Starting Over on YouTube: My Plan, Decision, and Results

My answer to whether starting over on YouTube still makes sense is yes, but not for the reason most people expect. I had been on YouTube since 2011, and in 2025 I deleted every channel I had because I was burned out and thought I was done. In 2026 I came back from zero on six brand new channels. Since then I have uploaded more than 1,200 videos, which have brought in about 1.5 million views, and not one of them went viral.

What worked was not a secret format. It was a fresh start on channels with a clear focus, a high volume of videos, and a steady look at the numbers that matter. A new channel gave YouTube a clean slate to read, and I could watch the algorithm pick it up within weeks on the ICP channel I started in March 2026. The lesson I trust most is about what counts. Views were never the thing that paid. Watch hours and revenue were.

My view changed across these posts, and I would rather show you how than pretend I had it figured out at the start. In my June results post I argued that the best new channel is one aimed at a demand that is not being served well, and that a fresh channel lets you break away from a confused history. In my exact plan, from the same month, I treated one-on-one calls as the main way to earn and said I had no intention of making Shorts again. By the rebuild post I had moved to one video a day per channel, with each channel covering one segment of my life and work.

Then came the volume. In I Started Over on YouTube and Got 543,142 Views in 132 Days I had published 573 videos across six channels in 132 days, starting from zero. That post made the point that long-form videos are the base and Shorts are a test. I also stopped editing, because the time it took to produce each video was the real bottleneck, and calls could be booked from day one, before any ad revenue arrived.

The newest post, the 1,200-video breakdown, is where the numbers got specific. Across the channels there were about 84,000 watch hours, and long-form videos made up 82% of that watch time. Shorts brought 28% of my views but only 2% of my watch time. In my data, the 20-to-30-minute group produced about 156 watch hours per upload, against 13 for five-minute videos. Those figures are not proof that length causes performance, but they changed how I plan my time.

Below this opening you will find the five posts in full, newest first, starting with the 1,200-video breakdown and ending with the plan I wrote in June. If you only read two, read the 1,200-video post for the data and the 543,142-view post for the simple version of the plan. The contents list links to each one, so you can jump straight to the part you need.

Some things I got wrong, and some I have not solved. I deleted channels I later regretted deleting, and in the newest post I admit that not one of my regular videos reached 10,000 views. Not every channel is monetized yet, and the business side, where the real income has to come from, is the part I am still building. If you are restarting, expect a long grind before the revenue shows up. For the cadence side, see my one-video-a-day post, and for why views are not income, see Views Are Not Income.

If you want me to look at your own channel, you can book a personal video review at jerrybanfield.com/review/.

I Uploaded 1200+ YouTube Videos on New Channels in 2026. Here's What I Learned. (October 8, 2026)
Starting Over on YouTube: My Plan, Decision, and Results (July 31, 2026)
Why I Rebuilt My Deleted YouTube Channels and Segmented My Content (June 17, 2026)
I'm Starting Over on YouTube. Here's My Exact Plan. (June 15, 2026)
Is Starting a New YouTube Channel in 2026 Worth It? My Results (June 15, 2026)

I Uploaded 1200+ YouTube Videos on New Channels in 2026. Here's What I Learned.

From my video published October 8, 2026.

1,200 videos, six brand new channels, 1.5 million views

I've uploaded over 1,200 videos this year on YouTube on six brand new channels that I started from scratch. I had no other YouTube channels, absolutely nothing. And I've gotten over 1.5 million views on these channels. What's even more remarkable is that I've done that off a quantity approach. None of my videos went viral. None of my videos got a bunch of views. I've literally just worked hard and gotten 1.5 million views.

I've been on YouTube since 2011, though. I deleted everything last year because I was so frustrated and because I was trying to make my marriage better. My wife didn't like me doing YouTube. I ended up divorcing her anyway and then going back to YouTube this year. I wrote down what the first run taught me in What I Learned After Uploading 5,000 Videos to YouTube, and this post is the sequel to that one: the same lessons, re-tested from zero with nothing carried over.

If you want help on YouTube, I've got the most accessible coaching program I know of. It comes with four one-hour calls plus support between the calls. I've coached a number of people to YouTube channels that have hundreds of thousands of subs and have made millions of dollars, and I'm here to help you.

You can see every one of my channels. If you go to any one of them, I have a list of all my other channels highlighted so you can easily find them. My most watched channel currently is my @JerryBanfield channel, The Jerry Banfield Show, even though it has fewer subs than some of the other channels. The watch time there is up to 10,000 hours in the last month, from scratch, on a brand new channel. Then I have a Dating channel, a Gaming channel, and a music channel, which I didn't even include in any of the analytics here because that's the one channel I didn't delete. I have a Content Creators channel for YouTubers, which is the channel this video is from. And then I have an ICP Crypto channel and a Crypto Reviews channel.

So I'm going to show you all the data for these channels, because I've learned some very valuable lessons. I've tested live streams. I've tested five-minute videos. I've tested hour-long videos. I've tested all kinds of different Shorts: Shorts that I filmed in one session, 120 at a time; Shorts cut from longer videos; Shorts filmed on my phone. To me this is one of the most impressive and transparent YouTube experiments that anyone has done in 2026. This is some of the absolute best information anyone is offering, because almost everyone else is just telling you what they would do, and they already had views. Once you already have an audience, it's easy to just get more. I published an early version of this experiment when the first channel was three months old in How I Got 340K YouTube Views in 90 Days on My New Channel, and this is what six channels and six more months of data look like.

The numbers behind the headline

Let's look at the data. I've published over 1,200 pieces of content, and not one of them is a major viral long-form video. I've gotten 1,530,000 views, over 1 million engaged views, and 11.8 million thumbnail impressions. That means my thumbnails have been seen almost 12 million times. And 84,000 hours watched. So we're not talking about a bunch of people who just scrolled by my videos. 84,000 hours is a lot of hours.

I want to put that into context on a calculator. There are 24 hours a day times 365 days a year, which is 8,760 hours in a year. So 84,000 hours is essentially 10 years of people watching my content in the last six months. That means there are about 20 people, at all times of day, every single day, all day long, watching my content. And that's starting from scratch. That's something that theoretically could be replicated. On top of that, there are thousands of net subscriptions, including the ones lost, attributed to individual videos. I think I've got around 10,000 subs on all my channels combined.

So here's the key thing that stands out about what I'm saying versus what everybody else is saying. Not a single one of my regular videos reached 10,000 views. Not one of my long-form videos or live streams, not one of them, reached 10,000 views. Only four of my Shorts exceeded 10,000 views, and none of them exceeded 100,000.

Why I think YouTube is getting wider, not narrower

To put this in perspective, I think the future of YouTube is going to be much more wide. YouTube lately, especially since MrBeast, has been narrow. You've got a relatively small number of channels soaking up the majority of views. But the more AI can differentiate content and get to know viewers better and better, the more viewers are wanting weirder and weirder stuff. Viewers are increasingly unsatisfied with a broad MrBeast video. Even MrBeast has been falling off a bit, as YouTube content goes wider and wider into more random kinds of videos and people segment themselves.

That's why, to me, a quantity-based approach is not quite guaranteed to win, but it gives me the most chances. If I can do dating videos and crypto videos and gaming videos and videos for YouTubers and vlogs, if I can do all of those, then I've got so many different chances to reach different audiences that are in demand instead of just doing one thing. I asked whether a fresh start even makes sense right now in Is Starting a New YouTube Channel in 2026 Worth It?, and the answer this data gives me is yes, as long as you spread your bets.

92% of my views came from everything else. My top 10 most viewed uploads only accounted for 8% of my views. And this has been a point of frustration for me as a YouTuber, feeling like I just can't get a viral video. I've accepted it. Look, don't even bother trying to get a viral video. Just grind out videos in a way that's fast and that will get you those 92% of views. I've tried to replicate my most viewed uploads and I can't even do it.

So here's the lesson. You don't need a viral video to build a channel. Consistent, reasonably successful uploads can add up to substantial results. And my key way to do this is to minimize the time it takes to make videos and upload them. That's one of the most brilliant things I do.

I borrowed $90,000 on credit cards this year, since I was making no money at the beginning of the year. I deleted everything. I got divorced. I'm very serious about this, because I know from my own experience that I can make tens of thousands a month on YouTube. I just have to upload those first thousand videos to get my baseline. And then from there, I can sell YouTube coaching, I can sell all kinds of stuff. If you're willing to upload a thousand videos to YouTube, in my experience you've got a good shot at being full time. And the goal is to upload those as fast as possible, at the highest quality possible.

Long form versus Shorts: watch hours are what actually count

So let's look at my long-form views. To me, what's more substantial is this. So many people have gotten so many views on short form, but short-form videos generate relatively few watch hours compared to views on long form. I've gotten over a million views on long-form videos and 70,000 watch hours. That accounts for the vast majority of my direct video-attributed subscriptions, the ones that aren't people coming in from my website who found me somewhere else or heard about me through word-of-mouth marketing. So the main thing that's grown me on YouTube is long-form videos.

Basically, YouTube is two different platforms right now. There's short form, where people are mostly on mobile, scrolling, getting quick dopamine hits, not that loyal to one particular creator. Occasionally they'll find a creator they like and watch a whole bunch of their Shorts. But a lot of those short-form views will not turn into long-form viewers, and a lot of those views don't pay very well. A million views with 70,000 watch hours is thousands and thousands of dollars in ad revenue, and now I'm sending people to my website on top of that, where I've sold things like Cameo, Skool, one-on-one calls, merch, and so on.

82% of all my watch time and approximately 90% of my net subscriptions are from long videos. Meanwhile, I have 400,000 views on Shorts, and I don't even know which one of my Shorts got 25,000, because I've uploaded so many of them that I don't even look. I did see a couple of the crypto Shorts I did that were at 10 or 15,000 views. So I have 400-some thousand Shorts views. I've gotten hundreds of thousands of views in both Shorts and longs, and almost 100,000 on live streams.

The Shorts have only got 1,891 watch hours, though, which sucks. To me, if you could boil your whole YouTube channel down to one metric, the most important metric is watch hours. 400,000 views versus a million sounds like the million is twice as good, right? But really you're talking 35 times more watch hours on my regular videos compared to Shorts. That's where you're going to really monetize. YouTube ad revenue is introductory-level monetization. You need to have your own website. If you want to be full time, you can go full time on an audience like mine just by grinding out videos, but you've got to have the long-form views.

If you notice, the longs got 20 times as many subscriptions and 35 times as many watch hours as the Shorts, but only twice as many views. So these Shorts views are not very helpful on their own, but they still do help add momentum to the regular videos and the live streams, especially when you live stream vertical and horizontal at the same time in a dual stream, which I do.

Live streams: the hardest views to get, the best to monetize

Live streams: 81,000 live stream views. These are generally the hardest views to get on YouTube, because who wants to watch some random person's live streams? You usually need to get Shorts views and/or regular video views first, and then people come through to your live streams. But live streams are some of the absolute best ways to monetize. I'm skipping ahead a bit here, but I've had live streams where I've earned $200 or $300 in a few hours. Whereas with the ad revenue on my videos, I'm lucky to get $10 or $20 on most of my long-form videos. Or not lucky; that's kind of average.

You can think of Shorts like ads for your channel. Shorts are free ads. It takes me about one minute per Short. I film videos vertical and horizontal at the same time in OBS. I take the vertical version and dump it into Claude, where I have a whole set of instructions I've custom built, and it cuts out the Shorts. Then all I have to do is watch a Short, which takes less than a minute, especially since I watch on double speed. Then I just drag it into a folder and it fires out to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube Shorts. And it's just like an ad.

I value my time at maybe $5 or $6 a minute. So essentially, every Short is a $5 ad. It takes one minute of my time, which is effectively five dollars, and here you go, here's another one, and that adds up. I try to publish something like 15 Shorts a day, and those are just free reach that gets tens of thousands of views.

Occasionally the Shorts get subs who watch long form, who go to my website, who come to live streams. The live streams, though, are the best earning. So the next question is video length.

How long should a video be? What the watch-hour data says

One thing I've been wondering about a lot is video length. How long should a video be? I tested all the different formats. For a while I tested just five-minute videos. For another while I tested just 10-minute videos. Then I tested trying to keep it just a little over 10. So here are my videos that are at least 30 days old, sorted by their watch hours, and I remember I tested a lot of five- and 10-minute videos.

The average watch time on a five-minute video: 13 hours median. There were some outliers, but median means the normal one, basically the middle of the data set, not the average that counts outliers. So five- to 10-minute videos: 13 watch hours. 10 to 15 minutes: 40 watch hours. 15 to 20 minutes: 75 watch hours. 20 to 30 minutes: 156 watch hours. And 30 to 40 minutes: 176 watch hours.

What we can see is that the 20-to-30-minute category generated more accumulated watch time per upload than the shorter categories combined. Now, these are across different channels and different topics, and they don't prove that making a video longer causes it to perform better. But in terms of time, it's only a little bit more work for me to film a 20-to-30-minute video, and I can expect to get 10 times as much watch time. So in most cases, for me, it's better to film a longer, more in-depth video and film fewer of those than to grind out shorter uploads. There are some exceptions, like my ICP videos, which performed extremely well being shorter.

