Here is my short answer. YouTube rewards volume, but volume only pays off if you can keep going without burning out, and it is a mistake to pile every kind of video onto one channel. I have uploaded more than 10,000 videos across roughly 14 years and more than ten channels, and I have deleted thousands of them, including all of my original channel's videos. So most of what I know about this I learned the expensive way.
If you want to know what I think now, it comes down to one test. Keep uploading, but only make the things you would still make if nobody watched and nobody paid you. In my June 2026 presentation on 14 years and 10,000 videos I put it this way: if it is not worth doing for zero viewers and zero dollars, then it is not worth doing at all. Everything below is me testing that idea against my own numbers, and I have not always passed the test.
My view has shifted over the years, so it helps to read the posts in order. In my August 2024 post on uploading 5,000 videos, I was pushing a fairly structured method. Aim for videos around 15 minutes, build playlists people can binge, skip the editing, and get to 100 videos before you worry about the algorithm. I also said the algorithm is pretty basic, so each channel should hold one kind of video. Music, crypto and tutorials on one channel was one of my biggest mistakes.
By June 2026 the method had become much simpler. In my growth formula post I said the whole system is one short video a day per channel, about five minutes long, plus a paid community to monetize the audience. I also wrote that you should spend the first four minutes or so of each video giving value and save the pitch for the end. That give-first, sell-last order is the rule I put at the center of it.
Then the view moved. In the 14-year presentation I said my best-performing work was live streaming, not short videos. I hated making shorts, and the thing I actually enjoyed was a live audience on Twitch and Kick. I also told the story that made the point for me. In early 2021 a Call of Duty Warzone stream could pull 50,000 to 100,000 views in a few hours, while a Rise of Nations stream I actually wanted to play got about 100. Playing what I wanted to play felt better, and the numbers did not, and that gap is a big part of why I stopped trusting the grind.
My most recent post, After 5,000 videos, I finally understand YouTube from August 2026, swings back toward volume. I now call YouTube a quantity game, and I say the main risk is burnout, because you will get bored and quit. I wrote that I had uploaded 467 videos across six new channels since May 18, that two channels were already monetized, and that I was making thousands of dollars a month from ad revenue, community income and one on one calls. Those are my own numbers, and I say plainly that they are not a promise for anyone else.
Put side by side, the posts describe one habit and three different reasons for it. The habit is steady output: a daily upload, a fixed set of channels, a rhythm you can keep. The reasons changed. First it was a method for beginners, then a warning that grinding burns out both the creator and the audience, then a case for live streaming as the one format I could repeat, and now a case that quantity is the only thing you can fully control. I do not think those reasons cancel each other out, but I would not call the question settled either. A grind that is fun is one thing. A grind you resent is the thing I keep writing about.
Below this opening you will find the contents and all four posts in full, newest first, so you can read the arc yourself. If you want the business side on its own, views are not income covers what small channels actually get paid for, and how I define success as a creator covers the part of this that is not about numbers at all.
If you run a channel and want someone to look at what you are actually doing, you can get a personal video review from me at jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- After 5,000 videos, I finally understand YouTube (August 8, 2026)
- 14 Years and 10,000 Videos on YouTube: What I Learned (June 17, 2026)
- After 10,000 Videos, This Is My Simple YouTube Growth Formula (June 13, 2026)
- What I Learned After Uploading 5,000 Videos to YouTube (August 8, 2024)
After 5,000 videos, I finally understand YouTube
From my video published August 8, 2026.
After five thousand plus videos uploaded to YouTube since 2011, I finally understand one really important thing. YouTube is a quantity game. And the main thing you have got to watch out for is burnout. Just trying to upload quality videos, stay in one niche, and be a coach is not sustainable for most people. You will get bored and you will quit. I know, because I have done it. And if you want to go viral, a lot of the time it stinks. You will get a bunch of negative attention. It will feel awful.
The way I have found to make YouTube sustainable is to just grind out as many videos as you can and then bring people to a community, the way I do with mine on Skool. If you are reading this and you want that kind of home base for yourself, come join the Jerry Banfield Family with us and see how it works from the inside. Then only pay attention to what the people in your community are saying. If you are uploading videos, it does not matter what all the random comments say, because those people have nothing invested in you. You do not even know if they are real people. They may be bots, or they may be haters sent over by a competitor. The only people you need to listen to are the ones who are actually willing to support you as a creator.
The mistake I made chasing money and views
One of the biggest mistakes I made uploading all those videos in the past was focusing so much on just making money rather than having fun, and so much on raw quantity of views rather than building a group of 100 to 1,000 true fans who absolutely love my content. When you read tens of thousands of negative comments hating on every single thing you do, it really adds up and it can leave you feeling like everything you create is crap.
And if you depend on YouTube by itself, the algorithm can leave you behind. You always want to bring people somewhere off of YouTube as your main gathering place. But I do not believe in selling a course anymore these days. I made that mistake after I started blowing up on YouTube in 2015, when I sent everybody off to buy all these online courses. The problem with the courses is that they did not do a good job of creating community.
Proof of human is the whole point now
With AI cranking out content faster than ever today, soon AI will be able to make a video just about like the ones I make. There are already a bunch of niches full of fake videos from someone who has just had AI post them automatically and generate them. You are already seeing it across coaching and self help, all these AI videos coming out. What you want with your videos is real proof of a human being.
