You're about to see my YouTube paycheck for 2023 across three different channels, built on twelve years of experience on YouTube. Two of those channels I started within the last year, both of which are earning nice income and getting a lot of views. This will be really helpful for you if you're thinking about doing new YouTube, you're brand new to YouTube, or you're wondering what really works to build a new channel. And if you've been on YouTube for a while, this will be helpful too, because I also know a lot about what not to do on YouTube. I've made a ton of mistakes, and my original channel is a great example of a lot of what not to do.
The first question: are you in this for yourself, or for your viewers?
The first key thing to begin with on YouTube is getting honest about this: are you in this to get views and money for yourself? Or are you in this to really help other people? Your mind will tell you immediately, "Of course I'm in this to help other people. It's all about them. It's all about helping my viewers." I'm sure your mind will say that, because my mind always said that. But let's see what your actions indicate.
When it comes down to choices you have to make, where you either do a video that you can get paid a lot of money for and that gets more views in the short term, or you do a video that's really helpful to your viewers but doesn't make you as much money and doesn't get you as many views in the short term, that's when we'll see whether you're really all about yourself and your own views and your own money, or you're really all about helping your viewers.
I was able to grow my original Jerry Banfield channel a lot. I blew this channel up to hundreds of thousands of subscribers because when I started out, I was willing to just do anything to get views and make money. And that was the downfall of this channel, and the reason there are only four people watching when I go live despite all these subscribers. I put over 4,000 videos on this main channel, but my primary thing I cared about was getting myself views and making myself money as fast as possible. If you'd asked me at any point, I'd have said it's all about my viewers and helping them. But really, it was me every day showing up trying to get as many views and as much money as I possibly could.
While that can work in the short term, you'll often crash and burn doing it in the long term. What's really challenging about YouTube is going through the good, the bad, and the ugly, like I did on my main channel. I went viral several times because whatever video I thought could make me the most money and give me the most views, I made it. And I did very well at that in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018. But eventually my channel became this crap show of videos on a bunch of different subjects, all designed to get money and get views. I had an audience scattered all over the place, where every video I put up didn't satisfy a lot of the viewers. So things eventually came tumbling down, my views kept going down, down, down, and I kept getting more and more frustrated. That frustration is what led me to create this new channel, and to create several new channels actually. I deleted some of them, but I have three channels now, all of which are monetized, and only two of which I actually put time and energy into.
I can't emphasize enough: really dig into whether you care most about your viewers, or whether you care most about getting your own views and money. It's not that you can't care about making money. Sure, I think it's great to make $2,400 in YouTube revenue in one single month from one single channel that I started a year ago. I do think that's great. However, what I'm most proud of about this channel is that I've turned down way more money than I could make, and I've said no to a lot of things I could do to get more views, because I care about giving people the best information even if it gets me fewer views. This is the same realization behind why I believe most YouTube advice is built for views, not income. If you want to go deeper on the thinking behind all of this, I keep these conversations going in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
What I made on two new crypto channels in one year
Let me look at what I've done on this newer channel and how much it's made. This channel has made $11,000 just on YouTube in the first year I created it. The journey has been very interesting. It had no views, it started from scratch, and I've made a few hundred videos and live streams on it. It has gotten 1.7 million views. What's been great is that all the views on this channel have been organic. Absolutely no paid promotion of any kind. The views have come directly from browse features, YouTube search, and suggested videos, as well as word of mouth. The videos have been shown 5.5 million times on YouTube.
One big point to emphasize is the average view duration: ten minutes. This is why YouTube is so good. If I had this many views on another platform, like I've had a lot more views than this on Facebook and TikTok, the average view duration on those is usually only a few seconds. What tends to work much better as a content creator is to get longer-format views. When someone spends an average of ten minutes watching one of my videos, that's enough time to make a meaningful connection.
One of the main ways I monetize outside of my YouTube channel is through my website at jerrybanfield.com, where I have a Discord and open chat community where you can talk with me and ask me questions. I also offer one-on-one video calls, and one-on-one video calls are one of the best ways to monetize on YouTube, because this is something people really need. I actually make as much or more money on my video calls as I do on YouTube itself. In a world where there's all kinds of content and people talking to you, what people are really missing often is a mentor.
I've had mentors who helped me. I had a mentor, Joe Parys, whom I mentored growing his YouTube channel before, and then he mentored me growing this crypto channel off of his experience building a crypto channel. His mentorship was amazing and very helpful. One of the main things that can help you do better on YouTube is to get a mentor. I'm looking for a mentor for my YouTube channels now too, one who's fit to help me with live streaming and doing two different channels with different kinds of content, with being useful to my viewers first and foremost, and with being willing to take much less money if it comes down to a choice between what's good for my viewers and what's good for me.
Here's a second new crypto channel. I started two crypto channels in the last year. This one has also made $856 in the last 28 days, and it just got monetized in the middle of the year. This one has also brought in $3,000. Now, if you consider doing about 500 videos and live streams for about $14,000, that by itself wouldn't be that exciting. But what is exciting is when you consider all the one-on-one calls people scheduled, all the income from my Discord server, my open chat, my Patreon, the tips people leave, and most importantly, that these videos have really been useful and helped people, which is why so many people have been watching them. That I feel very proud of. I am very happy that I built two YouTube channels to over 10,000 subscribers each in the last year, both monetized, and both of which made a really positive difference in people's lives.