So 20 to 30 minutes is a useful length to target, because the people who just want short content and clips are going into Shorts, and then people are watching longer videos longer on TVs and tablets and listening on mobile phones. The goal is to make the video long enough to deliver the value without unnecessary filler. I hope this one doesn't have unnecessary filler, except for the stuff that makes it entertaining.

The hidden cost of uploading more videos

Here's the sneaky thing that most beginner YouTubers especially don't consider: the hidden cost of uploading more videos. This has become very apparent to me, because the most limited thing you have is your time, much more limited than money. There are all kinds of ways you can get money, but you have 24 hours a day, and you should be sleeping (not medical advice) eight hours a day. I'm sleeping eight hours a day. If I go one day with six or seven hours, I'll go another day with nine or 10 hours. I sleep my ass off, so I'm rested and have a full amount of energy.

The big thing, though, is that it takes time to upload every single video. It's great that I can upload Shorts across four platforms in just a minute, but each individual Short doesn't get much of a return either. Meanwhile, every regular video requires choosing a title, selecting a thumbnail, uploading and processing, writing the description, setting and scheduling it, and checking to finish production. On average, I've calculated that it takes me between five and 10 minutes, so about seven and a half minutes, per video. Whether it's a five-minute video or a 50-minute video, it takes me about seven and a half minutes to upload it.

That means three eight-minute videos take 24 minutes of raw recording and 22 and a half minutes of uploading. And that's not to mention the research time and the setup. Often a video like this one only takes me a tiny bit more work to research and set up than an eight-minute video does. Research, setup, getting a thumbnail and the background ready, all of that means it takes much more time per minute of content to do a shorter video.

So three eight-minute videos take me about 46 minutes of real time, not even including prep time, and the prep time is generally going to be similar to that of one 24-minute video. It takes 50% more time to put the same 24 minutes on YouTube if it's in three videos instead of one. That's 15 minutes of real time I can save by doing one 24-minute video instead of three eight-minute ones. This is what you really need to be thinking about as a content creator: where every single minute of your time is going. I wrote a whole post on this way of thinking, Maximize YouTube Views Generated per Hour of Time, and the upload-cost math is the biggest reason it holds up.

So more uploads are not automatically more productive. I see so many of these channels just grinding out one-minute videos, five-minute videos, 10-minute videos. And while they do get views, having a thousand views with an average view duration of one minute is pretty worthless. But my video with a thousand views, when the average view duration is 10 minutes, is 10 times as valuable, if not 20 or 50 times more valuable. I explained why a small view count can still be worth real money in Your 50-View YouTube Video Might Be Worth $100, and minutes watched is the reason. You've got to look mainly at minutes watched; that's one of the best things to track.

So a complete, thoughtfully structured episode can be a better use of time than several short fragments. That's why, in the past, I would have turned this into three or four videos, but right now I'm doing one single video to capture this entire data analysis. And think about it: if you're asking people to share your work, is it easier to ask people to share three different videos or one single video? Generally, you want to dump as much value as you can into one single video and do fewer of them. But quantity still matters also.

Hour-long videos are not necessarily too long

Next point: hour-long videos are not necessarily too long, which I thought they were in the past. I've had several recent vlogs that earned hundreds of watch hours. And if you're on YouTube getting hundreds of watch hours, especially on a newer channel, that's getting monetized. Look at this one: "I spent $2,000 to be lonely at VidSummit." That got 420 watch hours. You realize if I do 20 videos like that, that's enough to be monetized. And literally, that's just me talking off the top of my head. In theory, with this kind of data, you could get your channel monetized in a single month doing 20 videos, literally talking off the top of your head for an hour.

That's exactly what I did. I have 10,000 watch hours on my Jerry Banfield channel, The Jerry Banfield Show, the vlogs. So people talk about how it's so hard to get monetized. Nah. You need to think watch time. If you do hour-long videos, it doesn't take very many views to get that many watch hours.

Here are some other titles I did. "I borrowed my ex-wife's suitcase for my first trip alone": 358 watch hours. "I met Mark Manson, then I forgot how to talk": 351 watch hours. And at the same time, I did a 32-minute vlog about how I got hacked, and that got 588 watch hours. So the ideal video duration depends on the length of the story. If you've got a compelling 60-minute story, you can totally do that. A 25-minute story can totally work too. But you're generally going to want to be ready to go longer and put more into fewer videos. And at the same time, that doesn't mean you have to edit them and make everything retention-perfect.

Channel by channel: the ICP Crypto channel

Now let's break this down channel by channel, by different topics, because this is something almost nobody does either. They'll show one channel or one niche. I'm going to show you six different channels' analytics here.

First, my Jerry Banfield ICP channel. My vlogs channel now has five times as many minutes watched as this channel, but this channel helped generate some of the views for the Jerry Banfield channel that got it going. So what you want to do with niching is pick different subjects you can talk about, test all of them, and then whichever ones work, you can push your other channels on those. That will help all your channels build. I laid out how I pick those subjects in How to Pick a YouTube Channel Topic, and the short version is: test several and let the data choose.

The YouTube algorithm is smart enough these days to know that's Jerry Banfield on the ICP channel, and that's Jerry Banfield on the vlogs, and that's Jerry Banfield on the other channels. And if somebody liked Jerry Banfield on this channel, they might like another channel. But don't put a bunch of different crap all on the same channel. I've learned that the hard way.

This channel has 532,000 views and 38,000 watch hours. Some of the best-performing subjects involve personal experience and investing decisions. For example, "Is buying 550 ICP today like owning 21 Bitcoin?" That got out to a nice general audience, and it's a lot of different subjects pulled together. But notice: that one got a lot more views, but in terms of watch hours, I could just go on in a vlog and get about that many watch hours. Then there's "ICP: ugly crypto price, beautiful technology."

Telling people what they want to hear

I recently got a bit toxic about ICP. So one thing you need to realize is that often you're going to be in an environment where people want to hear what they expect to hear, where you're going to need to tell people what they want to hear. And if you don't do that, you will often have people not watch you anymore. If you start making videos like I did about ICP, where I say "ICP is awesome, ICP is awesome" for months, and then I say, "Well, here's the problem," half the audience just leaves immediately. Now, at the same time, the audience that remains is much stronger.

But one big problem is that you're going to get more views telling people what they want to hear. Often, telling people something they don't want to hear can make you go viral, which I certainly know how that goes, and it can get you canceled, which I know how that goes too, though thankfully not on YouTube, on other platforms. Sometimes controversial opinions can get you tons of views, but they will often not attract people who actually want to listen to you every day. So you don't want to confuse getting views and getting attention with having people who actually want to listen to you. Those are the people who will actually buy something, like my YouTube coaching. And I'm going to have a new YouTube course, too. I've filmed a bunch of courses in the past, and I'm not going to put the old ones up; I'm going to film a new one.

Here's my next top channel, Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews. A lot of people have thought that I should have put these channels together, and in the past I did. I just had one channel, Jerry Banfield Crypto. But when half your videos are saying ICP is awesome and the other half of your videos are saying these cryptos suck, those are two different audiences.

The Crypto Reviews channel: getting found by people who never heard of me

This Crypto Reviews channel got a lot of people who'd never heard of me to find me when they were looking for a channel. They were looking for videos saying why a coin sucked, and they found my videos. For example, "Hedera HBAR: a crypto built for institutions, not for you." Or "Bittensor TAO looks strong, too; you ask better questions." A lot of the people who came from the Crypto Reviews channel found me in YouTube search on those review videos, or they found me from my ICP videos.

The vlogs channel: now my top performer and my number one income

But the Jerry Banfield vlogs channel, which is normally difficult to start from scratch, because who wants to watch a random-ass person talk about their life, is currently my top performing channel. It's actually performing as well as the Crypto Reviews and the ICP channel combined, times two, in terms of watch hours. The revenue is times three right now. So this channel is my much more mass-media, bigger-audience, very enthusiastic-audience channel. But it got a foundation from people finding me in YouTube search and recommended on the crypto channels, and then YouTube's algorithm showing them this channel, which is just @JerryBanfield, even though it is the vlogs.

This channel, even though it has fewer views, has 10,000 watch hours in the last month. That's half the entire watch hours of the Crypto Reviews channel, which has had six months to accumulate that. This channel, even though it has a lot fewer views, and a lot fewer Shorts views especially, is going to catch up.

Now, this channel grew off of dates and painful dating experiences and personal setbacks and talking about my financial challenges. It talked about a lot of things that people could relate to. And this channel is right now my number one income. This channel has brought in the majority of income across all my channels in the last two months, quickly passing the crypto channels. Although those crypto channels ought to be making some more money, and we're going to see about how to do that.

So the lesson from this channel is that specific personal experiences with real consequences give viewers a reason to follow the story. This is the channel that will be easiest for most of you to start, but it's not generally the channel you're going to start with.

Use niche channels to feed the general one

I realize you may not do crypto, but these crypto channels are an example of this: if there's a lot of traffic in a certain niche, and you can make videos for that niche, you can get discovered immediately. And then if you have a channel that's more general, you can bring people over to that. Once you get a foundational audience, that more general channel will have a much bigger chance to take off than your specific niche channels. Your niche channels will be easy to start and to make money on, but your niche channels will often get boring over time.

This is what people consistently overlook in YouTube coaching. Almost everyone in YouTube coaching tries to tell you to just do one thing: be an authority, get people to respect you, do the same niche over and over again, charge for coaching programs, have people apply. And what they miss is that it turns into a job. And when it turns into a job, your passion goes out. You get stressed out. Even if you make a lot of money, you won't appreciate it; you'll be all stressed out. I've seen so many people talk about how they got all these views on YouTube, they started coaching, niching, and they got stressed out. They can't stand it. And then at some point, because they're stressed out and can't stand it, the quality of their content tanks, their viewers leave, and all of a sudden nobody respects them anymore. They don't even like what they're doing anymore. And they're like, why did I do this? I wrote about that trap in The Content Creator Delusion, because I fell into it myself.

So to me, the key is: do not go all in on niching. Do not go all in on just being seen as the crypto guy. I know, because I've done that. I've been the crypto guy, the gaming guy, the marketing guy. And what I know today is that as a creator, I need to create lots of different kinds of content. I need to create dating content and gaming content and content for YouTube creators, crypto content, vlogs, music. I need to create all of it, because the one thing that can't happen is I can't get bored. If I just do crypto every day, I don't care if it makes tens of thousands a month, I literally will delete my channels. That's what I've done. My crypto content was printing money, and I deleted the channels because I got so tired of doing it.

And then, because I got tired of doing it, my content got to where it really sucked. I was just saying the same crap every single day. I had nothing new to offer, so my audience got tired of it. But at that point, I had put everything into just niching, and I had nothing left. And when I tried to do anything else, starting it up was miserable. So that's why this time I started everything at the same time.

So I encourage you: anything you want to create, start a dedicated channel for it. Even if you only post once a month to that channel, just try every different channel you could think of, whatever is fun to create, and see where you get traction.

The Dating channel: born from the vlogs, feeding the vlogs

This Dating channel was the last channel I created, because on my vlogs channel I got a bunch of views on my dating videos. So I made an entirely separate Dating channel. Notice this Dating channel has brought in thousands and thousands of watch hours and hundreds of thousands of views. And this Dating channel has funneled people to my vlogs channel, and the vlogs channel has funneled people to the Dating channel. I told the same story on several vlogs and on several dating videos. And this one video that captures it, with the title "I paid $625 to argue with a woman for 30 minutes," not only got 9,500 views on my channel, but several other channels reacted to it, and their videos got tens of thousands of views also and brought more people to my channels.

Speaking of reaction videos: I always have a watermark on my videos from now on. That way, people who steal my content, which I don't go after (I never go after anybody with copyright strikes; anybody is welcome to do anything with my content), are still carrying my watermark, because usually people are not going to spend enough time to take it off. So on that reaction video, my watermark was sitting there on tens of thousands of views. Same with the other one.

I'm not just creating; I tell really personal stories. What's difficult is that most people are teaching you to be an authority on YouTube and to make money and get views that way. But the problem is that when you start a new YouTube channel, or even if you only have a few thousand subs, it's generally going to be difficult to be an authority. Almost nobody is going to respect you without a whole bunch of views. And then the problem there is: what did people do to even get those views? By the time you get a lot of views, what did you do to get them? How burnt out are you? Do you even have anything original to add to the conversation? Do you even understand a regular person anymore?

Like with dating channels: so much dating advice comes from people who don't even understand a regular person. They've optimized to make money. They've optimized to get people a bunch of hookups and to make better dating profiles. And a lot of times these are guys you're not even going to be able to replicate. They're essentially ripping people off, but they are the biggest voices. And on top of that, with AI today, people are going in and making all this nonfiction content with fake podcasters and fake experts, and YouTube's cracking down on it, but these AI videos of fake experts are getting tons of views. So the way to counter that is to tell real human stories.

Three of these channels have ad revenue now, with the Dating channel being the next one, and then my Gaming and Content Creators channels are close to being monetized also. I would love to have all six of these channels monetized by the end of the year. You'll notice with these titles, I'm just telling stories. I just told stories. And a bigger view count does not always mean better results, either.

The Content Creators channel: the authority problem

Now, this channel, Jerry Banfield for Creators, my Content Creators channel, has actually been the most difficult channel for me, because I've run into the authority problem. When I put a video up, almost nobody cares, because they see a small number of views and they've never heard of me before. So almost nobody thinks I have any business talking about YouTube, even though I've gotten over a billion impressions online, even though I've gotten 11 million impressions this year and one and a half million views this year on brand new channels. The average person looking for authority-based content just scrolls by my videos.