To do that, I have been able to upload five thousand plus videos to YouTube by hardly editing any of them. You just want to get your videos out and have your raw, authentic, fun humanity in there, so that when people watch, they know you are not a bot and they know you are not reading off some script. I am literally talking off the top of my head. I have OBS running in the background and I am just talking, because I know this material cold. I have uploaded so many videos that I have had all of my videos trained into one custom AI, because I cannot even remember all the stuff I have filmed.
After uploading five thousand videos, I realized one of the easiest things to do. If you see a video working in your niche, like the YouTube coaching niche, I just take somebody else's title and film my own version of it, maybe modify the title slightly, make my own version of a thumbnail, and copy what I see working. But do not get locked into one niche. If you are going to do YouTube full time, you do need to pay the bills, but you want to pay the bills in a way that is sustainable. You do not want to just do anything to get views.
What selling out cost me
There were times when I sold out, when I just did anything to get views. That led straight to burnout and to feeling like crap about my own work. I accepted slimy crypto sponsorships. I sold online courses on subjects I did not even know how to teach, because I had paid somebody else to create the course and then I marketed it. Then I had all these followers on YouTube following me for stuff I do not know how to do, and I could not create anything without paying that guy to make more and more videos. I had videos go viral playing video games I actually hated playing.
When you are uploading, it is important that as a creator you show up even when you hate it. I deleted all of my videos on YouTube last year because I was so frustrated and burnt out that I did not love what I was doing anymore. But I realize now that is fine. It does not matter if you hate doing YouTube. If you are as good at it as I am, you just keep doing it anyway. If you are at some job, you are going to hate it sometimes no matter what you do. I remember Andre Agassi's book Open, where he says, I hate playing tennis, I do not want to play tennis. I feel that way about YouTube sometimes. But I just show up and create now, and I have 5,000 videos because I filmed on good days, on bad days, and on ugly days. I filmed when I could not stand to film, and I filmed when I was so excited to film.
This morning I could not wait to film. What inspires me is seeing the junk other people make. I watch other people's videos and I think, I am going to make my own version of that and it is going to be better. Maybe it is not better according to most people. But quantity is not subjective. Nobody is going to debate that I have uploaded five thousand plus videos to YouTube. You can debate whether my videos are quality or not, but quantity is critical as a content creator.
The numbers I actually run
If you want to take content creation seriously, do not tell me you are going to upload three videos a week and that it is going to be your full time income. In my opinion that is naive and ridiculous. Look at my spreadsheet and how many videos I crank out every week. I filmed 16 videos yesterday. I filmed 25 videos the day before. This is the third video I am filming today, and it is not even eight o'clock in the morning yet. I grind out videos no matter what is happening. When I have my kids, I grind out videos when they are not here. When they are here, I hang out with them and I generate my next titles and thumbnails, so that as soon as I step into the studio, bam, we are just doing videos.
If you want to make your videos faster, AI makes it so much easier. AI just grinds out thumbnails. I have tried doing my own little ghetto thumbnails and they are terrible compared to AI. AI thumbnails get higher click through rates. AI thumbnails are colorful. The one for this took a minute to generate with AI, and I generated about 10 of them back to back this morning, first thing when I got up.
If you want to take YouTube seriously, from what I have lived through, you should be prepared to upload 5,000 videos. I started six brand new channels this year and I have now uploaded 467 videos since May 18th. I have a half million views on those videos and all of my metrics are accelerating. Most of my watch time is up anywhere from 10 to a hundred plus percent over the last month. I have two channels monetized already. I am close to getting the third channel monetized, I just need the watch hours I have already earned to catch up. This YouTube coaching channel is on the way to being the fourth monetized channel. I have a dating channel and a gaming channel that are on the way to being monetized too. I am on my way to having six monetized channels by the end of the year or soon thereafter, within a year of starting from scratch.
I am already making thousands of dollars a month when you add up the ad revenue and the income from the Jerry Banfield Family, plus the people who message me for one on one calls. I have not even had a chance to take any sponsorships yet, because I just started and everything is so new. But I believe I am on my way to getting paid thousands of dollars to have videos sponsored as well. To be clear, this is my own experience and what I expect for myself, not financial advice and not a promise of what will happen for you.
Why I stopped staring at analytics
I know it is all about quantity. You show up, you grind, and you upload again and again, and you get better. The main way I get better is that I try to film and upload faster. From everything I have seen on my own channels, I expect that if you do 5,000 YouTube videos you would be in a very strong position for a full time income, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and millions of views. That is my expectation based on my own numbers, not a guarantee for anyone else. And you probably do not even need to do 5,000. I have a half million views, mostly long form, with about a five minute average watch time per video, and that is on 500 videos, actually less than about 500 when you add in the ones from before I started tracking on that spreadsheet. So if I upload 10 times as many videos, I would personally expect at least five, if not 10 or 20 million more views. The more shorts I crank out, the more views I get, which brings more views to my long form, which brings more people into the Jerry Banfield Family, more one on one calls, more sponsorship opportunities, maybe an invitation to do some coaching, consulting, or public speaking somewhere. All kinds of opportunities come my way. And all I have to do is keep increasing the number of videos I create.
So I focus more on how many videos I am uploading, how fast I am creating, and how I can get these videos out faster. I spend more time getting my numbers of videos out than I spend looking at the analytics. I have learned that after 5,000 videos the analytics do not matter much, because you cannot control them. All you can control is how many videos you are cranking out and how fast you are cranking them out. I make my process as fast as possible. I try to minimize any wasted time, so I do not edit at all unless I am using old livestream gaming footage and having AI edit a two hour livestream down to a 10 minute gaming highlight video. I am doing that on hundreds of old livestreams right now to build a gaming channel from scratch out of old content that is all mine. That puts me in a position to stream and play new games once I already have an audience there.