Let me show you how I built this channel first, because this is something almost anyone could do. The basic thing I did will work in almost any area on YouTube, assuming there are people searching for what you have to share. Now, technically I started this channel back around 2020 at some point, and I tried a couple of shorts on it in 2022. So technically I started it quite a while ago, but I didn't do anything with it until about April this year, when I started actually using it.
This channel has gotten 8.4 million impressions, but only 27% of those came from YouTube actually recommending my content. Let me show you where I actually got my views from, because that's what's really most interesting. The main place people are finding my videos is YouTube search. This is where you can start a YouTube channel. If you can make videos that people are searching for, especially where there's lots of search traffic, and you can make videos that are very helpful to people in that search traffic, you can build a channel from zero. That is the most effective way by far to start a new channel.
Why I go for search traffic instead of trying to go viral
I've watched so many other people's videos about how to build YouTube channels. Yes, there's a very, very, very small number of creators who can do what the very top YouTubers do and aim to get their videos discovered in browse features by general audiences and really go viral. But for probably 99% of YouTube creators, that strategy is not going to work. Why? Because browse features is insanely competitive, and you really need to have an established audience to even get shown in browse features. What can work for almost anyone on YouTube, which I've shown with two different channels in one year built from zero, is to go for YouTube search traffic. Once you get into YouTube search traffic, then you can get additional traffic from browse features.
Here's how this works. What people are doing to find my channel is searching for something specific. If we look at my top videos right now, people are searching for things like YouTube-type charts, YouTube videos, YouTube profiles, and Facebook tops. They're looking up specific cryptos. For example, "Pyth Network crypto review." They're looking for specific crypto reviews. They've heard about these crypto altcoins, and then they search for more information. What I've done is review these cryptos honestly.
Now, this is a strategy that does not make me as much money as doing what almost everybody else does. If you search, for example, just for "Pyth Network," a lot of people put up videos hyping stuff up constantly. All they do is hype things up in crypto and say, "This is 100x-ing, this is 200x-ing." Most of the time when you search for cryptos, all you find is hype. That is what most people do to build their channels rapidly: put out exactly what people are expecting, and put out content to get as much traffic as possible, regardless of whether the information is actually good for people.
What I've done with this channel is think about what is needed on YouTube. What's needed that I have experience with and can help with in crypto is to put out some criticism and some skepticism based on a lot of experience of the space, to put out some intelligent skepticism. That leaves my videos standing out in YouTube search. However, I make way less money doing this, because all the people hyping up these cryptos and altcoins get all these sponsorships, they send people to exchanges, and they make way more money than my less-than-$1,000-per-channel, $3,000 total in ad revenue this year. If I went around YouTube hyping up altcoins and saying how great they are, often based on very little research, I'd get way more views and way more money. Which is why I said in the beginning, it's critical to consider: are you really in this to get the most views and the most money for yourself? Or are you really in this to help people and give them what they need?
Because in the long term, if you really help people and give them what they need, your viewership grows. This is why my viewership has been consistently going up over time on this channel. Even though in the short term I make less money and get fewer views than hyping stuff up, in the long term people really appreciate someone who genuinely cares about them and is offering what other people are not. So if you want to really build a channel on YouTube, make videos where, when somebody searches for a specific term, there's no other video like the one you're going to make about that particular topic. That's how you can build a channel straight up from zero to hundreds of thousands of views and thousands of dollars in ad revenue.
The real math: about $50 a video, and where the money actually comes from
You've got to also look at how much work I put into this channel to get $3,000 in ad revenue. On top of that, people scheduled one-on-one calls, and I've probably gotten at least that much more in one-on-one calls, Patreon, and Discord. So I probably made about $10,000 off this channel total, counting one-on-one calls, Patreon, and Discord memberships. If you look at that versus how many videos I've made, I've made 177 videos on this channel. That's about $50 a video.
Now, the key thing on YouTube is: can you make videos fast? For me, these videos came together very quickly. This Pyth Network review probably took about an hour total, from the time I researched it, to making the video, to uploading it. If you can take an hour of real time, help other people, make a positive difference in the world, and then with all the income total earn about $50 an hour, that works out pretty good.
However, at the beginning of starting this channel, I was making almost nothing. If you look at the last 90 days, I made the majority of my ad revenue, two-thirds of it, in the last 90 days. That means for the whole first six months of the channel, I made $1,000 in ad revenue total, and maybe another thousand or a couple thousand from Patreon. So the first six months of this channel were not really worth doing in terms of what it is now. However, from here I have great momentum. I've got the initial 10,000 subscribers, a strong foundation, and I now get browse features that allow my videos to rank.
The real formula for doing really well on YouTube is this: if you can make videos that will get found in search results, then when someone finds that video, you have other videos they'll watch right afterward, or that they'll be interested in when you make a new one. This is why I've made this just a crypto channel. When I make a video about Pyth Network, then I make another, and I've made hundreds of other videos talking about other cryptocurrencies with the same kind of skeptical, critical reviews, and then people are looking for more of them.
This is also why one of the best ways to monetize your YouTube channels is through one-on-one video calls. Even if you get only a hundred or a couple hundred views from YouTube search, you might get a one-on-one video call out of it. I use Acuity Scheduling for my video calls, and they're paid calls. It costs a couple hundred dollars to have a one-on-one video call with me. You can sync this up directly with your calendar. The one-on-one video calls helped me realize the value I was offering. They helped me realize that people really were appreciating those critical reviews. What's really hard about YouTube sometimes is figuring out what it is about your videos that people really appreciate. If you can get on Zoom with some of the people watching your videos, you can often help them a lot more, and you can understand, "Oh, I need to make more critical reviews of other cryptocurrencies," and that will build you an entire channel. You can do that directly through my Jerry Banfield Family community, where I take calls and answer questions.