So this has actually been the most annoying channel for me all year, because I feel like every video I do is just pointless. Almost everybody is just going to scroll by, and they'll watch these other people who have much lower-quality information for the most part, just saying generic updates and repeating things that other channels have said. But over time, this channel will continue. To me it has some huge potential, because there are a lot of YouTubers, and because I'm actually putting out so much better information than most of these other channels, because I'm actually doing this and showing everything myself. That's the case I made in Why I'm the Right YouTube Coach for Experienced Creators, and every month of data on these six channels makes it stronger.

This channel has gotten a bit of momentum at various points, like when I did a video on how I got 51,000 organic views in 19 days and how to avoid YouTube's inauthentic content flag. And what's cool is that the bigger I grow on YouTube on the other channels, the better I'll be able to do case studies on this channel. The better the rest of my channels do, the better my content gets in terms of people thinking I'm an authority. And then the more I can actually sell some YouTube coaching. As I sell YouTube coaching, I'm going to try YouTube channel reviews, and I'm going to try all kinds of different products. If you get my YouTube coaching, you will get a complete channel review with it as well.

So this channel has fantastic monetization potential going forward for selling YouTube coaching. But ironically, it's one of the hardest channels to start, because you're stuck with that authority-bias problem. And that's one thing people often don't want to mention.

Often some of the best information is on smaller channels, and it stays hidden there.

The Gaming channel: a hobby channel that still taught me something

The last channel we'll look at is my Jerry Banfield Games channel. This one has gotten the least amount of action. And to be fair, I put the least amount of effort into it. I've done this one as more of a hobby channel, just playing around, mostly putting out clips from my old gaming streams and doing a few gaming live streams. This is a channel to test out, again, a totally different niche. Because if you really want to be great at YouTube, you want to do lots of different kinds of content. What works on gaming and crypto and YouTube creators and vlogs will have some things in common, but in other areas it will be drastically different.

On this channel, one specific entertaining concept worked. I literally loaded the game up, hit record, talked about how bad I was at Hearts of Iron, and uploaded a five-minute video. That got 6,000 views and 61 subscriptions, from one single video under five minutes. So this is an example of where just a quick video works. Whereas I did a live stream of Hearts of Iron, same kind of idea, and it did not perform nearly as well. That's interesting, because each audience is different, and on YouTube you need to be thinking about where there's an audience of people that YouTube wants videos for.

Most people think about what is already big and what people are already watching. Instead, you want to think: what do people want to watch? What do people wish they could see? Gaming's been a great example. Damn near any Hearts of Iron IV video you make is going to get more views than covering something like Fortnite, because there are already a ton of Fortnite videos and a ton of people creating Fortnite content. Whereas Hearts of Iron is a specific topic on YouTube that not a lot of people are creating content for, and there's a hungry audience. So anyone who creates Hearts of Iron content is going to have an easier time than with a lot of other things.

Why this is one long video and not two

So we're halfway through this already. And based on my research, I know it's better to just finish this up and keep going, because then this is one long, massive video with a ton of value instead of breaking it up into a second video. It'd be better for me to upload this one video than to split it into two and upload both of those, because I've got all this information and this brings all of it together. You need to put all this information together to really transform on YouTube. If you're just breaking it up, according to my data, it's generally not going to do as well. The easiest thing to do for me, and what takes the least time, is to put all of this in one video and upload it.

So I want to optimize for my time first and foremost, even before I optimize for the viewer's time. Because if I'm obsessing over every detail, but I don't know which details are important to you specifically, then I'm doing the wrong work. Which means, for the average creator, it doesn't make sense to even edit your videos, because you don't know what you should and shouldn't be editing. You don't know what's really important and not important to the viewer. You don't know how to make your videos really satisfy viewers. So you should just optimize your time.

Now, when you get to where Jimmy is with MrBeast, and some of these other YouTubers who already have huge followings, then sure, it makes sense to optimize for every second of the viewer's time, because you have so many people watching. But when you don't have that many people watching, it's ineffective, because your time is more scarce than the viewer's time. Plus, these days, people on YouTube really want a more authentic experience, and editing can strip out some of what makes a video great: the random outtakes and tangents and so on.

Titles that worked, and the one thing they share

Let's look at some of my best titles. One from the vlogs: "I got reported at my yoga studio, so I quit." One on dating: "She canceled again seven minutes before our date. Here are the texts." A crypto one: "I review every top crypto in 26 minutes." And on the creators channel: "How I got organic views." What's the common quality? Each one makes you ask a question: what happened? How did he get this many views? Curiosity is the main thing you need to trigger with your videos.

Shorts give you cheap discovery

I already talked about this a good bit. Shorts have given me 28% of my views but only 2% of my watch time and 4% of my subscriptions. Still, I haven't had that many Shorts take off, and my Shorts are distributed on all these other platforms too. Right now I'm putting three a day out, because a video like this can probably be clipped into about 20 Shorts. Each one of the Shorts it gets clipped into is a chance for the original long-form video to get discovered. So that's a bunch of opportunities to essentially run an ad for my video. The distribution side is the easy part now, which is why I wrote Every Content Creator Needs Repurpose.io; the hard part is the hook.

One thing I'm doing is trying to optimize my AI to pick the best opening hook, because just publishing something randomly clipped from a live stream is not getting more than a few hundred to a thousand or so views. But if I can help Claude figure out exactly where the points are, give it a formula where it knows what to look for and starts the clip with that, then the better I can get the initial hooks into the Shorts, the more opportunities there are.

I also tested filming 120 Shorts at once, all with hooks researched using AI to dig through millions of words in my videos and my stories. And what I can say is that didn't perform better than just randomly clipping live streams, except when I reviewed individual crypto coins. Randomly clipping live streams, or videos like this one, performs just as well as me standing there trying to film a dedicated Short on a dedicated topic. So we don't want to manufacture weak clips to meet a posting quota. But if I'm standing here filming an hour-long video, there's definitely going to be 10 or 15 minutes that's clippable and worth putting in Shorts.

Live streams: community first, and only once you're monetized

Another big area of YouTube monetization and learning for me has been live streams. I've tested live streaming only. I've tested doing longer streams and shorter streams. And this goes by niche. For gaming, you really want to do something like eight-hour gaming streams: just get on and stay on for a long period of time. For some of the other live streams on my main channel, it's ideal if you can pick the best time and stream three or four hours, scheduled in advance. People don't watch live streams after the fact very well. Live streams need to be optimized for engagement. I know a lot of people do live streams to try to do a show, but I put my chat directly on the screen so that it can be a very highly interactive experience for the people who are there. If it's not supposed to be interactive, I don't see the point in live streaming it.

I could have live streamed this video very easily, but I don't see the point. In fact, this would be worse to watch after the fact, because I'd have all kinds of people distracting me with other comments and taking me off topic. So now I think what I'm going to do on every channel is live stream at least one time a month.

But there's no point in live streaming on a channel that's not monetized, because one of the best things about live streaming is having a community, and then you get Super Chats and channel memberships. If you don't have your channel monetized, there's no reason to live stream. You need to be building a monetized channel first with videos and Shorts. Don't waste your time live streaming, because you'd be better off making videos that build an audience and build a community.

Then, just like me, you could be making thousands of dollars a month going live for maybe three or four hours a week. Just once a week, go live, sit there and accept the Super Chats and the memberships, and you've made a thousand-plus dollars a month going live for 10 hours. That's a hundred dollars an hour. In my experience that's pretty normal if you can get at least about a hundred people watching, which gets you thousands of watch hours. My live streams on my vlog channel get a hundred concurrent viewers with 1,700 subs. So if you can get a few thousand subs, you can live stream. But don't waste time live streaming if you're not monetized.

I already talked about live streams versus regular videos; the longer version of that comparison is in I Tested Every YouTube Format. Live Streams Won. But here's a fresh example. I did a live stream yesterday, and it was so bad, because the chat was just sitting there being critical. I wanted to do a vlog and talk about my day, and people wanted to watch a vlog, but the chat pulled me so far off topic and onto tangents that it ruined my mood. So if I really want to communicate something, it needs to be a video. If I want to interact with the community, it needs to be a live stream. But there's no point in doing a live stream until you've got the community.

The YouTube content funnel

Next, the YouTube content funnel. I actually already talked about this quite a bit. For discovery, you need Shorts and regular videos. Regular videos are the best to start with in most cases, unless you're great at creating Shorts. You need to get those first thousand, few thousand subs off of just Shorts and regular videos. Then deeper long-form videos and/or live streams really make the community and the business. And that business side is the area I'm building the most in currently.

The difference between a hobby and a business

I've got getting views on YouTube locked down. One and a half million views. If you're getting the kind of views I've been getting, which divided by six channels is hundreds of thousands of views every month and millions of impressions every month, then the difference between going full time and doing YouTube as a hobby is having a business behind what you do. And that's the one area I have not been optimizing well: the business aspect of what I do.

At the same time, I also feel like I've been throwing away most of my thumbnails by using AI-generated thumbnails and random backgrounds. A lot of channels I've seen have built up just doing vlogs in their bedrooms, and they're throwing away the chance to have a real business. Instead they have a hobby, where if I was them, I'd have a real business. And I'm already there. I went from $0 a month in March 2026 to, now that it's October, making thousands of dollars every month. By the end of the year, I intend to have tens of thousands of dollars a month coming in. But most of that money is going to come from having a business off YouTube.

I've tested Skool. I had Udemy courses back in the day. I've tested Cameo and so many different ways of monetizing. The ideal formula, for me, is to use AI, Claude, to build a website that you control. I host mine on the ICP blockchain, so it can't be taken down or censored, it's resilient to hacks, it's got secure sign-ins, and all of that is built in. Then I build this website out. I turn my videos into blog posts so that they're indexed in Google, and then I get additional Google search impressions and traffic.

The missing piece of my business has been that I've tried sending people to Skool, to Cameo, and to one-on-one calls. What I need to do, and what I'm now doing, is make every single one of my videos sell something on my website. Ideally, it will sell it directly in the thumbnail, because the thumbnail will often get 10-plus times as many impressions as the actual video itself.

The title offers the value, the thumbnail sells

If people already love my videos, and if I'm making a promise and making it clear, like the title for this one, which I'll use AI to help me optimize, something like "I uploaded 1,200 videos on YouTube in 2026. Here's what I learned," then the title is offering the value, but the thumbnail is a chance to sell.

Picture this. Even if I get fewer views, I've already shown that almost no matter what I do, every video could be considered a lottery ticket, and you're not going to win most of the time. But I don't have to have a ton of views if what I'm selling is extremely obvious. So in my vlogs, I wear a shirt that I have on my website; I'm selling clothes and merchandise and stuff on my vlog channel. On my Content Creators channel, I'm going to make products you can see right in the video. What I'm selling here is YouTube coaching: one month, or it can be spread out over two months, but the ideal format is a call every week plus support between, and that lasts a month.

I have a lot of proven experience on YouTube. I've helped a lot of other people build YouTube channels. And I was doing this back before people like MrBeast were even famous; I had more subs than him until about halfway through 2016. So I've been doing this a long time. And yet one thing I often missed was having a business that's not totally dependent on YouTube. YouTube is the discovery engine for my business. But the main way to monetize is to have something, a business, that you are selling. Even MrBeast right now is making a lot of his money selling chocolate bars and clothing and sponsorships, and he's helping people buy things. That's one of the few pieces of his playbook that did translate to my channels; most of the rest didn't, as I wrote in I Tried MrBeast's YouTube Advice But It Didn't Work for My Channel.

So I realized I need to have one thing I'm selling in every single video, and it needs to be super obvious. Instead of having a picture, like one of my recent vlog backgrounds, which is the front of my house, which is nice because you can see my kids' artwork and my books and stuff, why bother with a random background like that? Instead, I should always be selling something. I've tested videos where I was blatantly selling something, and it generated a lot of interest. I had people bid tens of thousands of dollars, which ended up being fraudulent bids, but there were some people who were willing to pay hundreds of dollars for things like my shirts.

So every video now sells something and sends people to my website. The video is there for the free value. What I say and everything I show is the free value of the video. But every video needs to very clearly and obviously sell something. So all my videos on my Content Creators channel going forward will sell something related to this: YouTube coaching, content creator coaching, a complete YouTube course (videos like this are like practice for filming a more polished version of the course), or maybe a Jerry Banfield shirt or something. But for every one of my videos going forward, the thumbnail is a great place for me to show something I'm selling. You see it right there: Jerry Banfield, YouTube coach. If somebody who's never seen me before understands the context of my video, it's "okay, this guy's telling people about YouTube," and then my video title gives people the value.

Fewer views, far more people who know what I sell

Now, in some cases I may get fewer views doing that. But I'd rather get fewer views on a video like this. Let's say a video like this gets a thousand views. If I have a generic background on it, or I put some generic YouTube logo and a rising views chart on it, like an old thumbnail I used before for my YouTube coach service, then maybe I'm selling YouTube coaching, maybe not. You don't know what it costs. But the new one is also reactable. My haters, my critics, the people who like to make fun of me: I've made this so it's very reactable. They'll be like, "Look at this failed YouTuber who's trying to sell YouTube coaching." That'll generate additional reaction videos, and it has the URL directly on the video, so those could bring people in.