Six channels feeding one community
What I have learned is that you just need to focus on what you are contributing, and make videos across all different subjects so you do not get bored. Ideally you have a couple of paycheck channels, but ideally all of your channels feed into the same thing. I have six channels and they all feed into the same invitation to join the Family, because of social proof.
Now that we have 25 people in there, and I only started this in the last month, it is easier to get the 26th person than it was to get the fifth person or the sixth person. Some days we have had five people join in a single day. There will be days in the future where probably 10 or 20 people join in one day, and we will get this thing up to hundreds of people. Maybe one day I will have a thousand true fans in there and I will be making tens of thousands of dollars a month directly from the membership, which I expect would be much more than I make in ad revenue. My membership revenue has already equalled and exceeded my ad revenue within the first month of starting it.
These are the essential things I think you need to learn, and you do not need anybody's course for them. These are the most important lessons on YouTube today. And the best thing you can do to get help is to join the Family, introduce yourself, share your YouTube channel, message me, ask questions, and ask for feedback. I have been on YouTube 15 years and I am here to help you.
I hope to see you inside with us. If you want more of this, keep going with my YouTube Coaching playlist, where I keep sharing everything I am learning as I grind these channels up from zero.
14 Years and 10,000 Videos on YouTube: What I Learned
From my video published June 17, 2026.
You are about to experience an unforgettable presentation where I show you what I've learned on all these platforms, creating videos and uploading more than 10,000 videos over the last 14 years. After all this time, I'm still creating. To borrow from Harry Potter: after all this time? Always. I'm live on Twitch, live on Kick, and live on YouTube right now, trying to help somebody else, because maybe you don't have as much time to waste as I do. It's been 14 years for me.
I'll give you the most important lesson up front: make stuff that you really want to make, just for the sake of making it. Where I've most wasted my time is trying to make things just to get other people to watch and just to make money. I know the prevailing mindset is that you should make stuff people want to watch so you can make money, because that's most of what you see, the algorithm showing you content people made just to get your time and attention. But what I've learned is that if you make things only to try to get money and views, that will never satisfy you, and when the money and views go away, you'll feel really bad.
The League of Legends stream that went viral
Here's a perfect example. I did a live stream one day just for fun. In 2016, I hired a professional League of Legends coach to teach me how to play the game better, because I wanted to play with my friends and I thought it'd be fun to live stream it. I did this purely for fun. The video went viral. It got hundreds of thousands of views organically on YouTube and millions of impressions. I started streaming games on Facebook just for fun originally too, and I got tons of minutes watched. Looking at my 2021 stats by themselves, I got so many views.
But here's the pattern. I'd have fun creating things at first, and then if I got money or views, I'd keep creating it and feeling like I just had to. That League of Legends live stream on YouTube went viral, and I've actually since deleted most of the views off of my channel. You might think that's crazy, but I'll explain it in a minute. My channel really started blowing up in 2016, and through 2017 there were just millions of views coming in. Before that, it was a small channel that hardly got anything.
I had this live stream blow up on League of Legends, which I've since deleted, and it brought in all these viewers who wanted League of Legends videos. But you know what? I hated playing League of Legends. I quit playing it after I did that live stream and didn't touch it for months. Then the YouTube algorithm blew the live stream up, and I started playing League of Legends again, only this time it wasn't for fun. I didn't want to play it. I felt like I had to play it to get views, grow my channel, and make money. And then I didn't even make very much money. The ad revenue on gaming was terrible. Back then they didn't even have super chats. So there I was, live streaming and feeling like I had to do League of Legends streams, because doing them got me more viewers than anything else.
I did League of Legends streams for months. I hired a second coach after the first one got upset that my video went viral and everybody was blowing up his Skype asking for coaching lessons, and most of them didn't want to pay, so his Skype went nuts. Then I quit gaming altogether because I got so burnt out on League of Legends videos, even though I went on to become one of the top streamers on Facebook gaming. I clearly still loved gaming, and people clearly still loved watching me game. But I did so many videos just trying to get views and make money that I burnt myself out and made myself miserable.
Burnout is the creator's biggest enemy
As a creator, one of the main things you're going to have to deal with is burnout. In my experience, the number one thing you can do to avoid it is to make sure what you're creating is something useful or fun for you to create, without anything else attached. Money and views by themselves are not satisfying. You might look at someone getting a bunch of views or a bunch of money and imagine that it is, and it is nice to be able to do YouTube full time. But it isn't the thing that satisfies you.
This presentation actually shows how I had a Facebook page that became one of the top gaming partner pages, really successful. And then I made a video where I changed my race, and it got taken down. That was live only on Facebook, not anywhere else, not on YouTube, not on Twitch. Well, Twitch took it down but then put it back up and apologized, which is unusual. YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok were all fine with it. But on Facebook the video went viral and Facebook shut me down by calling it hate speech, which was ridiculous. My whole page went down. It got all these violations that weren't even related to my original post, and all of them together stopped my page from doing anything. So when you're creating online, understand that it's an extremely fragile environment. You can blow up, and it can all be gone the next day.
Bots, the algorithm, and a rigged game
Looking at my YouTube stats from before I deleted all the videos off my channel, I had over 30 million views. Some of the big spikes were when I tried using bots on my channel. It worked to some degree, but not that well, so I stopped doing it. Since then I've come to believe that some of the biggest YouTube channels, and some of the videos you're most likely to see, are pushed by tons of bots on YouTube promoting certain narratives, certain topics, certain games, and certain YouTubers. If you're coming into YouTube, Twitch, and Kick being idealistic, thinking you're just going to make a great show and people are going to show up, understand that in my view the game is completely rigged against the average person.