Burnout, and honoring yourself as a creator
However, I have stopped actually making videos on this channel now, because my main channel gets so many more views, and you only have so much time in the day. Now, if I just wanted to get as much money and as many views as possible, I would definitely keep cranking videos out on this channel. What's challenging with YouTube, though, is that since this is a creative endeavor, you really need to make sure you're honoring yourself and what you want to do. The challenge is that if you're like me, you have a lot of energy and you can create almost anything. What happens, though, is that if you focus too much on just getting money and getting views, sometimes there are really fun videos you want to make, or videos you're really passionate about, that are not going to make that much money or get that many views, but you just want to make them. They satisfy you as a creator. They may help you in the long, long term, or they may help others more in the long term, but in the short term they're generally not going to earn as much.
For example, this very video about how much YouTube paid me. If I were doing a crypto livestream right now, I'd probably have ten or twenty times as many people watching. There would be tips flying in, and I could be getting a lot more money and a lot more views just by sticking with doing live streams every day. If I wanted the most money and views, I'd just crank videos and live streams on my crypto channel and my crypto reviews channel every day, and I was doing that for a while. But the biggest enemy you've got on YouTube as a creator is burnout. That's what I experienced with this channel: burnout from doing multiple crypto videos a day. I was killing it in search traffic, doing great, but what you really need to be successful on YouTube, as I've found, is to make sure what you're doing is sustainable for the long, long, long term. If you just grind and aim for money and you get burnt out, you crash.
One of the things that screwed up my original channel quite a bit is that I went long periods of time, sometimes months, without posting a video. Or I'd post all kinds of videos. For example, I made hacking tutorials back in 2015 and 2016, and that's where I got over half my subscribers from. But then I stopped making those, especially after YouTube updated the policies and said you couldn't make them anymore. And all the people who subscribed for those hacking videos on my main channel never got another one for years. When you grind out a channel and go for views, you leave people disappointed. I got all these subscribers on this newer channel, but I don't want to make videos for it anymore because I have one main crypto channel that's already doing so well.
So you want to make sure to divide your effort up on YouTube. If you're starting out, I'd recommend just doing one single channel. Then if you have a topic that really takes off, a topic your viewers love, you could either focus your channel on that, or move over and start a second channel. Starting a new channel with a very focused audience tends to be the best way to optimize the algorithm, but you have to keep yourself in mind as a creator. It's not just all about optimizing the algorithm. If you get to a point where you hate doing videos about a certain subject and you get burnt out, then you don't do it anymore, and you've wasted a lot of the time and energy you put into grinding.
My original channel really satisfies my desire as a YouTuber to endlessly experiment and try new things, because it gets boring just doing crypto videos to me every day. I don't want to do crypto videos every day. In the past I did so many crypto videos that I burnt myself out, got to the point where I didn't want to do any more, and eventually quit doing crypto videos altogether on my main channel. On my main channel I had three main subjects: hacking, crypto, and video games. And I quit all three of those at one point or another, which is one of the reasons I deleted all the videos off my channel to start over. That's a reflection of constantly grinding and going for maximum revenue and views without considering yourself.
Why live streams beat grinding out videos
It's very important on YouTube to make sure you do a great job for your audience and that you think about long-term survivability, making sure you really love doing your channel. I've tested so many different formulas, and the easiest formula to get views is to just crank out videos. The fastest way I've grown my channels has just been making videos, with the minimum editing, making them really authentic.
However, what I've found really builds a community and helps me as a creator is live streaming. When you're first starting and it's your live streams, you butcher how you talk, you don't really know what you're doing, and you haven't practiced that much. It can be much easier to just make videos. But the way I see it, the goal of making videos ideally should be to get yourself to a point as a creator where you can do live streams. What really helps me on my journey on YouTube is live streaming, because then I have an interaction with my audience. Live streams tend to generate a lot more minutes watched, and live streams often generate much bigger amounts of revenue. The days I do live streams, sometimes people drop a lot of super chat.
It's interesting to look at the different forms of revenue. While the majority of my revenue comes from watch page ads, there have also been hundreds of dollars from super chats and memberships. If we look back the entire year, a little more than 90% of my revenue comes from watch page ads, even though the main thing I've done is put videos up. But there's $1,500 that came in from super chats and memberships, and tens of thousands more that came in from one-on-one calls. I sold courses at one point, but I don't like selling courses, because if you're creating on YouTube, it's ideal to focus all your creative efforts on putting out everything you can create on YouTube. Then the ideal thing to do, when you want to make more money, is to charge people to have a call with you, where you can mentor them, answer questions, and perhaps most importantly, listen to them. The thing that's really helped me lean into making better videos for my viewers has been doing these one-on-one calls, seeing my viewers in person, listening to their stories, and really getting to know them.
How I started my main crypto channel, and the mistake baked into it
Let me show you how I started my main crypto channel. This is both a case study of what works really well in the short term, and what not to do. When I started this channel, I did what I knew would work well to get me the most views and make the most money as fast as possible. I put up videos with a clickbait title and a clickbait thumbnail, and it worked. It worked big. I did what I said in the video: I bought 132 Cardano, which at the time was $50. This video appealed to people searching for Cardano and to people already holding Cardano. It was just kind of generic hopium, a little bit of research, a fairly typical video in crypto with not much really useful information. But for people already holding Cardano, it was a pat on the back, saying, "Hey, look, I'm in this with you. I agree with you. We're in this together." And while sure, Cardano could go to $7.44 in 2024, anything's possible, but how possible is that? And are there better opportunities?