Let's say in scenario one I get 3,000 views on a video because it had a generic thumbnail. Sales from that: probably zero, because I wait till the end of the video to sell it, I hardly mention it, people don't know how much it costs, and by the time I mention it, half of them, if not two-thirds or three-quarters, have already left the video. Whereas with the new thumbnail, every single person who even scrolls by it sees what I'm selling.

So let's say I only get a thousand views on this one instead of 3,000, because I'm blatantly selling something in the thumbnail. It could even be more drastic, but it's probably not, because I've tested thumbnails for smaller channels that people have never heard of, and they don't actually matter that much. You can do whatever you want in a thumbnail, make it over-perfect; people haven't heard of you, YouTube doesn't know who should see it, it's a competitive niche, and it doesn't matter what you do with your thumbnail. It's not going to matter that much. I went through that evidence in No Title or Thumbnail Will Get Your Small YouTube Channel Views, and it's exactly why I can afford to use the thumbnail as an ad.

So realistically, maybe I get a thousand views blatantly selling like this. However, how many people now know that I'm selling YouTube coaching? On the generic one, people might realize I'm a YouTube coach or they might not, but they don't know enough about where to go and where to buy it. On the new thumbnail, even if I only get a thousand views, I get 10,000 impressions, if not 20 or 30,000 impressions. It shows exactly what it costs. It's super obvious. And instead of pitching to a tiny fraction of people at the end of the video, I've just pitched to 10 or 20,000 people. This thumbnail is also more likely to get a person who's actually interested in my coaching to watch, because they see the price up front and it's within reach.

Why I sell coaching the opposite way from everyone else

A lot of these YouTube coaches have this stupid crap where they try to make it as scarce as possible, because all the authority people are telling them to do that. That does go with a lot of human psychology for the masses and the way people are used to being sold to. However, there are other groups of people who are tired of all that crap. And if you just tell them how much it costs and where it's at and show some experience, they go buy it immediately. So that's my people. My people are tired of it. They're tired of wasting time. They're not going to apply to some dumb YouTube coaching program. They're not going to be in the next jumpstart cohort. They're not going to get some vidIQ coach or TubeBuddy coach or whatever.

I have never done somebody else's YouTube coaching program. And I've gotten over a billion impressions online and hundreds and hundreds of millions of views. You don't need other people's programs. I've talked to many people who've taken other programs, and they generally don't tell you anything better than what you could watch for free. You just get tricked into it. To me, the only value in YouTube coaching is to have somebody who's actually done this look at your channel and give you feedback.

So that's all my YouTube coaching is. I will look at your channel. I'll give you feedback. I'll talk to you personally. There's no group coaching, none of that garbage. It's just me directly interacting with you in four one-on-one calls, pure value, no fluff. And then I'll answer questions in between calls. If you're asking about this title or that thumbnail, if you have specific questions, I'll answer those. I wrote about how I arrived at that format in I Built the YouTube Coaching Offer I Could Never Find.

So my YouTube coaching is set up to provide massive value, where the majority of the programs I see out there do not appear, from what I've seen and from the people who've taken them, to provide much value for most people. Occasionally there are outliers, and those get survivorship bias. The outliers from other people's programs probably were going to do well anyway, or maybe they didn't know that stuff yet and they could get it. So the idea is that if you're watching this right now, and I don't know for sure that you are, but I'm guessing it's probable, I know that I'm filming it.

I know that every one of my videos will have at least one person watch the whole thing, if not hundreds. And I want to get people to click on my video who have some openness to paying for YouTube coaching. So this thumbnail strategy is a pretty hard filter, as well as a way of selling to a whole lot more people.

Transparent selling attracts the people I want

This is my latest thumbnail strategy, and I'm really excited about it, because I want to make $10,000-plus a month, and I want to offer you value that's worth it. In order to do that, I need to communicate to you exactly what I'm selling, so you know what it is, and it's transparent, and it's not weird. It's not hidden. It's not "how much income do you make?" The way most YouTube coaching is sold is disgusting to me. And therefore I'm selling in a different format, which then attracts people who are interested in that specifically. So that covers the relevant offers and services quite a bit.

What we're going to get to next is the new content production formula to support that. The thing I've been obsessing over is: what should my workflow be? How do I use my time effectively? And one of the big things I just hit on is that I should be selling something in every video, because that's a real monetization opportunity. For a small YouTuber like me, it should be super obvious. If it's not super obvious, I don't have enough people watching to make a whole bunch of sales on the hundred people who actually watch all of my vlog every day. But on the much bigger audience that scrolls by, and the people reacting, I do.

My new content production formula for six channels

Here's my new content production formula with six channels. First: one complete vlog per day, which I already filmed today. It was 30 or 35 minutes. I told the whole story, and a lot of times my vlog gets me to figure out what else I want to talk about. If I ended up talking about dating for 20 minutes in my vlog, then it's clear: let me do a dedicated dating video. And lots of times I can dump the video into Claude, get a transcript and metadata, put that into ChatGPT, and it will give me more ideas based on what I already talked about in my vlog that I can then elaborate on in a dating video. Today I was talking a lot about YouTube, so I thought, all right, I need to just get all this information out.

That vlog is a nice baseline. That's a video I do every day no matter what: good day, bad day, ugly day. I think it's really important to consistently publish one video a day, and that's something most people should be able to do. I made that argument in One Video a Day: The Simple YouTube Strategy Nobody Wants to Hear, and the daily vlog is how I actually live it. That's what I do every single day, a vlog, because those are the videos you're going to appreciate most that you did 10, 20, 30 years from now.

If I could go back to when I first started doing videos on YouTube in 2011, the one thing I wish I'd filmed every single day was a vlog. Just talk about your day. Talk about whatever you're feeling. I wish I could go back to the day I met my wife. I did do a daily autobiography series, like the day I got separated. I'm so grateful for that, because at the time I wasn't doing YouTube, but I put it into a book called Daily Autobiography. There are some amazing days in there. There are about six of those books on Amazon, and I probably should have a copy of my books here to show, but in some of my videos I will sell my books on my vlogs channel.

So I think the number one form of content every YouTuber should create is a vlog. Just get on there and talk about your life, real and authentic, like I'm doing. And then from there, it should inspire the rest of what you're creating. If you're brand new, that's also the fastest way to get the reps in, which is why I wrote New YouTubers: Publish One Video a Day to Win Long-Term.

So what I'm doing after the vlog is creating some videos on ICP a few times a week, a few crypto reviews every week, a few dating videos every week, maybe one or two videos on the Content Creators channel, and I'm just going to play around with the games a lot more.

Default length, and not repeating yourself

The default video length is ideally 20 to 30 minutes: shorter when the topic deserves less time, longer when it deserves more depth. This is a very deep video. And what I do now is, if I don't have a bunch of new information, I don't need to do a video. This is something I've recently realized: I don't need to do the same video every single day on a channel. I don't need to say every day that ICP is awesome and here's why it's going to go up. This video is a bunch of new information all packaged into one, so it deserves a complete master-class video. But until I have maybe several more days, a week, or two weeks of new data on YouTube, I don't need to put up another video about YouTube creation, because if I explained it in this one, I don't need to do it again. I've burned out my audience in the past by making videos that were way too repetitive, with the same content over and over. So don't do that.

Then Shorts: one to three strong Shorts per active channel per day when good material is available. What I'm doing right now is, if I have a backlog of Shorts, I'll crank out three Shorts a day. If I get to the point where I don't have a backlog anymore, I'll go down to one or two. Right now I've recorded so much content that some of my channels have 60 or 70 Shorts that need to be published. So I'm just cranking out three a day until I get down to fewer. I think over time I'll get down to one or two a day. For the automation, I use Restream, and they've got an affiliate program.

Live streams as planned community events

Live streams: one to two planned community events a week. This is one the data showed very clearly. I want one to two live streams, and maybe a gaming stream can be an impulse stream just for fun. But one to two planned community events each week, where all the Jerry Banfield people from all my channels can come hang out and interact with me. I'll share these in advance. We'll get as many people as we can on. We'll make it members-only chat to stop all the haters, and anyone who somehow says something nasty anyway gets banned, and we'll have an "I love Jerry, let's talk Jerry stuff" environment. The community events bring people together. They'll be a fantastic opportunity to sell anything, and for me to get to know my audience and learn what kind of videos I should make the next week. Each event needs to have a clear reason to attend.

How much I actually work

My time: I only spend about three to five hours working a day. This is what's cool. You don't have to grind this out. But I'm not working another job, so all my work energy is being dumped into YouTube. All my mind power, all my physical energy, is going toward YouTube. And this is seven days a week. Some days, like when I have my kids Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights, I don't have as much time, and maybe I'll work one to three hours. Other days, when I don't have my kids, I'll work seven or eight hours. The goal is to be consistent over time: sustainable results without burning out.

What matters more than total views

To wrap up this part, let's talk about what matters more than total views. I don't check audience retention much, but if I do a 15-minute video that gets 16 minutes of average watch time versus a 30-minute video that gets 16 minutes, well, the 30-minute video was a lot more compelling. One of the big things I obsess about is how much time it took me to produce a video. This video will have taken about an hour and a half total: filming it, getting the research ready, and uploading it.

Then the big part of that is revenue and business opportunities. If I do this hour-and-a-half video and I get one single YouTube coaching sale, and this video plus the YouTube coaching takes maybe 10 hours of my time, then I've made a hundred dollars an hour. In the YouTube coaching you get four hours of coaching directly, video call to video call, and then let's say you need a few more hours of help over text message or WhatsApp. So my expected input is 10 hours for this video, and my expected output would be a thousand dollars.

So my goal, ideally, is that every single video I make has the chance to earn at least a hundred dollars an hour for my time, because then if I work 30 hours a week, I can make $3,000 a week. That's enough that I can pay all my bills and do this full time. So the bottom line needs to be that every hour of my work leads to about a hundred dollars an hour in income. I charge a lot more per hour for a single one-off call, but if it takes me several hours of making videos to generate one call, then that comes out to about a hundred dollars an hour. And if you want to have a call every single week for the next year, we can set that up on an ongoing basis instead of booking one call at a time.

So these are the key metrics: the time it takes me to publish it, how much people actually watch it, and then how much revenue I make off it. Because what separates a professional content creator from an amateur is that this is a business for me. I have stuff to sell. I'm not out here just trying to talk and get attention. This is my full-time job. So if my videos are not turning into income, I'm not doing my job.

And the income I get should add massive value to the people who pay it. My goal is that it should return at least 10 times that much to you. You talk to me once a week, and I'll help you identify things you're doing that are inefficient and wasting time, which I'm very good at pointing out, and help you identify ways you can do things faster, to get ideally double the results you're getting in half the time, which would be a four-times improvement in your workflow. So the goal with selling stuff is to give people value in exchange for what they're paying. And if I give 10-plus times as much value as people are paying, then people are going to be very happy to pay for my coaching, as they have been in the past.

The people who have made millions of dollars after spending a few thousand dollars getting coaching with me have said that was some of the best money they've ever spent in their business, and they've said it in some of their own videos. With that in mind, let's wrap up with the biggest lessons I've gotten from all these uploads.

The biggest lessons from 1,200 uploads

One: viral videos are not required to reach millions of views. You can literally just grind. I have made content for lots of different kinds of people. You can make content that helps a very specific person, get millions of views, and make plenty of money. Ideally, you want a combination: put a ton of value into one video that's easy to create, and then don't make another video until you've got a ton more value. Unless it's a video that's easy to create, like vlogs, and then just do that every day, for practice, to be regular, like bowel movements.

Two: a complete episode can be much more efficient than several short fragments. To me, I'd rather do one one-hour YouTube video every week than split it into two 30-minute ones, because yes, that's two different ideas, but that's also twice as much work planning and uploading, and then it's just one thing for you to share instead of several different things. However, not everything needs to be turned into a complete hour-long master class. A master class on your subject like this one is intended to give you deep lessons I've learned from 1,200 videos. This is a long subject with a lot of depth to it, and we're really just scratching the surface. This could be a 10-hour talk on all the details of everything I brought up here, but I've tried to give you the things that are most important without diving into unnecessary nuance.

Three: strong topics and titles matter more than hitting a publishing quota. What's nice with an hour-long video like this is that I can use the AI to go through all of it and ask it to find me the absolute best title. Then I can A/B test three different titles to see which one hits the hardest, and from there I can get the very best results in the algorithm. If you want the deeper version of how I think about titles and topics that keep working, that's How to Get So Good at YouTube You Can't Stop Going Viral.

Four: Shorts help with discovery, but they're only worth it if they don't add much additional time.

Five: live streams are valuable for community, but they should not dominate the schedule. This is the biggest learning lesson for me in the last 24 hours.

Six: every different channel has different strengths and deserves a slightly different production strategy, and ideally each one needs to fuel all the other channels as well.

Watch time and revenue are the only two numbers I care about

Watch time, to me, is one of the biggest metrics. Watch time and revenue. What I care about is watch time and revenue. If people are spending time watching my videos, those are people who are likely, but not necessarily, going to buy. But the bottom line for me at this point is revenue. If I had to choose what I'd rather have, a million views a month or $10,000 a month with any number of views necessary to get that, I'll take the $10,000 a month, even if it's only 10,000 views. This is a very important thing to get straight in your head. Would you accept 10,000 views in a month if that would give you $10,000 in a month?