That's why it comes back to the number one takeaway: you've got to make videos and live streams that are satisfying for you to make, even if you don't get anything out of them. It changes slightly if you're a full-time creator, but even as a full-time creator like me, I find it's still important that at least half, if not most, of the content I make needs to be something I just want to do or just need to do. Something that's fun, or that needs to be said, or that's useful for me. If you're trying to build this way instead of grinding yourself into burnout, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll work on it together.
Right now there's nobody watching on this Jerry Banfield autobiography channel. I created a new autobiography channel, and I've had more than 10 channels on YouTube in the last 14 years. I like starting new channels and growing them from zero. Nobody's watching on this channel right now. There are people watching on Twitch, and there's nobody watching on Kick, which is fine. Because what I'm saying today, the main person who needs to hear it, learn it, and take it in is me. That, to me, is the key to making it as a creator: make stuff that you need to hear, make things that are fun for you to create, make things that feel good and need to be said.
What worked on my crypto channel, and why
With my crypto videos, my most popular YouTube channel right now is my new crypto channel. I did a video talking about how ICP will flip Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. When I do this live stream, there are hundreds of people watching on YouTube, more coming through on Twitch, and maybe somebody will find it on Kick someday. This pays all the bills for me, because people join my open chat and I get sponsorships. It also feels very good to say. One of the worst things I've done on YouTube is make content that's effective at getting money and views but that feels utterly worthless to me personally.
When I started this crypto channel, and this is such a valuable lesson, I was making a video buying crypto every single day. I did all kinds of videos saying things like, "I bought five internet computer protocol today, I'll be a crypto millionaire soon." I was making those on basically every crypto: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, HBAR, XRP. I just made a video like that every day hyping up one altcoin or another. And it worked to blow my channel up. It worked great. If you look at the viewership and views on Jerry Banfield Crypto, in most people's minds I've been very successful on this channel. I started a brand new crypto channel in 2022 from zero, and the views went up and up. The channel actually got taken down at one point, which I'll talk about in a minute, but I got it back, and the views just kept climbing to over 3 million on this new channel.
So how did I start this new channel, and why did it originally take off? When I first started it, I was hyping up all these different crypto coins. And what appears to have happened is that I ran into what you could call the crypto mafia. These are people who have a bunch of bots and are involved in launching a whole range of crypto coins, buying and holding the coins themselves, and then manipulating the market. They operate on YouTube, and what they're doing is pushing certain coins, certain creators, and certain narratives, using a bunch of bots to push the people and narratives they like.
From what I can see based on my YouTube analytics, they found my videos on one or more of the coins and watched them. They liked me as a creator, they liked how I was pushing their coins, and they started pushing my videos with bots, especially when I covered certain cryptos. If I did XRP, for example, they would push the bots hard into my channel. They made sure that if you searched for XRP, you saw my four-minute, no-useful-information hype video with XRP going to $12 in the title. And that worked very well to grow my channel.
How crypto videos made me money and made me feel disgusting
Do you see what a dysphoric environment this is? There are people running bots that manipulate the algorithm, and when you please them, they push your videos. Here is where that went wrong for me. I have been a creator and I have done crypto videos off and on for years. My first crypto video was back in 2014. I eventually quit my original channel, the one with all those millions of views I mentioned earlier. Part of the reason my channel blew up so much in 2016, 2017, and 2018, beyond the gaming videos, is that I did a bunch of crypto videos. Those crypto videos were often getting 10,000 to 100,000 views each.
I did a video about Ethereum mining at the beginning of 2017, for example. That was a good video if you watched it and got on it at that time. I hyped Bitcoin up in 2015 and 2016, and my very first Bitcoin video in 2014 showed how to buy Bitcoin with cash. That was a good one. You could have taken a few hundred or a few thousand dollars out of your wallet and bought Bitcoin directly off the website I showed, and you would have been a millionaire today.
Then I quit doing crypto. There is a big downward spike in my channel in 2018 where I stopped, and the channel just starts going downhill after that, and I moved over to gaming on Facebook. I quit crypto in 2018 because I realized what a disgusting environment I was in, and how it was almost all lying, cheating, and stealing from people.
Starting over with a commitment to ethics
So I started a new channel with the commitment that I was actually going to practice ethics. We were not just going to rip people off and say whatever I needed to say to get paid. Instead, I was going to give people genuinely quality information. I launched a crypto course even though my channel was only a few months old, and I was selling that crypto course for hundreds of dollars. Just a few months after creating a brand new YouTube channel, I was making $10,000 a month between YouTube ads and selling that course. Cryptos were offering to sponsor me, and I said no to most of them. A couple of projects just gave me some free coins, and I appreciated that.
But as I continued to do these videos and to get more and more of what you might think of as success, I felt more and more disgusted with myself. I felt more and more like I was just part of the problem, and I started to question everything I was doing with my channel. Did I really buy 50 different altcoins that were all going to 100x? That is ridiculous, and it has no integrity. The data shows that 99% of these altcoins are junk and are going to lose 50% in value over the next few years. So why was I just buying every top altcoin?
What I realized is that for me, what I was doing was working great, but for you, on the other end of what I was creating, it was not working well at all. If you had a Coinbase portfolio full of 50 altcoins because I said I bought them, and then I made all this money as a creator, what I came to understand is that my videos were causing harm to people. They were part of tricking and trapping people.