So I made a bunch of videos like this and got a bunch of views off search traffic and browse features on a bunch of different cryptos. But the thing that helped me is that I was doing all these one-on-one calls with people who watched those videos. Through those calls, I started to see that even though I was making good money, if anything, I was a producer of chaos. People would watch all these different videos and say, "You said Cardano is going to seven bucks, XRP is going to twelve, Quant's going to 2,500, ICP is going to 123, and Hedera is going to this." People were scheduling calls having watched all these different videos, and they'd say, "Okay, Jerry, so why don't you just give me the inside information now? You've gone and pumped all these other cryptos, but which one do you really like the best?"
That helped me see that I needed to offer something better to my viewers. Sure, if you watch one of my videos and subscribe but don't come back, that might be fine. You watched the Cardano video, you already hold Cardano, you liked it, you subscribed, I got more views, and you watched for some minutes. But if I don't make another video about Cardano, you probably don't come back, and it was kind of just a transaction. A one-view stand, so to speak. That's not generally what's going to work well to build your channel over time. What you really want is people coming back over and over again. This is where I really failed on my old channel.
You'll notice a big change in my metrics. When I first started this channel and was constantly making videos hyping up all these altcoins, I was getting a ton of new viewers who kept finding me on all these altcoins. But the people I was having one-on-one calls with were more confused. They'd say, "Which of these coins is actually the best? You've hyped them all up." So I started to do more research and realized I needed to deliver a better message. Based on what I was hearing people say, my videos were all over the place, they were confusing people, and people didn't know what to do.
This was me essentially making the same mistake I'd made for, at this point, twelve years on YouTube. I was doing a great job getting all kinds of new viewers, putting into practice what I knew, and many of my viewers were coming back, interested to see each day which coin I was pumping. But after all these one-on-one calls, and remembering what I'd learned, I knew that while this strategy was working well for short-term growth, it generally turns out very poorly in the long term. When you just hype everything up, you don't really believe in anything. You're a producer of confusion. Then when you're wrong all over the place, or when it becomes obvious to people that you're kind of a fraud who's just here trying to get views and make money, people go away, stop watching, and post nasty things about you. Then your channel just bleeds to death over a long period of time.
I could see this coming, so I started to pivot. I started to do better research, and because I'd had all these one-on-one calls, I started to really think about my viewers more and ask, what kind of videos can I make that will help my viewers the absolute most? Because while a lot of stuff on YouTube gets views, it doesn't actually help people that much. In fact, the same kind of stuff that often gets views on YouTube will lead people to getting ripped off, whether it's ripped off of their money in things like crypto, or ripped off of their time watching endless hours of gaming videos learning pointless skills you don't even need to know. A lot of videos on YouTube, and a lot of creators who are successful on YouTube, make videos that are nothing more than time and money wasters. I know that's going to sound brutal, but look around. A lot of the videos you find in many areas of YouTube are nothing more than time wasters. They don't offer you any value, and you'd have been better off not watching them. That's what I realized around here: I needed to stop wasting people's time.
Getting my channel terminated by a network of bots
I needed to start giving people much, much, much better information. And when I started doing that, somebody with a network of bots got pissed off and attacked my channel. Some of these crypto videos, it looks like there are people with networks of bots, where if you talk about certain cryptos, they use their bots against you. This is totally something you, as a creator, have no idea about. But with twelve years on YouTube, I get the feeling, based on the data I'm seeing, that with certain cryptos, and this seems to be less of an issue in other areas of YouTube but especially bad in crypto, dishonest organizations of people buy into certain cryptos, use a bunch of bots to push positive videos about them in order to get people to buy, and then they end up rug-pulling on them.
So when I started really caring more about my viewers and trying to give the people who'd been scheduling calls with me better information, I started criticizing a lot of these cryptos that, while I'd gotten views talking about them, I thought looked horrible at that point as a crypto investor. It appears what happened is that somebody running a network of bots attacked my channel and falsely reported it for illegal activity while I was live streaming. At which point YouTube, for the first time in my twelve-year history, terminated my channel. For a week, my YouTube channel was taken down completely.
I then took to X, tagging YouTube and Team YouTube repeatedly, and explained in my appeal that I had a twelve-year history on YouTube, that I'd never had a community guidelines violation at that point, that I'd never had a copyright strike that had been upheld, and that I had hundreds of thousands of subscribers on my main channel. After a week, they finally put my channel back up. But having that week where I lost all the traffic really killed my algorithm too. I was averaging like six to eight thousand views a day, and my channel was going up and up and up. When it got terminated, my views dropped to about half of where they'd been. I got pretty down for a while, burnt out on crypto. I was cranking videos out on my other channel, and I had about a month from when my channel was terminated of just burnout, wondering what to do with myself.
The value of that, though, is that I started to think of myself more as a regular crypto investor and less as just a YouTuber. What's difficult about doing YouTube is that on any subject, you get to be more in the mindset of "I'm a creator on this subject" instead of "I'm just someone on this subject." Then I started doing more live streams, really listening to my audience, and making videos my returning viewers were really enjoying. I was educating people in crypto. I was researching and trying to find which crypto was the best, so that instead of people paying $200 to ask me which crypto I actually thought was best, I could just tell people in one single video exactly how I felt and put all my money into it.