Right now, this one video could make me $10,000, either from one person buying a lot of coaching or from 10 people buying one month of coaching. This one single video could make me $10,000. It also could make zero. But I'd imagine the estimated average revenue on it would probably be at least a thousand. So then look at it this way: if you do an ICP video where you get $20 in ad revenue, versus a YouTube video talking about coaching where you get a thousand dollars in revenue, even if you get five times as many views on the ICP video, the YouTube video is much more worth doing.

So to me, revenue, at least in terms of being full time, is the biggest measuring stick. If I'm not making revenue with my videos, it kind of doesn't matter. Views are nice. But the main signal is: where's the revenue coming in, and how can I do more of that? That continues until it gets to a point where I'm making tens of thousands of dollars a month, and then I don't urgently need to optimize for revenue. At that point, I need to optimize for consistency, sustainable consistency. I used to just grind out a video every day on every channel, and that's not necessary, especially if it's long form. Consistency would be valuable in doing one of those every week, but I don't need to do the other six videos.

Use quantity to discover what works, then concentrate

Publishing a large amount of content is useful when the results teach you what to do differently. And that's what I've done. I've published a ton of different content to try to figure out where I should optimize. I used quantity to discover what works. And now I've figured it out: I need to maximize more complete episodes, make better use of my time, and make every hour of my work count, where ideally every hour of my work is worth a hundred-plus dollars.

Sometimes on live streams it directly is, for every hour I'm live. A big community stream can add up to a hundred-plus dollars an hour in Super Chats. Every hour I spend on an in-depth YouTube tutorial or a content-creation case study can lead to hundreds or thousands of dollars in coaching sales, which is hundreds of dollars an hour on that. And I have meme coins in crypto, so every one of those videos could contribute to people buying meme coins. So it's got to be a complete business system.

How working with me goes

If you've read all the way to the end of this, I have extremely high confidence that my YouTube coaching program will be very good for you. It's utterly simple. No BS. You buy the program. Then I will reach out to you, or you'll get an email automatically that you can just reply to with your YouTube channel. I'll immediately look at it. We'll have a call once a week. If you want to do four calls in one week, we can do that, but the general pace is to have one call every week with me on Zoom, and we'll talk about your channel.

If you want to do a collaboration with me and talk about something like dating or content creation on YouTube, we can do a collaborative video where I will help my audience find you. What I'd love to do is have some of you who do the YouTube coaching get on Zoom for at least one of our four calls, and I'll do live coaching. It doesn't need to be live streamed; we can record it, and I'll go through and give you feedback live on your channel, and you can talk about it. That will be a really good video for other people to see me as a YouTube coach, to discover your YouTube channel, and to take some of the same kinds of thoughts and apply them to their own channel. I'd love to do some of that to introduce my audience to you. You'll find those sessions, along with everything else I've learned about YouTube this year, in my Content Creators playlist.

And for anybody who does YouTube coaching with me, any topics you cover that I cover, I will shout you out whenever possible, like Joe Parys and Superman Crypto in my crypto videos. They worked with me in the past, and I still shout them out years and years later, even when they have more subs than me now, after I deleted all my channels. I consistently shout out other creators I've worked with in all my videos where they're relevant.

Some creators, because I've been demonetized and banned and canceled a few times for going way too viral and for taking on the kind of BS system we're in, challenging the matrix, prefer to be kept private. They love and respect my experience, but they're like, "Yeah, don't mention me in public. I love what you do and you've helped me a lot, but I want to work with you on the down-low. Tell me what you really know. I don't want people to know that you're the reason I'm getting these results." So there's that too. If that's you, either way can work.

So I invite you to get YouTube coaching with me. It'll make my day.

Starting Over on YouTube: My Plan, Decision, and Results

Originally published July 31, 2026.

If you want me to look at your own channel, you can book a personal video review at jerrybanfield.com/review/.

I Uploaded 1200+ YouTube Videos on New Channels in 2026. Here's What I Learned.

From my video published October 8, 2026.

1,200 videos, six brand new channels, 1.5 million views

The numbers behind the headline

Why I think YouTube is getting wider, not narrower

Long form versus Shorts: watch hours are what actually count

Live streams: the hardest views to get, the best to monetize

Occasionally the Shorts get subs who watch long form, who go to my website, who come to live streams. The live streams, though, are the best earning. So the next question is video length.

How long should a video be? What the watch-hour data says

The hidden cost of uploading more videos

Hour-long videos are not necessarily too long

Channel by channel: the ICP Crypto channel

Telling people what they want to hear

The Crypto Reviews channel: getting found by people who never heard of me

The vlogs channel: now my top performer and my number one income

Use niche channels to feed the general one

The Dating channel: born from the vlogs, feeding the vlogs

The Content Creators channel: the authority problem

Often some of the best information is on smaller channels, and it stays hidden there.

The Gaming channel: a hobby channel that still taught me something

Why this is one long video and not two

Titles that worked, and the one thing they share

Shorts give you cheap discovery

Live streams: community first, and only once you're monetized

The YouTube content funnel

The difference between a hobby and a business

The title offers the value, the thumbnail sells

Fewer views, far more people who know what I sell

Why I sell coaching the opposite way from everyone else

Transparent selling attracts the people I want

My new content production formula for six channels

Default length, and not repeating yourself

Live streams as planned community events

How much I actually work

What matters more than total views

The biggest lessons from 1,200 uploads

Four: Shorts help with discovery, but they're only worth it if they don't add much additional time.

Five: live streams are valuable for community, but they should not dominate the schedule. This is the biggest learning lesson for me in the last 24 hours.

Six: every different channel has different strengths and deserves a slightly different production strategy, and ideally each one needs to fuel all the other channels as well.

Watch time and revenue are the only two numbers I care about

Use quantity to discover what works, then concentrate

How working with me goes

So I invite you to get YouTube coaching with me. It'll make my day.

Why I Rebuilt My Deleted YouTube Channels and Segmented My Content

From my video published June 17, 2026.

It's February 18th, 2025, and it's my 5,013th day on YouTube. Today I created three more YouTube channels, all of them ones I had deleted before. So this is going to be the first video for my second Jerry Banfield autobiography channel, because I want to really segment my content for different audiences. If you want to watch my vlogs, this Jerry Banfield autobiography channel is now a dedicated vlog, an "all I do is talk about my day" channel. The idea is that you could essentially go back through it and hear about my entire life. I'm not going to try to march back through the past the way I did before. I'll just share stories from the past where they're relevant as they come up in the present.

Three New Channels in One Day

So I created this autobiography channel today, and then I created my fourth gaming channel, kicking it off with my first ever Warzone solo win on that channel. And then I created my second crypto reviews channel, which I had previously deleted. That old channel had hundreds of crypto reviews, tens of thousands of subscribers, and was making thousands a month in ad revenue. I deleted it trying to be a good boy, feeling like I should stop being so negative. But now what I'm doing instead is segmenting my crypto content. People who want the "going to zero" videos are mainly coming from search results, and those kinds of videos drag down my views on the main channel.

I also remember learning that you should never have more than one video a day on a single channel. More than one video a day is just really garbage for your reach, and the algorithm sends you down the sewer. So the rule I follow is one video a day per channel, and segment your channels. So I ran a contest today for people to see if they could figure out what I did, and nobody was able to figure it out. Nobody guessed that I had created three new YouTube channels today. I went through the open chat and there were so many people guessing so many things, and nobody got it. So I think I'm going to cancel the giveaway, since nobody can get it before I publish. I could just publish this on my autobiography channel and leave it there to see if anybody manages to find it on that channel, which might be kind of funny.

I regretted deleting all these channels before. Sometimes the solution is just to go fix it. I really want a crypto reviews channel where I can just do "going to zero" videos, where the whole channel is going to zero videos, because there are people who don't want to watch that on my main channel. My main channel will be the hype channel, whatever I'm hyped about, like ICP. The other channel will be the going to zero videos for a different audience.

Rebuilding the Experience Channel as an Archive

Then there's the autobiography, and I also changed the experience channel as well. The experience channel is where I was doing vlogs. But what I'm going to do now is re-upload all my old videos that I want back up there, except gaming, because gaming needs its own channel. I have so many great videos that I just deleted. I was already doing different formats and different titles on this channel, so what I'm going to do is go through and upload all my old videos. For example, this one I deleted off my Jerry Banfield recovery channel when I deleted that old channel. This is a video that should be up, a great video about getting sober, a great presentation. If the average watch time on it was four or five minutes across 15 views, then some people genuinely watched it. The idea is that this will be my archive. This channel will hold all the old videos, older vlogs, all my old autobiography videos. It'll be like an everything-else channel.

So I can put one video out a day, a video every four hours across six different channels to put all the videos out on. And then I'll put all the videos on X as well. The X algorithm seems more flexible for different kinds of content, like a picture of my dogs, a going-to-zero clip, or music. On X I don't feel like I have to constantly optimize everything for one kind of content. But on YouTube, you really need to optimize very carefully for your different kinds of content. One reason is that X just has a lot of impressions from people scrolling through, whereas YouTube is all videos, so it's more competitive. It's cool to put these old gaming videos up. I'm going to put a lot more videos on X and use X as a backup video platform, plus make posts on X whenever I feel like it, like I did with my dog today.

I've been thinking about doing this for a while, and I'm really happy to get these videos back up and to realize that I'm a full-time creator who wants diversity. What I love is that among all these channels, I've filmed so many videos, and it's crazy that there are so few of them up. So there'll be two channels, gaming and experience, where I'll just be cranking out old videos. I might put some old crypto reviews up too if they're still good, cranking them out on that channel as well.

Bringing Twitch Back In

For the music, I'm also reconsidering just being a music streamer on Twitch. I think we're going to need to open Twitch up to filming all my videos again, because with all these different channels I may want to do one music video, one autobiography video, or a crypto review in a single session. Maybe in the future I might want to do a gaming video too. I might as well hang out on Twitch. I don't think I need to specialize and try to super-optimize my Twitch. I might as well just record and hang out with people there. It's just the Jerry Banfield experience, and it is the best free experience you can have with me.

I'm also testing a members-only feature where people can see what my upcoming video is here. What I don't like about it is that it shows members first on this one, which does spoil it a little. But it does get some people anticipating it, and I'm going to try it because it gives you a real reason to become a member. If you can see that you get a video before everybody else, that's a nice reason to join. It spoils it a little, but at the same time it builds some anticipation. So I'm going to test and see how this works, putting a members-only post out and seeing if any more people join, because I would love to get more members on my channels. To me this is the clearest reason I've ever seen to be a member. Getting videos early would be really cool, and it gives you a preview of what's coming ahead of time. That's a new YouTube feature I'm excited to try.

Tennis, Massage, and Role Models

I didn't make a vlog yesterday because I was busy setting up new channels, playing tennis, and getting a massage from a new therapist. I really liked the new therapist yesterday. I already scheduled with the first new therapist for next week, so I'm going to try her one more time. I'm really grateful. When I looked around, I only found two therapists I really wanted to work with, so I'm glad I like one of them and want to go see her again. She did a really deep massage and did a lot of cupping on the back too, and it was very effective. My other massage was great as well. I'm glad I have choices.

I also had tennis yesterday, and man, I got my butt kicked by a guy who could be my dad. He whooped me in two sets, and he was 6'1" or 6'2". That makes me want to go do some more coaching lessons and watch some more tennis videos. I told him he's an inspiration. You see so many bad examples of people who were born in the 50s whose bodies are just gone, sick, fat, and hurting. And here's a guy who went to the gym at the same time I went to yoga, then met up with me and beat me at tennis out in the Florida sun in two sets. That's so inspiring, and it's unusual these days. In my experience it helps to have both positive and negative role models, and this guy is a big positive one for me. That's what I'm aiming for: that 30 years from now, I can get out there and play singles and beat a guy who's the same age as my oldest son.

I think it really helps to have those negative role models too. My dad died in his 60s. He didn't do what this guy did. He didn't take care of his health, he didn't put any priority on it, and he got physically inactive. So I'm really grateful to be back with this autobiography channel, and grateful to see where we go from here. If you ever want to dig into how I think about coaching, lessons, and showing up, you can explore my YouTube Coaching playlist. If you want the old biographies, they'll be on the experience channel, where I'll put them all back up if you missed them. And I'll keep the videos on this channel under 10 minutes, like I said I was going to do on the last channel but then didn't.

I'm Starting Over on YouTube. Here's My Exact Plan.

From my video published June 15, 2026.

Why I Deleted Everything and Came Back

I'm starting over on YouTube, and here's my exact plan. Now, I've been on YouTube since 2011. I've created 20 YouTube channels, and last year I deleted all 15 of the channels I had at the time. I thought I was leaving YouTube forever. After hundreds of millions of impressions, tens of millions of views on all kinds of different subjects, getting recognized in person, traveling for conferences, I had the life as a YouTuber. I was burned out and I deleted everything. I didn't think I was ever coming back. So when I tell you I'm starting over on YouTube, I actually am. I started, deleted everything. Now I have five new channels for YouTube, and I'm going to show you my exact business plan for all these channels based on what I've learned uploading thousands and thousands of videos on YouTube, how I'm starting exactly from scratch, and my workflow.