One of the hard things about multi-streaming is that your attention gets divided, and it becomes very easy to be distracted. I forgot to update the description on my Twitch channel for the live stream, and I went live there talking about content creation while nobody on that platform realized what I was discussing. It took me 14 years on YouTube and Twitch to learn the lessons I am sharing here.
Why the back-room deals matter
On my YouTube channel, I had a total change of heart. I had grown my channel by promoting all these junk coins, and the crypto mafia people discovered my channel and were pushing it with bots. This is intuition. This is what I have seen in my analytics. I cannot prove it, because I never talked to any of them, but that is what I observed.
Then my conscience came back. I realized I needed to dump all these altcoins because I was hurting people. I had gone right back to doing what I quit doing in the first place, and I got to the point where I wanted to quit my channel all over again. I realized I needed to change what I was saying and how I was thinking. I needed to start thinking about my viewers first, and I needed to act the same way my viewers could act.
This is what is so hard as a content creator. You see all these other creators doing things, but you do not know the back-room deals being made to push certain products. You do not know about the bots pushing certain narratives and keeping other things suppressed. You do not know all the other stuff going on. So you copy what they are doing, and often it does not work for you. Or you find out why what they are doing is working, and you do not like it. That is what happened with me. I thought, this is disgusting. Ideally you should be giving your viewers the same thing that works for you. With my crypto investing, I came to believe that I should be genuinely invested in any coin I tell my viewers about. I should be leading by example, not as an example of a content creator, but as a crypto investor.
Turning on the junk coins and getting attacked
With that in mind, I realized almost all the coins I had bought were junk, that I needed to sell them, and that I needed to start getting honest. So guess what happened as soon as I did? I started putting videos out saying, I was wrong about Shiba Inu, Shiba Inu sucks, I do not know what I was thinking buying that, I was just trying to get views. I said Avalanche sucks. I went after XRP. I turned from saying all these coins are great to saying all these coins suck.
And you know what happened? This is how I understood the whole narrative fitting together. As soon as I turned, the crypto mafia people who had been promoting me looked at it as if I had turned on them, and they attacked my channel with bots and got it taken down. That is why there is this big drop in views. My channel got taken down by a bot attack. They used thousands and thousands of bots to report my live stream, claiming I was doing something illegal. YouTube automatically took my video down. There was no manual intervention, it was automatic, and it took me a week to get my channel put back up.
The only reason I think I got my channel put back up, even though I was doing absolutely nothing wrong, is that I had my original YouTube channel with a history of zero policy violations since 2011 across thousands and thousands of videos. After a week, YouTube restored my channel. I have continued to grow since then, but it has been difficult to make sure I keep my integrity.
The lesson: make it worth doing for zero viewers and zero dollars
That was such a valuable lesson. A lot of times what you see people doing to grow is something that either harms viewers, wastes a viewer's time, or wastes a viewer's money, getting them to buy music equipment or games they do not want to play and that are not fun. Or the YouTuber is just doing it like a job to make money and get views. I realize all of us in this world have some kind of need for money to pay our bills. YouTube and all these online platforms are actually terrible for that. In my experience it is genuinely worse than a nine-to-five to approach these platforms and say, I want you to pay my bills.
That is why, to me, the number one thing that is important is to just do videos that are good for you. If you want to play a game and it is fun, go for it. If you have a message you really want to share, then share it. This, to me, is education for anyone who might watch it, but it is also therapeutic for me, because I want to remember this. On a day-to-day basis it gets so easy to forget that you never want to create content with views and money as your primary objective. You will know views and money are your primary objective when you get really sad and annoyed when you do not get views and money. If you create something that just feels good and that you know you need to make, that actually sets you up in the best long-term position.
This is one of the biggest mistakes I have made in all this time creating, grinding out video after video and live stream after live stream. The biggest mistake has been creating short-term content where I just wanted views and money that day, instead of putting more time into content that is simply fun or genuinely useful for me to create. Basically, if it is not worth doing for zero viewers and zero dollars, then it is not worth doing at all. That really needs to sink in. If you would not do the live stream or the video for zero viewers and for zero money, then it is not worth doing.
So you really need to connect to your passion and find out what you care about so much that even when there are no viewers, it is still worth it. Those gaming streams I did, I had a lot of fun playing games. What is so easy to do, though, is get sucked up into the views and the money. I did this yesterday. I did a live stream on my original channel making music, and in my mind's idea of it, nobody watched. I tried a vertical live stream and a horizontal live stream simultaneously, and most of the time on the horizontal stream there were zero viewers. There were maybe 20 views total, and I was so butthurt afterward. That is exactly the trap I am talking about.
If the thing is worth doing, the audience doesn't matter
Most of the time on those streams there were a handful of people watching on the horizontal, a few more on the vertical, maybe four or five extra. And I just felt like crap afterwards. I had done so many live streams, and it sucks to have nobody watch. That feeling is actually a big part of why I wanted to put this presentation together. Here is the thing I keep having to remind myself: if the thing itself is worth doing, it does not matter whether you have an audience. And if the thing itself is not worth doing internally and externally, no audience will fix that. This is where so many of us go wrong in our lives. We throw our lives away trying to work and get money doing something we don't care about. In my experience, I would much rather make less money doing something I would do for free than make more money doing something where I am just a slave, just there to get my needs met.