Going all in on Internet Computer, and watch time over money
After a few months of wandering and feeling lost and making all kinds of different videos, I finally found Internet Computer and went all in on it around October. You'll notice I was basically just grinding out content. I would sometimes take a week or two off, and I was not getting that many new viewers. Most of my audience was returning viewers.
Now, if you have to prioritize, it is much better to focus on making videos your returning viewers will like than trying to get new viewers. Where you really make deep relationships with people is when, you know, some of you have watched hundreds, maybe even thousands, of my videos. Some of you have spent hundreds of hours watching. That is the most meaningful relationship. Having someone new come along is just like dating: going out on a first date with somebody versus having a wife you've been married to for twelve years. The value of the relationship is vastly different. So it's very important to prioritize stuff your returning viewers will enjoy, because the algorithm will really punish you if your returning viewers don't like something. YouTube generally will not put it out to people who've never seen you before. But if your returning viewers like it, then YouTube will often consider putting it out to other people.
This is why, if you're going to be on YouTube, you really need to be in it for the good, the bad, and the ugly. This applies to anything you want to do professionally. If you don't like doing it on the bad days, if you quit when it gets hard, then it's probably not for you. I certainly did think about quitting when my channel was terminated. Because if you have one channel terminated on YouTube, you're not allowed to run any other channels either. Which means it is definitely best to just start out with one channel. If you don't have some success on one channel, or if you get one channel terminated, you might need to go somewhere else. The reason I kept going was that I was thinking about my viewers, and I didn't have anything better to do with myself. So I kept making YouTube videos, and I kept trying to make better and better ones.
You'll notice that after my channel was terminated, it took months to get the views back up to where they were before. But now we're reaching all-time highs on my channel. We're getting a good amount of new viewers, and we're also consistently bringing the viewers back. When I went all in on Internet Computer, some of my returning viewers left and didn't like it. But the community has been growing drastically since then, and the returning viewers have been very happy.
One of the biggest metrics you want to pay attention to on YouTube, more than your money, is your watch time. What I'm really happy to see is that we hit an all-time high in watch time. The watch time for the entire year has been 179,000 hours. In a single day recently, we had 1,900 watch hours. So in one single day, we had about 1% of the total watch hours for the entire year. That's why live streams are so good, and why returning viewers are so good, because returning viewers will often watch a lot more than a first-time viewer. I know that as a viewer myself, I generally watch a lot more of somebody I've already watched before. So watch hours, to me, is one of the best ways to gauge success on YouTube. It took months from my channel being terminated to actually get my watch hours growing, but now I'm doing a live stream every other day and scheduling them ahead of time, which helps people understand when I'm going to be live. I've found a crypto and a community I love creating for, my returning viewers are getting really satisfied, and I'm very happy doing that.
My original channel: $88,000 in ad revenue, millions in courses, and a slow death
I've talked a lot about my newer channels that have grown and made the majority of my income this year. Now let me dive into my original channel, the one with the long history. A lot of you would look at this and say, "Why bother with this original channel? Why bother talking about anything besides crypto?" For a good amount of time this year, there were months where I did two videos a day, one on each of my channels. There were even points where I did multiple videos a day on both crypto channels. There were days this year where I just grinded out videos to get more views and revenue. But every time I did that, it didn't take long until I was thinking about quitting completely and deleting my crypto channels. That's the main thing you want to avoid.
If you look at how I'm getting traffic on this original channel in the last 28 days, I'm getting most of it from browse features. Keep in mind that on the crypto reviews channel, I was getting most of my traffic from search. Browse features is what you should have once you get a channel where you've already got viewers who discovered you on YouTube search and then enjoy coming back. If you really want to do well on YouTube, you generally need to succeed in browse features, which means people finding your videos just by scrolling through the homepage, the subscription feed, and so on. However, you always want to have some YouTube search traffic bringing new people in.
If you look at the views throughout the entire year on this channel, when it first started there was a lot more search traffic. But for most of the year it's been browse features going out to my existing audience. Just recently, we actually peaked at the highest number of concurrent viewers on a live stream. With the average view duration being ten minutes, this is really good for bringing people in. I got a lot more search traffic this year on my regular videos compared to browse features. So if you're just starting a channel, videos tend to work really well to get your start and to let you experiment faster. But once you start to get an audience, live streams are the best for keeping people watching, giving people the best experience, and getting the most engagement.
While you can grind videos out endlessly, I see some people grinding out three or four videos a day, even experienced creators like me, while also live streaming. I have respect for the hustle. The problem with that, though, is burnout. Another problem is that if you're scattershotting yourself all over the place with all these different videos, it can be hard to get your audience focused. What I'm finding I really love as a creator is just doing one single thing a day: scheduling one single live stream ahead of time and then showing up for it.
Now let me explain my original channel, which is more of a case study in what not to do at this point. While it was initially a great source of pleasure, for the last few years it's been a great source of pain. I deleted every single video on this channel after I got my first-ever community guideline strike that was upheld. For most of my history on YouTube, I didn't care that much about just following the policies, because YouTube often wasn't very good at enforcing them in certain areas, and I also felt that in certain areas the policies were blatantly wrong and I should speak up about them even if that meant directly violating them.
One thing I've learned: if you update your description or your title, YouTube will go back and rescan your video. I got a community guideline strike on a video that was two years old. At the time I posted it, it definitely went against the policies, and I got away with it. But I updated the descriptions across all my videos, the algorithm rescanned, and I got a strike. So I said, "Fine. You want to give me a strike on a video that's two years old that nobody was watching? I'll just delete all my videos and start over." And I deleted all my videos on this channel and started over with the idea that I wanted a fresh start.
