One of the key lessons from deleting 300,000 subscribers and building back 6,000 in four months is that the easiest thing you can do is have somebody you can talk to about your YouTube channel. I know lots of other YouTubers, I see what they're doing, and I've been doing YouTube for 15 years. If you want to make things easier, I have a community where you can go in, post your channel, ask for feedback, and I'll help you — join the Jerry Banfield Family and let someone help you. That's the easiest way to make things easier on yourself.
I've also been using AI to make proofs of human — real videos where I always have my face — and the AI has sped up my creative process so much from a year ago that I crank out six videos a day. If you want views on YouTube, it's literally as easy as just cranking out a bunch of videos.
Six channels, five to six videos a day
I mostly do long format videos because those get the most watch time. I have a crypto reviews channel, a gaming channel, a vlogs channel, an ICP channel, a YouTube coach channel, and a dating channel, and I aim to put out six long format videos a day. I've averaged five videos a day — including testing, doing live streams, taking a vacation, and trying to date and parent my kids. I do YouTube full time, and if you want to do this full time, you've got to act like it. I'm devoted to doing this. I average uploading 73 minutes of content a day, and I've uploaded 91 hours since I started tracking this on May 18th.
And in fact, you should give up on the idea that you're going to get views based off having the best title and thumbnail. You have almost no chance of going viral on most of your videos. Once you accept that — and accept that all you need to do is grind out videos, because YouTube is hungry for new videos and it's going to show your videos around — everything gets simpler.
Where my 543,000 views actually came from
I've got 543,000 views on YouTube organically, because Google ads suck. I did a brief test and then unlisted the videos — Google ads garbage up your traffic and it's distracting. Google will give you tons of organic views on YouTube if you make the right kind of content.
The right kind of content, for example: my Jerry Banfield ICP channel has gotten almost 300,000 views, because there are very few people who make ICP content and there are tens of thousands of people who watch it. I think there are actually only two or three creators making daily ICP content — me, Blockchain Pill, and Zero2Hero. Tens of thousands of viewers, three creators. So the number one thing you do is find an area on YouTube like that. The way to do it is just to test: make videos about anything you can imagine, then see which ones get the most views. Think about videos that solve real problems and give people what they're looking for. That one channel has gotten more than half my views.
Niche channels — but never only one niche
You want to keep each channel niche, but don't just niche your whole life. Some of you would argue I should just do my ICP channel and nothing else. No — because I did that before, and I optimized for money and views. All I thought about was money and views, and I'd make like $10,000-plus a month taking calls and making ICP videos all the time. I got miserably bored and hated doing YouTube. I got so burned out that I deleted 14 channels — I started on YouTube in 2011, and I literally said I quit in 2024, running that same strategy of doing all ICP and crypto videos.
So it's really important, if you want to do YouTube full time, to have several different things you care about creating content on, and then to create the content as fast as possible. My ICP channel gets a 10-minute video ground out every day — it takes 20 or 30 minutes of actual time. On my crypto reviews channel, I use ChatGPT Pro on the $200-a-month plan to do some absolutely insane research for me: the AI takes an hour and a half to do the research, and then I put that research up in a single video and just go through it. Those have been amazing.
The YouTube coach channel and what I offer
Then I have a YouTube coach channel. The YouTube shorts have been going off on this channel, so I'm going to be doing more shorts there; the longs have not gotten as many views. I'll personally look at your channel — I may watch one or more of your videos and give you personal feedback. That's insanely valuable from somebody who's been on YouTube for 15 years with tens of millions of views and hundreds of millions of impressions, and it's cheaper than anybody else's, easier, and immediately accessible. And if you really want the best impact, the best thing is to talk to me regularly — you can sit down and have a Zoom call with me every week, or once a month. I have the simplest, easiest, most accessible YouTube coaching program, and I've got fantastic results myself, starting from zero, to back it up. Even when my long videos there don't get that many views, I get views from people who find them really helpful and then join my community.
Everyone should have a vlog channel
Then I have my Jerry Banfield channel where I do vlogs, and on my vlogs I do real personal stuff. I definitely lost some women dating because if I go out with you, I'm going to talk about it on the vlog — I'm not going to mention you by name. You can see this vlog series is just going off: "I Shouldn't Have Sent This Message at 6:48 AM," "The Queen Goes Cold," videos about dating and prayer, "AA Sponsor Fired Me." I was crying in some of them, but these videos are really good for me to do. This channel is probably going to be my third monetized channel — I have three monetized channels already, and the ICP channel got monetized in like 19 or 20 days.
To me, everyone should have a vlog channel, because the number one form of content you're going to wish you'd done in 20 years is a daily vlog. I wish I could go back 20 years and watch a day in the life of 22-year-old me. Probably half of it would be about video games — I played this match in Call of Duty: World at War and got 10 kills and called the dogs in — or it'd be some woman I just met at the bar, or a day being a police officer or a corrections officer. The number one video I should have made is a vlog every single day.
Some of my vlogs have been getting too long, though, even with pretty strong average watch time. It's generally better to put out a roughly 10-minute video every day on a channel than longer videos less consistently, because if I watch somebody every day, I really want to see them once a day. And what's great is that if you follow me, you can get a vlog video, a dating video, a YouTube coach video, two crypto videos, and a gaming video every day. That's what you want to be thinking about: deep, deep fans. If somebody finds one of your videos, can they spend an hour a day watching your videos if they want to? On one of these vlogs the average watch time was eight minutes — pretty sweet. But the longer I go on in every video, the longer it takes to film all the videos, and I can't film six videos a day if I'm doing 30-minute vlogs.
My AI workflow and studio
I use AI to speed up every single part of the process. For this vlog I did today, I came up with the title myself, but the metadata and the chapters — I dropped the video into a Claude window on my computer, and it does all the descriptions, puts in all the tags, pulls the thumbnail out of the video, and transcribes all of it. It checks to make sure there are no policy violations. It automatically writes the description with chapters and all the key entities in it, so YouTube knows exactly what's in the video even if anything's misspelled. All the tags are done correctly, and all I have to do is upload to YouTube. I get a metadata file, copy the description, pick from the title ideas — especially on the vlogs, I often don't know what I'm going to title it, I just start off and do the vlog — put in the tags, stick in the thumbnail, and publish it. It's a super fast workflow.
I have a YouTube studio that cost about $10,000 for everything: a nice huge key light, three monitors including a 2560-by-1440p monitor, OBS that I record on, Claude over here in the terminal, and the Rode arm and RE20 all set up. It's a really fantastic setup that allows me to just step up and talk. If you're building toward doing this every day, that's something worth learning from — and you can see how I apply all of it across my YouTube Coaching playlist.
If you want to just do YouTube for fun — and I'd suggest 99% of people should just do YouTube for fun — upload a vlog every day and go about your life. But if you want to make money on YouTube, you need a mentor. I'm a fantastic mentor. I might even say I'm a better coach than I am a YouTuber myself, and I've coached a lot of YouTubers over the years — some of them have outshined me on YouTube. One note: I only read messages in the Family — I don't read the comments on YouTube, because if you're not part of my community, I'm not paying attention there. And as I finished filming this, I got a message — someone wants to play 10x. So let's go.