In fact, what I've done today is I've dedicated this channel to being Jerry Banfield YouTube coach because I've got a lot of videos. I've got a lot of experience on YouTube, more than the vast majority of YouTubers out there, and I want to give it to you real and raw exactly what I'm doing today. If you want to build your own channels right alongside me, you can schedule a private call with me, and I'll walk you through exactly how I'm running this whole rebuild.

My Business Model: Monetizing Through Calls

So let's start off with the bigger business approach and the channel strategy and to avoid burnout, which is really important. So this channel, this is at Jerry Banfield YouTube coach. This channel, the whole purpose of this channel is to teach you what I know about YouTube. I made this video as the, the first video I came back to. And then I'm showing things like how I've been using Google ads and how I research and plan my videos. What I'm going to do soon is put all kinds of videos into a complete YouTube course. And then I'm going to advertise that course on Google ads to bring more YouTubers into the channel.

I'm gathering everything I learn rebuilding these channels into my YouTube Coaching playlist, so you can follow the whole process step by step.

But for now, I need to lay a foundation and content. A new version of my website where the entire call to action is to schedule a call. I see a lot of YouTubers out there and I've made millions of dollars selling online courses and I've had programs and recurring income. To me, the main thing people really need is to talk with me one on one. And that's the main thing I value also is one on one coaching. I don't want your program, your thousand dollar a month program that comes with all this stuff. I want to talk to them, the YouTuber. That's what I want. If you'd like that kind of time with me, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me and we'll talk through exactly where your channel is and what I'd do next in your shoes.

So I think one of the best ways to monetize across all of YouTube is to do calls. Because when you get people to watch you and they spend all this time with you, then it's a very clear value proposition like, hey, schedule a call and talk with me. Even if it is just to talk, it also has helped me really get to know my audience. So that's the main business model I'm using across all my channels. Why I made five channels right away is because I know I can't just do one type of content all the time. I can't stand to just do crypto videos, for example.

Now, so I know some of the people on YouTube are all about, you don't matter unless you have a whole bunch of views. And that's not true. Because if you monetize through calls, you can have a relatively small amount of views and make a full time income. That's the approach I'm going. So however, my main channel, so this is the video this channel is going on.

How My Crypto Channel Got Instant Organic Traffic

But my main thing I started back where I've got some traffic immediately is my Jerry Banfield ICP. So this is a crypto channel. And what I'm doing is, what you'll notice, this channel has got immediate organic traffic. So ideally, you do want to find some topic you can get organic traffic from. And if you'll notice, this brand new channel, which was literally the first video for this channel, was March 25th, 2026. And today it's April 8th, 2026. What you'll notice, this channel is nearly monetized already in just a couple of weeks. And all I did, was upload 14 videos. And I made these videos just talking off the top of my head.

And then if you look at the earn, it takes like a week to catch up, but I'm halfway in two weeks, even with the delay five days behind, I'm halfway to having full monetization on YouTube. And on this channel, I get traffic by organic reach. And that happens by videos being shown in the suggested feed. And that there's an already made audience on YouTube that loves videos about Internet Computer Protocol. Like almost anybody could just start making videos about Internet Computer Protocol, and you would have an audience with it. So if I look at the analytics here, you can see 34 000 views, 297 000 organic impressions, average watch time, five minutes.

So one thing I have no intention to ever do again on YouTube is shorts. I tried shorts. I went viral on TikTok and Facebook, and I got some YouTube shorts that got views, but YouTube shorts are just not my kind of traffic. I'm a long format video guy. So you'll notice where exactly I'm getting traffic from. I'm getting traffic from browse features. So these videos are going out to people who already want videos about Internet Computer Protocol. There's such a demand. And I did make a lot of videos before, so people already knew me. But this is a good sign that the YouTube algorithm is so good that if you make videos for a ready made audience, YouTube will crank your videos out immediately to that audience.

If the algorithm is so good today, if you make videos for a specific audience, the audience loves, you will get immediate traffic from the algorithm. Now you notice 13 of my, my results from YouTube search, which is awesome and suggested videos only a little bit from external. So you can see it's I'm getting real YouTube organic traffic here, not something where, some influencer pushed my account or something. And that's how, like I literally just cranked out videos and something people wanted. And it's that simple. And there's, it's not like any one video is really doing that either. If you notice it's just a straight up grind.

So my videos consistently getting like two to 3000 views, maybe 2000 and some views on, on average, this new video, this is what you want to see. Like this video has a very high like ratio. People really love this video, very high, like ratio, ready made audience. And there's nothing like click baby I'm doing either. I'm just making real down to earth, regular videos about internet computer protocol. So this is what I'm doing to immediately get organic traffic. And you do, ideally you want to have some audience on YouTube that you've got ready made organic traffic for, and or you can combine that with YouTube ads.

If you combine that with YouTube ads, then you can get a bunch. You can really funnel, get the YouTube ads to bring in new traffic. And that new traffic can bring in organic traffic. Let me show you what I'm doing. I have another channel called Jerry Banfield, crypto reviews. And what I want to highlight here is the importance of very specifically focusing your YouTube channels to a certain point in the past, I tried to put all my crypto content on one channel, and then I split it off to, to another channel. Then I put it all back on another and that doesn't work. So Jerry Banfield, ICP is just for people who want internet computer protocol, crypto videos.

That's the only audience I'm not going to talk about all these other points, but there's a ton of organic traffic and doing crypto reviews, especially if you watch mine and learn, like, see how I do them is pretty easy to do. At least I think it is because I've done it a lot, but here's another channel I did. I started this channel on the same, around, around the time, but I, I built, I bought a new camera. So the camera I'm using is a Sony FX 30 and one. That's why the picture on this is so beautiful.

The Gear I Use to Look Professional

So for filming your videos, there's two things that well, three areas you really need to do well to look like a professional one is to have a microphone. I have an re 20 microphone with a road caster duo that I plug it into. That's about a thousand dollar mic audio setup, but it makes my audio sound professional. Then I have a $2 000 Sony, FX 30 camera with the F two, eight lens. And then I plugged that into a cam link, 4k and Elgato. Then I have a $2 000 new gaming PC. I bought that tears through any editing or transcript processing and record the videos alive in OBS.

So that's how I'm able to crank out videos really fast. What I, my superpower is, is that I can crank out videos really fast. And when you can do that, then I can do this. So then I go into here. I've, I've only made, I've made five videos on this channel and only I've only made four actual crypto reviews. And what you can see, these are getting organic traffic, but these are not getting just ICP traffic. These are getting people on other cryptos. And then I'm funneling them back over to my ICP channel. Now, if you check the analytics and we see how we got views on this channel, you can see in a little more detail where exactly the views came from, because this is slightly, slightly different.

Now I've already got 500 watch hours with just four actual crypto reviews on here, which is a good sign. So if we, if we look over here in more detail, you can see more on the views and I'm consistently I'm getting views from YouTube search and from suggested videos again on these. And these are often people who are not even watching my ICP channel. So that's a really good sign in the average view duration, actually higher, the click through rates higher. So again, this is another example of the audience wanted the videos and YouTube's putting them out in browse features, suggested videos, and YouTube search is putting them out.

You can see, 81 of impressions from YouTube directly recommending my content, which is the same on the other channel. And this, these are really positive signals to Google. So at this rate in a month or two, I'm going to be making thousands of dollars in ad revenue on this channel and the other crypto channel by itself, strictly from organization. So I'm going to be making thousands of dollars a month in organic traffic. And it only takes me maybe an hour or two a day to film one video for each of these channels. So in an hour to a day and crank out a video on each of these channels, and that's good for thousands of dollars a month in baseline income.

So that's kind of my organic foundation where I know there's already traffic. And I just put videos in a place there's organic. Now, what you'll notice is I don't have to do anything like super difficult or viral. I don't have to research any ideas. Like it's literally, I just go into the comments. I see what kinds of what people are saying.

Why I Now Moderate Comments Strictly

Now I have changed my comment moderation. I used to go into the comments and I would tolerate all kinds of negative comments thinking that it would give my video better algorithm, but it also burned me out and left me with hurt feelings and all the time and made me not want to do my videos anymore. So now when I go into the community and I go look through the comments, I'm very quick to hide all. So I love, and I heart every single comment I liked that's positive like this. And I think it's, it's really important. It's really important to be engaged in the comments and that's because this is what to me successful channels are doing.

And what I do in the comments though, is if someone make, if someone makes a comment that I don't like, I, or even that I don't agree with. And if I, here, if I don't want, I'm trying to look, where's all right, here we go. So what I'm, as soon as I find a comment like this, I just go hide, use it from channel. And even that way, my comments are all supportive or respectfully disagree at least. So then in the comments, the comments are the community of people who love my video. And the people, when you go to hide all the user from channel, they've been shadow banned.

So they only know they've been shadow banned. If they check from another account and can't find their comment, or they wonder why nobody's ever responding to their comments. So what I do now is the very first time, somebody makes a comment that's, nasty. That's, that's, that's starting to make like, Oh, that's ridiculous. This guy's clearly somebody that's supportive and we'll just hide user from channel. So that is, that's all you need to do to make the comment section really nice. And I do tell people, if you think you're hitting on the comments, go to another one of my channels and ask nicely on another channel.

And I'm happy to put you back, but I will not tolerate all. I will not tolerate people coming in my comments and laying all this criticism or, just trying to bring people down or put scams in the comments. I used to do that. And that was a big mistake. So I'm not doing that anymore. My comment section is mine and I'm moderating it very strictly. You're high. All your comments are getting hit in first time. If I don't like them big change, I made this helped me out.

My Gaming Channel: A New Game Every Day

Now I'm also doing a Jerry Banfield gaming channel. So what's cool about this is a significantly different kind of channel. My content than the crypto and the YouTube coaching. And this, this is a different business model because most of the people watch my gaming videos. But this is a channel that's just more for fun. So the idea of this channel is to make gaming fun and to lead by example in gaming, because I love gaming and I figured out a strategy for this channel where what I can do on this channel is play a new video game new to me that I've never played before.

So it could be an old game, but I've never played it. So what I've it's taken me a couple of weeks to look through all I've done thousands and thousands of gaming videos I've done, thousands of hours of live streams on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Tik Tok, Twitter even. And I did a live stream for war zone, but I ultimately you generally need videos as your foundational content strategy. And live streams can be, can be good when you've got community, but if you just crank out live streams, you're often not going to grow and you're going to put a ton of effort. You need some kind of video strategy to build your initial viewers.

Then you can live stream to deepen the community. Like when I build these crypto channels up and I get them monetized, then I may do a live stream like once a week to build up with the community. But in the past, I got into doing too many live streams. And when you do too many live streams, you get burnt out. And the live streams don't tend to work as well in the algorithm as videos do, because who's going to watch the two hour war zone live stream compared to watching me try a video game for 10 minutes. So with this gaming channel, the strategy I'm doing here is I want to play a different game every single day.

So 365 days a year, that's 365 videos where I try a game for a minimum of 10 minutes. I can play it longer if I want to, but I got to try the game for at least 10 minutes. That strategy is designed to build a nice organic traffic and to find hidden gems because there are certain games on YouTube. They have a big amount of players, but there's not that many people that create content. I found this before on previous versions of my Jerry Banfield gaming channel, which have since been deleted. And some people re uploaded those videos on other channels. But I found, for example, when I played hearts of iron four, I did a live stream on that.

This is the same idea I dig into in One Video a Day: The Simple YouTube Strategy Nobody Wants to Hear — consistency beats chasing any single viral moment.

And that got thousands of organic views from people who just love hearts of iron and don't have that many hearts of iron creators to watch. Also, I think about longterm, one of the biggest mistakes I made on YouTube, was consistently just thinking short term only thinking, well, what am I going to do to get views today, tomorrow, this week, this month on this gaming channel, I'm thinking what will be awesome 10 years from now. If I started doing it today, what could build a huge community? If I just repeated doing it for 10 years and what would also be sustainable? Like I know I built a huge community on Facebook and a pretty big one on YouTube do at various points with different games.

For example, league of legends. I was one of the first league of legends, YouTubers, and I was one of the top league of legends, YouTubers in 2016. And I did not like playing the game. So I quit playing the game and I quit gaming altogether. But anytime I'd go live, I'd get hundreds of concurrent viewers, thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of views on my live streams. So I know that for me streaming the same game over and over again is not sustainable, but what's good for me is to try a new game. That's hard. And I want to lead by example, encourage gamers to play more games.

So my content strategy is I do. I play a new game every single day. That guarantees my content stays fresh because people will get bored watching war zone over and over again. And then you can see if I think it's fun or not. And then I picture 10 years from now, having 3 652 different videos and me playing different games. How incredible would that be? How much organic traffic would I get? How big would my live streams get, et cetera. So what you can see I'm building on YouTube is I'm building a ton of different ways to win. I can win off gaming videos, getting organic traffic, crypto videos with organic traffic.

I can advertise YouTube videos. And I, I tried advertising this video, but it didn't work that well in ads. So what seems to me to be the ideal ad strategy is to run a short little in feed ad, or I'm going to test the other one in stream ads. But you can see on this channel, I will share my journey as I go along testing these different ad formats. So this video shows how I set up ads for that gaming video. And you're usually not going to build a brand new channel from scratch. In my experience, the, what I showed you on my crypto reviews channel, this is unusual.