I've done so much of my content creation just trying to get views and money, and then being frustrated by the result. For me there has always been this dichotomy: if I don't get views and money, I feel like the thing wasn't worth doing. I did great with my gaming streams. I had a lot of fun playing all these different games. But then I would tell myself that if I didn't get enough views, it wasn't even worth doing, that I didn't make money on it so it wasn't worth doing, that I was a failure. And yet when I do go all-in on getting views, when I do the things that get millions of views on my TikTok, or when I grind something like Gods Unchained, it still doesn't satisfy. My Twitch channel is still in one of the top tiers, more watched than most channels even with six people watching live. But here is what is crazy: there is no amount of views you can get where it will ever be enough.
Why the numbers never feel like enough
Even when it feels like enough, it is only temporary. On Facebook in January and February 2021, my live streams were often hitting a thousand concurrent viewers. At first that was enough. But then when it dropped back to a few hundred, I felt like that sucked. For some reason we carry this belief in our minds that the numbers should just go up and up indefinitely. My Facebook analytics from that period are a great example. You would look at them and think, that is massive success, and it did feel great a lot of the time. But there were plenty of other times it didn't.
Look at the minutes viewed in January and February 2021. I was doing Call of Duty Warzone streams almost every day. I had spent years streaming games, quitting on and off, and I was absolutely killing it with these Warzone streams. But I was getting bored playing Warzone every single day, so I tested other games. One day I played Rise of Nations, a game I genuinely wanted to play. A Warzone stream would pull 50,000 to 100,000 total views on the live stream in a few hours. Rise of Nations got me about 100 views. One hundred. And I was absolutely disgusted with the entire streaming environment. I felt trapped. All I could do was make stupid Call of Duty Warzone solo streams, and if I did anything besides that, my viewership tanked. It got to feel extremely confining, like this is all I get to do, and it was horrible. If you feel that same trapped feeling with your own channel right now, you can join me in Jerry Banfield Family and we'll talk through your situation and find a way forward that doesn't burn you out.
The algorithm giveth and the algorithm taketh away
On top of that, Facebook changed. I switched into a new page experience and it killed the algorithm on my page. I had a few months where I was making lots of money and getting tons of views. Some days it felt really good. Other days it felt stressful and confining, like I had a job. Then they changed things, I changed the page type, and it killed my viewership.
I got really frustrated streaming in March and April. I played Magic: The Gathering basically every day, and my viewership was absolute junk compared to what it had been before. I had days where I was really enjoying playing Magic. I had so much more fun just playing Magic, but I got so angry about the viewership. So what did I do in May? I switched back to streaming Warzone again. Within a month of switching back, my viewership instantly came back. But within that same month I was again burnt out and disgusted with all of it. So what happens then? I did a live stream that was incredibly toxic where I hated everybody and everything on the platform, I took a two-week vacation, and I rethought everything I was doing.
I told myself I had to get back to having fun first and foremost. Just playing Warzone every day and racking up minutes watched and donations does pay my bills, but I wasn't having fun. It sucks showing up to YouTube and Facebook just trying to make money. These content creator platforms suck compared to a lot of regular jobs in one specific way: a regular job gives you a regular paycheck. YouTube doesn't. Facebook doesn't. These platforms don't give you a regular paycheck. Your algorithm can come and go in a week or a day. You can be viral one day, especially on TikTok, and irrelevant the next, with nobody watching your videos and nobody wanting to sponsor you.
Why I believe content has to be a labor of love
So to me, it has to be a labor of love. Ideally you should be in a situation where you can live for free. My wife has a full-time job, so there is not much pressure on me to produce a huge income. For a lot of people who want to create content, I believe it would be ideal to either live for free with your parents, a partner, family, or friends so you can create purely for fun and joy, or to work a part-time job so you have time to do your content on the side without demanding money from it. Because what I have described here is me making lots of money and still feeling stressed and burnt out for much of the year.
And essentially all those analytics are worthless to me now, because I deleted my Facebook page in 2023. I was so disgusted with the platform. Regular content creators get no support when there are problems, while partners at the high level get their issues handled immediately. The regular creators get nothing and end up dealing with bots that trap them in feedback loops whenever things don't work perfectly. When I was a partner, they fixed exactly that kind of thing instantly.
Having fun beat grinding for money
Here is what happened after I took those couple of weeks off: my views went to oblivion. And then I went back to having fun. Before the break I had played some Goldeneye on a live stream, and I noticed something. Most Warzone live streams would barely get any views after I went offline, but the Goldeneye stream actually got more views after I was live than while I was live. So I cleared out all the thinking about what I was supposed to do. Right there in July I got back to having fun. I played Duke Nukem on stream, which was so much fun. I played NBA Jam. I played Goldeneye. I played all these retro games, and it was a blast. And then I set new all-time highs. I broke records with my viewership as my Goldeneye, NBA Jam, and retro game live streams went viral. It crushed what the Warzone streams had been doing. I was having more fun and putting in less effort than before.
Then the comments got so crazy and toxic that I went to supporter-only chat. So many viewers were consistently unhappy with me, talking junk, saying I only do stuff for money and don't care about them. It was crazy how toxic everything was. I had a lot of success with the retro streams for months. But then I got tired of doing retro games all the time. It was the same trap again: if I didn't play Warzone or a retro game, nobody wanted to watch. There was a game called Returnal I really liked playing for fun, and nobody would watch unless I played that. I wanted to start talking about other things. I wanted to get into real-life topics, and the algorithm would just dump on me if I wasn't doing what it wanted.
The algorithm kept changing, and people kept getting out of the house more as the world reopened. By January 2022 my page had trended down and down. I agree that being enjoyable is important and that making money on top is an advantage, but to me doing it for fun and for joy has to be the foundation. Making money or getting views should be a perk. A job where you are guaranteed to get paid is completely different from going online and hoping that creating content will somehow get you paid.