On this original channel, I had uploaded over 4,000 videos and done about 1,000 live streams. Most of my subscribers came in for hacking, gaming, and crypto, all of which I had quit on this channel. And this channel still was getting like 1,000 views a day just off search traffic. But my new videos were tending to only get like 100 views, which they still do now. I thought about deleting this channel a bunch of times. Instead, I started several other new YouTube channels on different subjects: a gaming channel, a business channel, a recovery channel, and a music channel. What I found was that the crypto channels were the only ones really getting great YouTube search traffic.
This original channel, because it has so many old subscribers, often has a poor click-through rate on new videos. When you have a lot of old subscribers who've forgotten about you, they're often more likely to scroll past your video. A 3% click-through rate is usually not good enough to really get out there and get new viewers. YouTube might put a video out to a few new viewers, but if the click-through rate from returning viewers is low, YouTube figures it isn't a very good video, since most of the people who already subscribed didn't like it. So this old channel, because of all these old subscribers, is kind of dead in a lot of ways, but it still gets more views than a brand-new channel. There are a lot of subjects, like music, business, or recovery, that are just difficult to get any views on unless you can figure out what those hot search terms are.
The main thing that happened with this channel is that I was inconsistent, and I was inconsistent because I prioritized getting the most views and income in the short term instead of thinking long term. When I first started, I had some videos I tried paying for views on. I can tell you that was not only completely worthless, it sabotaged my channel, because when you get people to watch from a low-quality source, it hurts you. On those videos I used Fiverr, and they've since been deleted; it was eleven years ago at this point, so I think we can talk about it. This is an example of what not to do. I realized you should never buy views for your channel.
But I thought it was different to pay for ads. One of the ways I actually blew my channel up was paying for a lot of ads, and the ads worked back then to get my videos ranked high in search results. You'll notice some days I had 40,000 or 50,000 views back then. I used paid ads to get more minutes watched, my videos then ranked higher in organic search, and then I was getting browse features. But because I was using paid ads and getting a bunch of junk traffic onto my channel, this strategy eventually caught up with me. When I did a whole bunch of paid ads on videos people didn't even like, they stopped enjoying my channel, they got annoyed with it, and people stopped coming back. I got so frustrated that I did even more paid ads just to try to get the views up. Then I finally gave up on paying for any ads. If you take out the paid ads, my channel's organic views just took a long, slow, painful, steady drop. I did get some extra views when I went viral on Facebook in 2022, but my views just kept going down, down, down, until I deleted them all.
I've actually had 32 million views, but I've since deleted all of them. The majority of my views on this channel were organic search traffic and browse features, and a lot of them came from Google search. I did make $88,000 just in ad revenue from this channel. But I made millions of dollars selling online courses on this channel. Millions of dollars selling online courses and promoting cryptocurrencies. Millions. But what did I not do? I did not consistently give my viewers good value over time. And for not consistently giving my viewers good value over time, all the work I did to get my channel going viral and really popular, it eventually just went down, down, down, down, down. If you want to see how I think about the income side of all this today, I broke it down further in my current income, expenses, and business plan.
Why I keep my "dead" channel alive
So I've thought about it: should I just delete this channel? Should I get rid of it? Why don't I? Well, after I tested starting brand-new channels, this channel gets more views on basically anything besides crypto than a fresh channel would. What I'm really liking on this channel is just doing live streams and reconnecting with viewers who saw me seven years ago and still subscribe and actually check their subscriptions feed.
I've been happy to see that even though this channel in a lot of ways has been dead in browse features, YouTube is more about what you've done lately. Most of the people who subscribed don't ever see any of my videos in browse features, so a lot of the people who do see my videos in browse features have actually been recent viewers. The last live stream I did on this main channel is called "AA Speaker: From Sad, Drunk to Happily Sober, 9 Years in Alcoholics Anonymous." I did this live stream where I told my entire story and history of alcoholism and how I got sober, a two-and-a-half-hour live stream. What I'm really happy to see is that YouTube is putting this out in YouTube search. There wasn't much in search the first day, but what's really nice about YouTube is that even if you have a dead channel, you can really go back to basics. If you make a video that people enjoy watching, that they click on when they're searching for it, that they spend a good bit of time watching, and that they subscribe to, YouTube will put it out in search regardless of the rest of your channel. So I'm very happy to see this video now getting views in YouTube search.
My biggest passion project right now is bringing this original channel back to life, because there are a lot of people who subscribed way back when who would still come by and see what I'm doing. This video would not have gotten this many views to start with if I'd done it on a brand-new channel; I tested it. You really do need some watch time to show up in YouTube search. You need at least some foundation. If you can get like a hundred views and ten or twenty watch hours, that will be enough to show up.
I realize that if you're looking at this, it kind of looks irrational. My whole strategy looks like I'm just wasting my time in the short term grinding out content on a channel where I actually consistently lose subscribers. I've actually lost 3,000 subscribers on this channel, and that was better than I did before. I consistently lost subscribers because I have so many, but I am still getting some new ones. The reason this channel is the best place for me to do everything besides crypto is that, while in the last year I've only made $1,300 on it despite uploading a lot of videos, and despite deleting all the older videos, this is my channel where I'm free to do anything. This is a channel where I can put up music videos, talk about my journey in weight loss, do my speaker meeting on Alcoholics Anonymous, and do an hour-and-a-half live stream with healing affirmations even when I didn't like how the audio came out.