Just starting out and getting immediate organic traffic on every video. That's unusual. Most things you are going to need to build from scratch. Like on this ICP channel, every single video, thousands of views straight from scratch. That's not normal. What's normal is like this YouTube coach channel. This one, I tried to advertise this, but it got limited because of my clickbait title. And I didn't actually run any ads. So these are all organic views on this video too. I've went back and forth on how long I want videos to be. And it seems that doing videos, people can finish and then watch another video. YouTube seems to like that better.

And it seems to be more sustainable. So right now I'm going for videos that are like 10 to 30 minutes long. And then what I'm going to do is put multiple videos into entire courses.

The Self-Help Channel and My Master Brand

The last channel I'll show you here is my new Jerry Banfield channel. This is going to rebrand to Jerry Banfield coach at some point, but I took the handle from my other one right now. It's Jerry Banfield and it's at Jerry Banfield life. Now I'm this channel. I originally was thinking about doing a vlog channel, but vlog channels are not very sustainable over the long term because people get bored with you. They're, they're not going to care about your day to day existence every day. So this is my now master brand self help personal development channel, where I'm going to put courses up on dating weight, loss, personal transformation, sobriety, energy career.

I can put courses up on whatever I want, as long as there are broadly general relevant subjects. So I was thinking about combining like YouTube videos, but this, this channel putting videos up that are technical about YouTube, it does not go very well with more of a broad personal coaching brand. So you can see now I have a very well rounded presence on YouTube. This is a very broad audience channel where this channel could reach people all over the world on all kinds of different subjects. Whereas these other channels are pretty niche. Like the YouTube coach is very specific. So, the gaming, the gaming is only for gamers and then two crypto channels.

But the advantage is I have a well rounded business now that any of these channels could go off and make full time income by itself. And then all these channels can feed each other. And if I get fellow content creators and I can create ads aimed very specifically at you, because I know how to find, I know what websites, like if you're using vid IQ or two buddy or things like that, I can target you in Google ads and then send you to this channel in ads. So this is a very nice channel to build with ads. This is a nice channel where I can test out different ads, like for weight loss or for dating, and then send them to a YouTube course playlist where they might watch 10 different videos.

And then if they watch 10 different videos, they're going to see more videos organically going forward. Then, then the crypto channels can both funnel people over to all the other ones. Like, Hey, if you enjoyed this, get, check out my gaming channel. If you are a gamer, check out this. If you want to see behind the scenes in my daily life and my coaching. And if you're a YouTuber, check out this channel, because I noticed in my crypto channel, my ICP channel, I have YouTubers that follow me. This way I'm well rounded. I'm not burnt out. And crypto is very, very seasonal. So sometimes crypto will pump and go crazy and all my view videos will go off.

And other times like right now, crypto isn't kind of a down cycle. So these are actually down cycle views here. If we were in an up cycle, these videos would be getting five or 10 times as many views and printing thousands and thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue and five, five to $10 000 a month and calls off my website. So when crypto goes off, these channels are crazy profitable. But when crypto, which is most of the time often for like three years, then these channels don't make much money, but you need to have them in position and ready for the up season.

So these are like up seasons, income spike channels and consistent regular viewership for people who hold the coins that want a video about it every day. Then the gaming channel is a fun channel. I need to have some fun that doesn't have to make money or anything. It's just there for my own fun. And then this personal brand channel could be a very consistent channel that is feels like I'm fulfilling my life's purpose with important topics. I got really burnt out doing crypto before feeling like just talking about ICP and doing crypto reviews every day wasn't really meaningful that I wasn't really doing something valuable that all I was doing is just grinding out content to make money.

Well, this channel is here for really useful, meaningful work, helping people lose weight, change their diet, have a successful dating life relationships. When I'm doing videos like that, I feel like I'm doing a lot of work. I'm really accomplishing my purpose on this planet and I'm really making a difference. Thus, this is the channel like this and the gaming are real passion channels. And then I need this YouTube coach channel too, because I see so many people who know much less about YouTube than I do giving what I think is bad advice about YouTube, telling people to make these viral clickbait videos and to always think very broad and try and get as many views as possible, impress people.

And I'm like, I just want to give people the realest, best, best day to day information about YouTube right now. And that's what's happening. And I don't want to try and get anybody to pay for a course or some program. It's like, look, if you want help, you can go to my website and just talk with me and show me your channel. And I'll look at the analytics and I'll listen to what you're doing. So this to me is like an accountability channel. Like I need to just post videos on this channel just to share about what I'm doing. And this channel can end up being a case study of like, Hey, I deleted everything on YouTube.

I started over, and each video each day on this channel will document the process as I build five YouTube channels up into what I imagine will be tens of thousands of dollars a month off YouTube with thousands of dollars a month in what you'd call passive income from ads. And then we're with this channel. This is a great channel for sponsorships. This channel, probably not as much for sponsorships, but this could drive a lot of calls. This channel could drive a lot of calls. All these channels could have good ad revenue. The gaming channel is a great channel for, sponsorships where I could start getting paid hundreds of dollars to play a new game for 10 minutes.

These channels, this one's not good for sponsorships since it's only an ICP channel. And this one's not good for sponsorships either, but both of these channels are really good for ad revenue and paid calls, especially in high times. So this, you'll notice. If you want help mapping out which channels and business systems actually fit your situation, you can book a private call with me and we'll plan it out together for your own setup.

Why I'm Focusing Only on YouTube

I also haven't mentioned other platforms. There's no links to Instagram or Tik TOK or Twitch or Facebook. What I'm doing big this time is I'm only focusing on YouTube. If I could isolate one mistake, one area where I wasted so much of my time over the last decade, it was always bringing people off of YouTube and then focusing off of YouTube. YouTube to me seems to be the go to content platform. It has the, you did as Google behind it with AI and the future. Google is pulling information and recommending YouTube videos in its AI search. I've seen chats. You BT recommend the videos and it's search as well.

So to me, YouTube, YouTube is the ideal content platform in the future. It's definitely not Twitch is definitely not Facebook. I know a lot of people are on Instagram, but Instagram does not do well for long videos. And it does very well for, if you can run Instagram ads, but they don't have nearly as much data and as much organic traffic potentials. I see that YouTube has YouTube is ideal for education, for learning and for building a full time business. And the beautiful thing is the more I get some organic traffic and the more I match, that with paid traffic, the more money I get coming in from my business, I can afford to spend more on ads.

And then I can really do a flywheel where I have a month where I make like $20 000 combined from ad revenue and sponsorships and paid calls. Then I can afford to invest, 5 000 in ads for the next month and then build up my channels like that. I could try advertising one of the games if I want to, I can't advertise the crypto, but I can make sure every YouTuber has seen, this channel, I could crank out heavy ads for things like, my weight loss courses and dating courses. I could build the hell out of these channels. I could use the organic traffic from crypto and the money from crypto to build these other channels up.

And then I've got a really well rounded, very satisfying for me as a creator experience on YouTube. So I've made this video to show a, to give the best information you've seen before about YouTube and that it's extremely current. If you want to see, see my exact workflow right now for Google ads, watch the video, how I use Google ads to grow my YouTube channel. If you want to see my process for researching and planning YouTube videos, which is really cool. I actually use chat GPT and Gemini both to rapidly speed up my videos. This shows you the details how I crank videos like this out.

I deleted a billion views in 15 YouTube channels. You know about this channel. If you're in the middle of dating, you might want to watch some of my dating videos and see where I'm at with that right now. If you love games, like you see how this one video just got you into a whole ecosystem and all of its branded Jerry Banfield. So if you see this Jerry Banfield channel, Jerry Banfield Gaming, Jerry Banfield ICP, Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews, Jerry Banfield YouTube Coach, my branding is consistent across all my channels. So that Jerry Banfield YouTube Coach pushes my branding for all my other channels. So I hope this video is leading by example and I'm responding and I'm reading all the comments on all my channels and I'll keep doing that as long as I can would love to have any questions or see your feedback.

Is Starting a New YouTube Channel in 2026 Worth It? My Results

From my video published June 15, 2026.

Why I Deleted Everything and Started Over

I deleted all of them. I was so burnt out on all my channels. I'm getting the same amount of views instantly before. The algorithm is so good now that you can just immediately get into an audience if you create the right kind of videos. I'm going to explain all of that to you and show you. I'm getting these directly from browse features, YouTube search, suggested videos, not from YouTube ads or any secret trick that some of these other people may be doing in the background, but this is literally just creating content that is in demand. I've done this on two channels in the last. 14 days with two different distinct types of content.

Here's a second channel, a crypto reviews channel, exact same pattern, instantly, instantly thousands of views a day on a brand new channel all through organic discovery straight from YouTube. Once you see this, then it can give you confidence like now is an awesome time to start a YouTube channel. You don't need an existing audience. I've got an outline I'm going to go through and explain all of this to you right now because I want you to have an easier time on YouTube than me.

14 Years of Struggle Before This Moment

I started on YouTube in 2011 and I struggled so much to the point where I deleted all my channels last year and now I'm back and I have a message that unlike these others, I literally did just start five channels from scratch. All you need is content that is. If you make videos on topics people care about you, it is easier than ever to get views. Now, this can be harder in areas based on authority like YouTube coaching, where people often respect a lot of views more, but you can always use YouTube ads to push those. And if you make a great video, YouTube will put it out to the right people today.

But I got really burnt out last year because I kept grinding out videos on these old channels and getting diminishing returns. I used to think that starting from zero is a huge disadvantage and I couldn't do it. I talked about it. And I deleted a billion views and 15 YouTube channels. I even see some celebrities who have huge old channels that get tiny, embarrassing amounts of views because of their old channels. And all the data on that is not supporting the videos going out. I waited nine months. Then I started five new channels from zero. And this is huge that I'm already getting the same kind of views I was getting per amount of videos.

Now, sure, some like my old crypto reviews channel was getting more video views because I had like 100 videos. But they the new videos. I was making were getting less views than I'm getting right now. YouTube boosts new channels. So if you can laser in your topic, then you can get a really strong audience. What I've learned is that starting over is not something to fear, but actually could be a great opportunity if you feel like you're stagnant or if you want to split off and change what you're doing. Starting over can be awesome. And it's validation that the YouTube algorithm today, in some cases, is doing a great job of matching the right content to the right content.

Even with no prior data on the channel itself. And now I'm so glad I did because I feel like my content has a fresh start and a fresh audience. And it's getting the algorithm reach that it fully deserves. The channel I had before was a variety channel. And that mismatch sabotaged all my content. Then when you post something new, the AI is not that good at trying to send out the correct video to the correct viewer. On the just one channel. But if you are trying to start a channel in 2026, present day relevance is the best it's ever been. I've never seen it be this easy in 14 years, 14 years on YouTube to start a brand new channel and instantly get viewers on a new channel.

Every view, every click and every returning viewer helps define the audience. Clearly there's less baggage, there's less confusion, there's less history pulling you in the wrong direction.

Give the Algorithm a Clear Signal

Today it's easier than ever for YouTube to understand what your channel is about and who should watch it. As long as you clearly give that data to YouTube in the video title, the thumbnail, the description, the tags, and what you say in the video, because YouTube reads everything you say in the video. So YouTube knows from what I'm saying here that I'm talking to people who are YouTube creators and who are uploading videos on YouTube. And therefore YouTube knows that YouTube creators are going to be able to understand what I'm creators and people using all kinds of apps like vidIQ and TubeBuddy and watching ad outreach videos from Alaric.

It knows that those kinds of people might like this video. If you have a new channel on a very clear topic, it helps both the viewer and the platform, and YouTube gets a much clearer read, and that clarity can be extremely powerful. The opportunity now is don't just build an audience, though. Serve a demand. The more I built up a smaller number of channels that were not niched very well, the more it felt like my new videos were limited. YouTube growth today is less about trying to build an audience around random content and more about serving a clear demand. My question for you is, where do you identify content on YouTube that could be a lot better?

Like in crypto, it's really easy. Like anybody could come in and create the kind of content I do because the content is so, the bar is set so low, the content is so bad that anybody with a little integrity and ability to do a little research can create better content that's better for viewers. And I'm really happy to see that YouTube is rewarding that. And I'm really happy to see that YouTube is giving me the same amount of views as me. That's a huge sign. And if people are actively searching for, so you're like, okay, well, how do I find topics like that? Think about where you watch videos where the content could be better.

For example, crypto is easy, but for me, I see a lot of YouTube, how to do YouTube content that could be a lot better too. I see a lot of YouTube content where people are constantly selling courses and coaching and programs. And I want a lot less of that. Do not sell me a course. I don't want to buy your how to YouTube course. I don't want to pay for your YouTube program. If I'm willing to pay for anything is to talk to you. That's why I've got this channel. You can schedule a call and you can talk directly with me and Zoom share your YouTube channel and your analytics.

And you can ask me questions directly off of my 14 years and 20 YouTube channels and all the time I've spent on YouTube and other platforms. If you want that kind of read on your own situation, you can book a one-on-one call with me, share your screen on our call, and we'll look at where your channel could go from here.