What I learned about platforms and the house of cards
So what happened next? My views trended downward for months. My retro streams were not taking off as much, though there were still some spikes. I was getting burnt out on retro streams, the algorithm was changing, and in January 2022 I had the lowest viewership since March 2021. During this whole year I was not focusing on YouTube or Twitch, and that was one of the big lessons. You always want to get people over to your other platforms. I wish that during this whole year I had made a consistent effort to move people over to Twitch and YouTube, and that I had run a dedicated YouTube gaming channel the entire time. You really want your content out on multiple platforms, because you might blow up on one and not the others.
Some platforms, like Twitch or Kick, are really good for keeping people coming back over a long period of time. YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok can work great for discovery, but they will drop you from the algorithm in a heartbeat if you are not pushing the exact thing they want you to push. The dedicated live streaming platforms like Twitch and Kick are much better for retaining people over the long term.
By February 2022, after I tried to play more Returnal and grew more and more frustrated, all the grinding I had done had become nearly worthless. Do you see how you can grind and work so hard on something, and then through no fault of your own they change the algorithm or people stop using the platform? Everything you make as a content creator is an absolute house of cards.
The day I changed my race and everything came down
Everything you build online can come down and disappear almost instantly. You can have all this success one day, and a year from then, after a year of grinding, it's all gone. That's exactly what happened to me. In January or February of 2022, I woke up one day and thought about what would be amazing. I had seen people changing their genders, and that inspired me. I thought, if people can change their genders, I'd really like to change my race. And I realized there was nothing stopping me. There's no reason I couldn't do that. It's perfectly legal. There's not even an operation to have or anything. I could just change my identification.
So in what some called a woke euphoria, I came out and said I'm changing my race. I was really excited about it. I said I'm no longer white, I want to be identified as black. And that went crazy viral. It's the most viral thing I've ever done. And the hate was shocking. I came online thinking I was going to be embraced as this courageous person who really wanted to understand what it's like to be black, this person who wanted to bring everybody together and transcend boundaries, someone so forward-thinking. In my head, that's what people were going to say. I was so excited about it.
Then I was shocked as all the haters came out. People said, you can't be serious, you're racist, you can't change your race. People said things like, you don't have enough genetics to say you're black, that's not how this works legally. The haters absolutely took over the entire narrative. When it went very viral, almost everything everybody heard at first was other people lying and hating on me. People literally just made things up, and that became what other people believed.
When the platforms decide your story for you
Then Facebook took my live stream down for hate speech while it was going viral. I was playing Call of Duty Warzone, I won a game, and my live stream was going viral, and they took it down. They said it was hate speech. Even though on that same day, none of the other platforms did. I streamed on YouTube, on Twitch, and on Twitter all simultaneously, and none of the other platforms took it down. Only Facebook, which to me clearly shows it was discriminatory on their part. It got reported on every platform by all the haters, and only Facebook took it down.
That was a horrible message to receive. There are certain narratives that are so controlled that even if your content is perfectly legal and fits within the terms and conditions, if your post puts out something these platforms don't want said, they'll use any arbitrary policy to take it down. I've seen this happen to others too. There was a man I talked to in coaching who was a creator on Amazon Kindle. He was making book summaries that were getting ranked and reviewed higher than the books themselves. The publishers complained to Amazon, Amazon created a policy that wasn't there before, and then took all his books down.
This is why it all comes back to creating just because it's good for you, because it's fun, because it's enjoyable, and because you're trying to help somebody. If you're not creating with that as the foundation in mind, the money and the views are extremely temporary. And if you do go viral, you may get everything, and that may cost you everything. This is exactly the kind of thing I keep working through with people in the Jerry Banfield Family, where we're building creative lives we don't need to escape from instead of chasing the next spike.
Who actually had my back
I've come to believe the criticism didn't come from where people assume. Some of the most vocal critics were other people who were white. They were the biggest, loudest critics, calling me a racist and a hater. Meanwhile, there were a lot of people in the black community who were very supportive. In fact, a black celebrity took a part from my live stream and put it up on his radio show, Charlemagne tha God on The Breakfast Club. That went out a few days after I got canceled on Facebook. Facebook demonetized my page, and people celebrated on X that they got it taken down. And a black celebrity came out and said this is great. He said it's ironic: you wanted to understand what it's like to be us, and then you got treated like us.
So I did get what I wanted. I wanted to understand, and what I understand now is that it really sucks to be treated differently because of anything about your physical appearance, whether it's your skin color or your weight. It sucks to be treated differently because of your appearance, and to have one certain kind of appearance get treated differently is insane. None of us should be treated like that.
I was absolutely destroyed after that. I had made $100,000 in 2021 doing all this on Facebook. In 2022 I was demonetized and absolutely destroyed. Then I had years of dysphoria, years of still trying to go do all these gaming streams. I kept doing these gaming streams and they just got a fraction of the views, but you could see that people really liked them. A lot of them had 100% likes. At the time, though, I was obsessed with the views I was getting.
Views versus impressions, and why YouTube mattered more than I knew
I also wasn't considering that a view on YouTube is more like an impression. The newer platforms, like TikTok and Facebook and Instagram, have tricked viewers by changing the language away from impressions. These videos of mine might look like they got a small number of views, but if you were to use the same language TikTok or Facebook or Instagram use, they got ten to a hundred times as many impressions.
What you need to understand as a content creator is that impressions means how many times your video was shown to somebody. On TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, they call an impression a view. So when somebody is just scrolling through the feed and sees your video, they call that a view. But on YouTube, only when somebody actually clicks to watch your video do they call that a view. On YouTube, a view is more like a conversion, or a highly engaged view.