This is my fun channel, and YouTube has to be a labor of love
This channel fulfills my passion as a YouTuber to experiment, mess around, and have fun. This is essentially my fun channel at this point. I actually put more than half my effort into my fun channel. Because if you're going to be a YouTuber, it needs to be fun. It needs to be joyous. If it's not fun, it's not worth doing. And this channel keeps things fun. I'm hoping that one day maybe this channel will be the only thing I do, and I can just have fun on it.
The crypto videos, at this point, are very much like a job to me. I'm happy to do them, I enjoy doing them, but if the crypto videos got the same kind of views this channel gets, I don't know if I'd do them. What's nice is that on this channel I'm doing these videos essentially for free, just out of love, just to help my audience, just from passion. That seems to me to be the ideal way to create: just for fun, just for passion. And yes, if you find a niche like crypto where people love my live streams, are consistently watching them, and are pouring in time, energy, and money, then that's worth doing too. But I've done so much of YouTube as essentially just a job, just a means to make money, that I know the real opportunity is to keep doing this for 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years.
The biggest mistake I made on YouTube in the last twelve years since I started my channel back in June 2011 is that I thought short-term. I was always concerned with how to get the most views as fast as possible, which is why I ended up buying views, which was absolutely a mistake, and then paying for ads, which was another mistake, and then making any kind of video just to get views and make myself money. While, purely from a financial standpoint, I've made millions of dollars online and gotten millions of views, I look at a lot of what I've done creatively so far as a failure. My best work is still ahead of me, because I've learned a lot of valuable lessons from getting all these views and making all this money. At the same time, having a dead channel when you've made this much money and gotten this many views is really embarrassing. That's why I made these new channels: to try to prove to myself that I don't totally suck as a YouTuber. And I'm grateful this crypto channel is now bringing people back over to this original channel.
YouTube has to be a labor of love if you're really going to do it. If you don't like doing YouTube when you're not getting any views, you won't last. Another thing I haven't illustrated is the massive amount of criticism. The comments. I don't even read comments on YouTube anymore, because while there are a lot of positive ones, there are so many nasty ones. I've read thousands and thousands of nasty comments on this channel. Every comment like "you bought your subs," "you're a faker," "you use bots." I didn't buy my subs. I made videos years ago that were popular. That's why I rely on my community and open chat and Discord and my one-on-one video calls, which are all part of the Jerry Banfield Family.
If you're just starting, YouTube will often do one of two things. Most people are making videos and then struggling to even get anybody at all to watch. They're frustrated they're not getting enough views. In those cases, all the comments may be positive, but they're from the same person commenting on every video. That actually is one of the most joyous environments to create in: where all you've got is a few friends and family who love what you're doing, who show up, who talk all the time. If your YouTube channel is not worth doing like that, trust me, you're not going to like it when it gets bigger. Because as soon as your channel starts getting bigger, all the nastiest haters come out. All the paid trolls and bots that just say nasty things. I've heard like every nasty thing you can imagine in the comments on my channels over the years. That stuff did wear on me, which is why I don't read them anymore. I read live stream comments, and if people want to show up on a live stream and be a critic, I generally just ignore those comments. But sometimes the critics have a good point. The critics on this channel often made very good points that I didn't listen to, things like, "Why aren't you creating any more hacking videos?" If you can't consistently show up in the same place for the long term, it's not worth doing. This whole tension is part of why I came to believe being a big YouTuber is not fun the way people imagine.
How many channels should you have?
On YouTube, one of the hardest challenges to figure out is how many channels you should have, assuming you want to do this full-time. To me, you should only have one channel to start with, unless there's a certain niche so hot that it kind of ruins everything else on your channel. I tried doing three different niches on this channel at once, big ones like gaming, crypto, and hacking. And I did so many different kinds of videos that if I had just made a crypto channel, a hacking channel, and a business channel from the beginning, that probably would have gone really well. But in a lot of areas, it's going to be difficult to get search traffic and do what I did with these crypto channels to start two channels.
Crypto is so hot right now. If you review altcoins, there are so many people searching and there are so many videos that suck. Crypto is one of the easiest things to do on YouTube right now. There are also other areas you can find that are similar. However, whatever you do on YouTube, you've got to be in it for the good, the bad, and the ugly. Because most of my time on YouTube has been ugly at this point. It was ugly getting started and frustrated when nobody was watching my videos. Then it was really nice when I had a few years where my videos were really popping off, and I was one of the biggest crypto YouTubers in the world, and everybody was talking about Jerry Banfield. There were tons of positive comments, all kinds of money, millions of dollars to be made for about a three-year period.
And then what happened? I quit doing crypto. I quit doing hacking at the same time, and I quit doing gaming, all at once. And my views just got destroyed doing that. I tried making music videos, which people were not liking. Then I tried to do all these business videos. I was all over the place. I did gaming again, a whole bunch of gaming again, and then quit gaming again. And then most of my time on YouTube has been just ugly: watching my views go down, down, down, watching my audience consistently criticize and leave, watching my audience consistently disappointed. Someone who loved hacking videos leaves frustrated comment after frustrated comment that I'm not doing hacking anymore, then starts criticizing me as a YouTuber. Then the same kind of person comes back: "I wish you'd do gaming videos again." "I wish you'd do crypto videos." I did at least listen and start doing crypto videos again, initially on this channel, and then I moved them over to another channel because it was so hot.