Find the Content That Makes You Angry

Thus, the way to find the content you'd like to make is what content pisses you off when you watch it. When I watch some of these how to YouTube tutorials, I'm like, this crap is garbage. That wouldn't work for somebody who's brand new on YouTube. The information is useless and I have better information. So I get out there and put my information and my video out there. And then YouTube, I'm like, I'm going to do this. And then YouTube gives me views. And there's lots of these kind of areas, but it can be in some areas like gaming, for example, or I'm making some gaming videos and I'm having a bit more of a challenge in gaming, figuring out like exactly where is the audience and the content.

So yes, you do need to test. And yes, you don't want to lock yourself into doing a channel on a topic that's not sustainable. And yes, if you're just playing around and getting started on YouTube, it can make sense to do a variety channel where you throw 100 of your content on YouTube. And yes, you don't want to lock yourself into doing a channel where you throw 100 videos up and see what sticks and what you like doing. But the best place to start a channel, if you want to make money and get views and be a professional, is to find a topic where the topic is in demand and where the videos on it aren't that good or could be better.

And the great news is you don't need a following at all to get started. So I've showed you my ICP channel as a case study, but I'll zoom in on some clear things like why it worked. First, it worked because people did already know me. So people watching my ICP videos already knew me and knew my face from before. And then they sent all these positive signals to YouTube by liking the video, subscribing to my channel, and commenting. And YouTube's like, wow, people love this guy. And I'll keep showing them more videos. But here's the thing. And so I'm going to show you how to do that.

This is exactly why I keep coming back to serving demand over chasing an audience, and I broke down the daily rhythm that makes it sustainable in One Video a Day: The Simple YouTube Strategy Nobody Wants to Hear.

So if you're and there's so little supply that people will jump on whatever demand is there. So if you can ever find any content on YouTube where there's so much demand that the creators are kind of low quality, like crypto, there's so many low quality creators, that's your opportunity to come in and do better. And the lesson is clear that this didn't happen because I became a better creator. It happened because the channel is aligned with what the audience wants. And so I'm going to show you how to do that. So if you can ever find any content and I'm a professional, what makes you a professional at YouTube to me is three key things.

How fast can you film a video? And then what kind of quality does that have in terms of your camera and your microphone? I spent $1 000. I have an RE20 microphone, a Rodecaster Duo audio interface. I have a Sony FX30 and I have a F2 8 lens on that and a Cam Link 4K. That's $3 000 worth of equipment that I can film. And I'm a professional. What makes you a professional at YouTube to me is three key things. I have to capture audio and video. When you see my picture and you hear my audio I'm not some amateur.

Invest in Audio First, Then Video

If you want to create a new YouTube channel, the place to invest is in audio first, then video, and then be able to record it fast. So I record using OBS, which makes my video super fast. And I've got other videos on my channel that go in and explain my creative process more clearly. But if you want to get immediate results and start a new YouTube channel and you want to be a professional, then you want to act like a professional. And a professional has a quality camera like a Sony FX30 with a F2 8 lens and then a RE20 microphone, Rodecaster Duo. That signals quality.

If you want to watch me walk through my workflow, gear, and channel setup step by step, I keep it all in my my YouTube Coaching playlist.

And then I have a computer, an OBS, a new gaming PC that's $2 000 that I can rip through my entire workflow with. And I make the videos off the top of my head using an outline because that gives them life. It gives them passion. I see so many videos where people have no passion. They're coaching people on YouTube. But they have no passion anymore. They don't care about it anymore. They're just making videos to get money. They're just out here talking like this. And then you click over here and then you have the AI do this. And I can't stand it. So you got to come out here on a topic.

You got to use your anger. It's like I'm angry that people are watching such useless, boring videos when they can watch my videos that are better. So then I make my videos and then people watch them.

The Biggest Mistake New Creators Make

The biggest mistake that new creators make, though, is just kind of not having a strategy and an audience for the channel. And I did this even as a, a veteran creator with over a decade of experience. I would just throw 10 different videos a day on my 250 sub channel, 250 000 sub channel, and the algorithm would dump all over every video. And then I'd get upset. Now, yes, there is a place to test your passion and to see what you care about and to try different things. But once you find something, even on a new channel where you're testing passion and testing demand, you..

You could still get some nice views. And then whenever you find something, you get some nice views on. Like if you try 30 different kinds of content and you find one that you love doing and that the audience loves, then you can make a dedicated channel for that one. It's smarter to begin with a topic that already has real demand. What a lot of people do on YouTube is try and copy a lot of the popular YouTubers in terms of popular by the amount of views they get. And that they make that they box themselves into trying to do these viral vlogs or these clickbait challenges.

And that's awful. It's often not sustainable over time because the cold start problem comes up. Like why would people want to watch someone they've never known before do some diet that 50 other people have done or to do some challenge that 50 other people or thousands of other people have already done? What you want to make is videos where people will watch your videos every day on that subject. I can literally talk about internet computer protocol or review a crypto every single day. And there's thousands and thousands of people that want that content. And if I don't make it, they're stuck watching it. They're watching some crappy alternative in lots of cases. If you're staring at YouTube trying to spot the topic where you could do better and coming up blank, you can schedule a private call with me and we'll find your angle together off your own experience.

So if you can find topics where you see that this should be better, get in there.

The Wrong Channel Hurts the Right Video

Now, the wrong channel can hurt the right video. It's great to start a new YouTube channel, but it stinks if you put all different kinds of videos on the same kind of channel and the algorithm just crushes all of them. And some niches are harder than others. Like starting an instrumental music channel can be difficult unless you watch a ton of other videos and you see which keywords and which kinds of instrumental music are in demand. And then if you can find that, you can make instrumental music instantly to an audience because there's often there's an audience that feels like there's scarcity where the audience wants something different, but they can't find it.

Then the people that want to create something different can't find the audience. You got to match up where is the audience available demanding something different that you can make that other people aren't making. The exceptions are all over the place. So even a strong video can struggle in the right environment, but just making content like other people are making or just making content without a clear strategy or a clear audience ends up being a waste of your time. And a new channel can help you restart because when you make a new channel, you can kind of break out of what you've been doing and remove the confusion.

So I just started from zero a few weeks ago. So I started by picking topics with both obvious demand. Now, I would caveat that you don't just want your YouTube to be about getting views. And that's why I've created a Jerry Banfield YouTube coach, a Jerry Banfield gaming channel, in addition to two crypto channels, because I really love doing gaming content. I love playing different games. I love helping other YouTubers learn from my experience because I've been on YouTube longer than most creators. I've got a deeper level of experience than even some of the people who get a lot of views on their how to YouTube videos.

They often know how to do one thing well and to get, either put views on them with ads or, get a lot of people to watch with a viral video, but they often don't have an experience over a wide area of YouTube. Thus, I do stuff that I really am passionate about and I do stuff where there's a proven audience. So the two crypto channels can easily provide enough income full time by themselves. But you also don't want to get locked into just doing one channel or one thing because as a YouTuber, you often can get very bored and burnt out. And so I've been doing that for a long time.

And I've been doing that for a long time. If you just do one kind of video all the time, like when I just did crypto for years, I got so burnt out. I ended up deleting everything because it's boring. And if you're a YouTuber, you need to keep your creativity alive. And if you can create a variety of channels and have some channels like these are obvious demand money making channels, but then also have some other channels that are like I'm passionate and these might make a little money or get a smaller amount of views like this YouTube coach channel. I don't know that this will ever be like a hugely viral channel.

I don't know thousands and thousands of views a day channel. And it wouldn't have to get a whole lot of views to do that. And I'm passionate about it. Because this channel is good for me. It's good for me to create content on what I know on YouTube, because I feel satisfied teaching it and it helps teaching is the best way to really learn something. And by committing to teaching YouTube, I'm also committing to doing the best job on my YouTube channels. That is a channel mostly for fun, mostly for my own personal development. So I've channels that the crypto channels are like business channels.

Those are work channels. Those are like a job channels. I show up like I'm going to work on those channels every day. And those channels pay the bills. But those channels have big ups and downs in terms of viewership. Then this channel and my main channel, I'm going to be doing a lot of videos on YouTube. And then the gaming channel, I'm going to be doing a lot of videos on YouTube. And then Jerry Banfield coach channel, these are very passionate, passionate channels where I can talk about here topics on YouTube, my coaching, things like dating and weight loss, etc. And those have some income potential, but they're not as in obvious demand, at least that I can see right off the bat compared to like crypto, and thus, then the gaming.

So if you can do all kinds of different content, but you need to have your channel set up by individual topics and business systems. And to me, the one business system that works is that people schedule. So I'm going to schedule calls. Like this YouTube coach channel, I don't need a lot of views to make a nice little income. Like then you put this income from, even if I got five calls a month, that adds up to $1 000. And that's as much revenue as I could get on something like a popular gaming channel, like not not, the top popular, but if my gaming channel had like 10 000 views a video or so.

I can make the same amount of money getting 10 000 views a video on one video a day on a gaming channel, as I could having five people or one person five times schedule calls with me to talk YouTube on this channel. And this channel might only get, five, 10 of the views that a gaming channel with 10s of 1000s of video would get.

Why 2026 Is the Best Time to Begin

So to me, this 2026, the best environment I've ever seen to start a YouTube channel, which I'm really surprised. I used to think for a lot of the time that, oh, I wish I'd started YouTube even earlier. I wish I'd put more into YouTube instead of selling online courses and Facebook and Twitch and TikTok and Twitter. I wish I'd put more into YouTube earlier. But today, I am not even, focusing on any content outside of YouTube today either. YouTube is the number one place that I see to upload content. And 2026, the AI is making it easier than ever, if you make quality videos, and in demand videos to get them out there.

So an old channel can still, help if the audience still matches the content. But an old channel can leave you burned out and boxed in if you don't expand. Even if you've got an old channel, a new channel could give you the feeling of a fresh start and bring the excitement back to YouTube and back to that old channel. So if you want to start fresh on YouTube today, rather it's completely from scratch like me, this is a great time. And in 2026, relevance matters more than history. So it's a great time to start on YouTube today. I hope this has helped and inspired you.

If you want more, I am cranking out, I'm sharing exactly what I'm doing on YouTube with all my experience and my brand new channels. I invite you to follow along with my journey and see how this goes over time. And if you're a YouTuber, I've talked to a whole bunch of YouTubers, I've helped a lot of YouTubers over the years build channels, build business systems. I also read all the comments. So if you have any questions, just drop one in the comment. And I'll reply there.

Starting Over on YouTube: My Plan, Decision, and Results

On this page

I Uploaded 1200+ YouTube Videos on New Channels in 2026. Here's What I Learned.

1,200 videos, six brand new channels, 1.5 million views

The numbers behind the headline

Why I think YouTube is getting wider, not narrower

Long form versus Shorts: watch hours are what actually count

Live streams: the hardest views to get, the best to monetize

How long should a video be? What the watch-hour data says

The hidden cost of uploading more videos

Hour-long videos are not necessarily too long

Channel by channel: the ICP Crypto channel

Telling people what they want to hear

The Crypto Reviews channel: getting found by people who never heard of me

The vlogs channel: now my top performer and my number one income

Use niche channels to feed the general one

The Dating channel: born from the vlogs, feeding the vlogs

The Content Creators channel: the authority problem

The Gaming channel: a hobby channel that still taught me something

Why this is one long video and not two

Titles that worked, and the one thing they share

Shorts give you cheap discovery

Live streams: community first, and only once you're monetized

The YouTube content funnel

The difference between a hobby and a business

The title offers the value, the thumbnail sells

Fewer views, far more people who know what I sell

Why I sell coaching the opposite way from everyone else

Transparent selling attracts the people I want

My new content production formula for six channels

Default length, and not repeating yourself

Live streams as planned community events

How much I actually work

What matters more than total views

The biggest lessons from 1,200 uploads

Watch time and revenue are the only two numbers I care about

Use quantity to discover what works, then concentrate

How working with me goes

Starting Over on YouTube: My Plan, Decision, and Results

On this page

I Uploaded 1200+ YouTube Videos on New Channels in 2026. Here's What I Learned.

1,200 videos, six brand new channels, 1.5 million views

The numbers behind the headline

Why I think YouTube is getting wider, not narrower

Long form versus Shorts: watch hours are what actually count

Live streams: the hardest views to get, the best to monetize

How long should a video be? What the watch-hour data says

The hidden cost of uploading more videos

Hour-long videos are not necessarily too long

Channel by channel: the ICP Crypto channel

Telling people what they want to hear

The Crypto Reviews channel: getting found by people who never heard of me

The vlogs channel: now my top performer and my number one income

Use niche channels to feed the general one

The Dating channel: born from the vlogs, feeding the vlogs

The Content Creators channel: the authority problem

The Gaming channel: a hobby channel that still taught me something

Why this is one long video and not two

Titles that worked, and the one thing they share

Shorts give you cheap discovery

Live streams: community first, and only once you're monetized

The YouTube content funnel

The difference between a hobby and a business

The title offers the value, the thumbnail sells

Fewer views, far more people who know what I sell

Why I sell coaching the opposite way from everyone else

Transparent selling attracts the people I want

My new content production formula for six channels

Default length, and not repeating yourself

Live streams as planned community events

How much I actually work

What matters more than total views

The biggest lessons from 1,200 uploads

Watch time and revenue are the only two numbers I care about

Use quantity to discover what works, then concentrate

How working with me goes

Why I Rebuilt My Deleted YouTube Channels and Segmented My Content

Three New Channels in One Day

Rebuilding the Experience Channel as an Archive

Bringing Twitch Back In