana and that it's going to go up. Even if the coin itself, like Solana to me, is a dumpster of useless technology, you can see how effective that kind of marketing is. That's what works. You need to repeatedly, over and over again, share your coin with the same audience.
What I noticed doing OpenChat for a month is that when I did 27 videos all in one month, all featuring OpenChat, people who had heard me mention OpenChat five or 10 times before that month finally signed up and used it. They finally bought some of the OpenChat coin, after I talked about it in every single video for a month. Now, some people in the community were very critical, saying I was just preaching to the same audience that already knows about it. And sure, 10 to 20% of my audience absolutely knows about OpenChat and doesn't need a reminder. But 80 or 90% have heard it only in passing and have never researched it. Many of them have never signed up. I've talked to many of these people. They're sitting there with huge amounts of money in the bank, and they're literally saying, "Jerry, which token should I buy?"
Why I won't promote coins that haven't earned it
I could easily tell one of these people that I think they should buy $10,000 of some ICP coin, and they would probably buy it immediately. And yet I ask myself, why would I do that? That coin hasn't done anything for me. Why would I get them to buy $10,000 of some coin that hasn't done anything for me, that I don't even own $10,000 of myself?
I know this sounds a little selfish, but here's what happens. If you go around acting like you're totally selfless, what will often happen is you'll get really resentful and angry at everybody, and you'll quit your YouTube channel. That's what happened to me last year. Going around trying to act like I'm just helping everybody else, not concerned about how much money I'm making, just giving everybody free marketing, I ended up quitting my YouTube channel. Or I'd buy some coin like Tagger and try to pump it over and over again.
So what I want is to have a handful of coins that have given me my fair share for what I'm doing. Those are my coins that I love, that I use every day. I used them before I ever bought them. Those are the coins I mention over and over again. And any projects that are not in that handful, I'm not talking about them. That might sound harsh, but you can go to one of the other creators, the ones that have jobs and may be more altruistic than me in this respect.
My altruistic channel and being choosy
Now, if I'm going to be altruistic and just do videos out of the goodness of my heart, I have a crypto reviews channel named Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews. Those videos are made out of the altruism in my heart, selfless, to try to help somebody else. And do you know what I do on it? I find whatever trending junk coin is out there and I snipe it and explain why it's going to zero. Those videos make me no money, unless somebody schedules a call, which is not very common. If I do 30 of them, one person might schedule a call. So those videos are basically worthless. They're basically me volunteering my time. If you want me to cover an ICP project that's not in my handful, I'll be happy to talk about why I'm not investing in it.
What I've noticed in crypto is that you need to be extremely choosy about which projects you invest in. Most of the ICP coins I've bought have been total losses so far. In fact, I don't think I'm up on one single coin I've bought at this point. Now, yes, if I didn't do this work, I'd probably be buying some of these coins and stacking them up. But I do this. This is what I do.
At a certain point, people give you the coins
At this point, many of you may not realize this, but once you get to a certain point in crypto creation, you don't buy coins anymore. People give them to you. Look at the top crypto YouTubers. Do you think they're out there buying coins? They might swap some junk coin they get for Bitcoin or something, but people just give them coins. They don't have to buy them. It's the same thing with cars and other things. You get rich enough, they just give you cars. You get to be a big enough celebrity, they just give you cars so you can drive around and show them off. It's a ridiculous system, but the more wealth and influence you get, the more you just get given things that everybody else has to buy.
So this has been hard for me to lock in and zone in on my value, and I hate how it sounds in some ways. But you know what? It's time for me to stop pretending I'm out here volunteering and doing this purely out of the good of my heart. I'm not. This is my job. I want good money out of it. I believe I'm worth at least six figures a year, which is $10,000 a month, and that's in profit, not in revenue. That's in profit. So I'm worth that much.
The projects I'm committed to
I'm grateful Decide AI already gave me $3,500 worth of Decide AI, which based on its valuation is like $200,000. For Decide AI, I'm putting half of that into liquidity. And OpenChat is currently passing at the time of filming this. Trax is currently passing too, and that one will definitely execute from what I saw. Then there's GoldDAO and ICPSwap. I haven't made the Water Neuron proposal yet, but I plan to. I waited because they have creator grants, but the creator grants are a perfect example of why you need to demand payment upfront. They offered the little lure of the creator grants, but none of us have seen anything in over two months. So they got all of us to cover the project for free and then haven't given us anything for it.
I'm open to adding new projects to my portfolio if they're absolutely outstanding. To me, the six projects I've identified are outstanding projects. And if any of them reject my proposals, I'm going to ask for a token allocation again and again until they give it to me, because they have no better choice for marketing. All the haters can say whatever they want. I've got numbers. I've got loyalty. I have a track record. And that is worth compensating for, especially when you've got big bags of these altcoins. You'd better hope I'm promoting them.
You might also want to ask why I don't think something is even worthwhile to ask for money. I'm not asking any other projects for money because I don't think any of the others are worth me promoting. I don't use them every day, and I don't want money from a project I'm not using and committed to for the long term, every day. I'm tired of these one-night stands with projects. It's time for me to get serious and commit to a handful of projects on ICP. If you're not in that handful, I'm not talking about your project. You've got other channels you can use.
The math projects keep getting wrong
For example, one of the DAO creators approached me and asked if they could do an interview with me. It looked like they'd already done several interviews with other creators. I said sure, but you need to give me a portion of the DAO tokens. They didn't follow up, which I know they would have if I'd just let them do it for free. But here's what's crazy. If they'd done an interview with me and given me a fair share of the tokens, they'd have probably doubled the amount of investment in their DAO. They didn't want to give me a relatively small amount of tokens in exchange for potentially doubling the amount of ICP they would raise.
I don't want to work with projects that are on that level of scarcity, where you have so little money that you can't afford to even market the project. I'm going to do a video about this soon with caffeine.ai coming out. It's going to be hell on some of these ICP altcoins, because it's going to be easier than ever to create a new altcoin and put real value, a website, and a product behind it. Basically the only advantage the existing projects are going to have is the network effect and marketing, which are directly linked, and having a product that's technically superior. But somebody might be able to code an app with AI that's technically superior to some of these projects today. That's something I just need to say, because a lot of you tell me, "Jerry, you're so honest."
Being honest about an uncomfortable subject
This is me being honest and talking about something I know I need to address. It is kind of an ugly subject in some ways, and at the same time, this is how we really get to know each other. I value your feedback, and honest conversations like this one matter more to me than keeping everything polished and comfortable.
I have been experimenting with the dictate function while I record, where it automatically runs speech to text on the words I am saying. What worked for me was using that to create something more visually engaging, so there is text on the page that follows along with what I am sharing rather than just audio carrying the whole thing.
The DAOs and the proposals
Part of what I want to talk through is the DAOs that have not yet passed the proposals. If you have any connections to those teams, I would encourage you to share this with them, because I am going to keep coming back to this. These proposals matter to the projects involved, and getting them across the line is something I care about following through on.
I also want to give thanks to Decide AI for being the very first project. To me that is a really good sign, and I am genuinely grateful for their team. Being first takes a certain amount of trust, and they extended it. If you want to follow more of how I think about this corner of the ecosystem, you can find the rest of it in my ICP Crypto playlist.