But most of my time on YouTube has been ugly. It has been getting fewer views, or hardly any views. Even the times when things were just popping off, that was often chaotic and anxiety-provoking. I often felt like I didn't have enough views even during that time. I'd put videos out that only got a few thousand views and feel like they were a total failure. I got frustrated with my audience. For example, I quit playing video games at the end of 2016, and a lot of my viewers at that time were there for video games. Then I switched to music, and people were pissed. So it's nice when you're starting to just do one channel. But if you get a specific niche that's really hot, breaking that off onto a separate channel can be better.
At the end of the day, do you love what you're doing?
At the end of the day, it really comes down to whether you love what you're doing. The one consistent thing I can see here is that no matter how bad my YouTube has gotten, I don't see anything better to do with myself. I do love doing this. And what I'm really proud of right now is that the views I'm getting are enough today. To me, that is having made it completely. I was getting a lot more views at various points, although I'm getting about the most minutes watched I've ever had. At the height of my popularity on this original channel, one video where I ran an ad got all these minutes watched, but those minutes turned out to be useless. Now I'm getting about as many minutes watched as I was at the height of my popularity, except now it's enough. It's finally enough. Having 10 or 15 people watch during most of a live stream, that's enough. Because the real value of these live streams is that they can then be watched indefinitely.
So you also need to balance, on YouTube, between doing things that are good for today versus evergreen. This original channel I've set up as an evergreen channel. My content on it can be watched indefinitely. Whereas my crypto channel is more of a "you've got to watch it today, because it's already going out of date tomorrow." A lot of those videos on Internet Computer will be good for months, but a year or two from now, a lot of them will be pretty out of date. You have to balance content where, like a video like this, it could be valuable to watch 5 or 10 years from now. My Alcoholics Anonymous speaker meeting will be good to watch indefinitely; you can watch it 10 or 20 years from now. The affirmations, too. You definitely want to balance evergreen content, things you can watch forever, versus things that are going to be hot today but that you'll have to constantly grind out new videos to replace.
My strategy now: evergreen content and keeping people on YouTube
So my main strategy now, and this is why I'm doing one live stream every other day, is that my crypto channel is for an audience that wants to show up live and that's mainly relevant for today. Why live streams on YouTube are so good is that if you look at these live streams, the majority of the views come after I was live. When you get those YouTube views after you're live, and you schedule your next live stream, that's how you really snowball: you get more and more people. So this is what I'm doing on the crypto channel. And then my original channel is a channel for evergreen content. My vision is that the crypto channel gets a lot of search traffic, but I have to keep doing it or it gets irrelevant fast, and then I can funnel people over to my original channel for the evergreen content that will be worth watching forever. I can share a video like my AA speaker meeting all year long, referencing it over from my other channel.
So this is what I've learned in twelve years on YouTube. If you add everything up, YouTube has paid me tens of thousands of dollars this year. I've had expenses related to it. And if you've hung on to the end, my actual profit after all my expenses this year as a full-time YouTuber is around $10,000 to $15,000. While you might think that's pretty low, and it is very low compared to most of my other years going back to 2014, I'm also setting up to lay a strong foundation for the future, which is where I went wrong in the past. I wasn't really laying a good foundation for the future. This year I've set up a strong foundation that can grow consistently going forward, instead of these quick pump-and-dumps in one form or another.
About those hacking videos I mentioned: they were showing how to do so-called ethical hacking, which really was just a way of showing people how to do hacking and trying to get away with it. I do have a shop where I sell products, but I don't like constantly selling stuff on YouTube. It's really annoying to always be selling. So I prefer to only do a soft sales pitch occasionally, like mentioning that on my website you can schedule a one-on-one call with me or join my communities on Discord or open chat. I prefer that kind of soft sales pitch. In a lot of my old videos, I did really hard sales pitches that worked to make lots of money. But what they didn't do is keep people coming back to my YouTube channel.
My goal with my presence on YouTube is that the video itself should give you a massive amount of value. That's the primary purpose. The video should give you a massive amount of value, and then a secondary consideration is maybe I'll get something out of it. What I've found is that it's not worth doing videos at all if my main purpose is to make myself money. It's only worth doing if the videos are very helpful for you. And then I don't have to worry, because if I make stuff that's really helpful for you, you all will take care of me financially. You may take care of me less financially in the short term, especially versus selling stuff hard, but in the long term I'm thinking about how, when I do a video like this 10 or 20 years from now, what I want to see is consistent, steady growth in my YouTube channels. I want to see consistency on my part as a creator, where I give people a repeatable experience. I want to see that I'm having fun and getting to experiment, and that I'm delivering consistent value. My time on YouTube so far, the only thing I've consistently done is show up. And that, at least, has gotten me to this point and kept me alive as a YouTuber. I'm really excited for the future, to apply all these lessons.
The final lesson I'll impart is that one of the best things you can do on YouTube is keep people on YouTube. Keep people coming back to YouTube. Always give somebody another video to watch instead of sending them off YouTube. Always refer another video for somebody to watch. Another little tip: I'm using ChatGPT to help me, since I often answer a lot of questions when I'm live, and to get ideas for what to talk about. I use it to crank out some questions and then put those in the description to help YouTube understand exactly what my live stream will be about and get it out there. But mainly, it really helps to just always recommend another video for somebody to watch. Keep people coming back on YouTube. If you want to keep learning how I approach all of this, you can watch my newest videos in my YouTube Coaching playlist.