For years I didn't understand how important YouTube was, because I was easily tricked into getting more so-called views on TikTok or Facebook. I did a video about changing my race on TikTok that got taken down for hate speech, but I appealed it, they put it back up, and it got millions of views and tens of thousands of new followers. But then I'd put up new videos and TikTok would hardly show them to anybody. You look at these short videos and think, well, I'm getting more views on TikTok than on YouTube. But those are impressions. So really I was getting ten to a hundred times less meaningful engagement on TikTok and Facebook compared to how much meaningful engagement I was getting on YouTube.
On these YouTube streams, it might only say a few hundred views, but a lot of the time that was ten or twenty people watching an average of ten, twenty, or thirty minutes of a live stream. A lot of these had 100% likes, 94% likes. People were really enjoying my videos. But I got so lost in the money and the views, getting attached to certain terminology and how popular I was. Even yesterday I felt so crappy, because the live stream I did making music got fewer views than the ones I was doing gaming years ago. But then I listened to my music in the car and asked myself, is this good music? Yes, it's great music. I love the music I made yesterday. I made an hour and twenty-three minutes of music in a little less than two hours of real time.
Create with the end in mind
After you see how this bigger picture works, what it looks like to go viral and then fall off, here's what I've found matters most for the long term: you need to create your content with long-term repeatability and enjoyability in mind. This is what I consistently didn't do on my channels. I consistently did not create my content with the long term in mind. I created it with short-term satisfaction, short-term views, and short-term money in mind. I didn't ask, how is this going to age five years from now?
I deleted all the videos on my original YouTube channel to try to give myself a fresh start. I had gotten one single policy violation on a video that was multiple years old, after I had edited all the descriptions. I had thousands and thousands of videos on that original channel, and it was consistently getting a thousand-plus views a day on all those old videos. I got so frustrated that I just deleted everything and started fresh. That, to me, was a big mistake. Deleting everything and starting fresh was a big mistake.
What's better to do is to create your content from the beginning with the end in mind. To ask, how is this going to age five or ten years from now? Is this going to be something somebody wants to watch? I've been successful in the short term repeatedly, but in the long term it hasn't worked out, and a lot of what these YouTube gurus tell you is to just grind out videos.
Why I deleted Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok
I actually deleted all my TikTok accounts, so I don't have any now. I deleted my Facebook, my TikTok, and my Instagram, because I've come to believe it's really important to get off platforms that don't offer you a fair share. YouTube offers me a fair share of the ad revenue. Twitch and Kick offer a fair share of the revenue that's generated from me streaming. TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook take and give you almost nothing in return. They've tricked people into consistently putting all this time into creating all these videos, but they give creators almost nothing.
So I deleted the Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok channels because I saw how important it is to focus. Where is the best place for me to create, and what is the number one format for me to create in? I did go viral on TikTok, but what I noticed is hardly anyone from TikTok would actually go follow me somewhere else. And I personally found that I hate creating short videos. Even though I've made videos that got millions of views on TikTok, I deleted my account because I hate making shorts.
One thing that's really important to tap into as a creator is, what do I do best? Where did I go viral? Facebook live streaming. My live streams went viral, not my reels, not my shorts, not my videos. My live streams went viral. And on YouTube, what's the number one place I got organic views doing something fun? On my YouTube channel I did get a bunch of views on hacking courses and similar content, and those actually got more views, but I paid to promote them and they sold courses, and I didn't even make those for fun.
Figuring Out What I Do Best
Those videos were to make money. But the number one thing I ever did on my YouTube channel that was fun and that got views was live streaming, especially that League of Legends live stream. My gaming live streams were also the number one thing I did to get views, and they were fun too. This was working just fine before I deleted them all off the channel, and I regret deleting all those live streams because they would still be getting views today. Some of them are up on Rumble, but hardly anybody watches Rumble.
So it is really important as a creator to dig down and figure out what you do that is special, what you do best. If you want a second set of eyes on that, you can join Jerry Banfield Family and we'll look at your own channel together and figure out what you should actually lean into. If you do video editing, then sure, upload videos. If you love making little short videos and watching them, then sure, upload those. I personally love live streaming. That is my gift. I wasn't patient enough, and I was always impatient, and one reason you get impatient is when you are doing things you don't love. I hated making shorts. It was fun to experiment with making a few, but I mostly made shorts just feeling like I was trying to squeeze views out of them. What I really wanted was to have a live audience hanging out on Twitch. That is what I really love, having a live audience.
To me, the best form of content is live streaming. The better AI gets, the more it can just create short videos and all kinds of videos on YouTube. The one thing that will be most difficult for AI to replicate is a live stream where it is really interacting with the chat, because that takes a human level of processing and real human interaction. As one of my viewers put it, sometimes you don't get the results you want immediately, but in time it adds up. That has been one of the most difficult things for me to do on YouTube: to figure out what I do best and then patiently just do that.
Live Streaming Is All I Should Create
Where I am at today, and one of the main things I hoped to remember for this live stream myself, is that what I do best is live streams. What I love the most is live streams. And that is all I should create. I shouldn't take any time to record videos. I shouldn't take any time to make shorts. A lot of people tell you that if you want to live stream, you need to record videos, you need to make shorts, you need to publish long videos and short videos, you need to be everywhere. But in my experience that doesn't work, because you have such a limited amount of time.
For me, I have maybe three hours a day, seven days a week on average, that I can create. I have kids. I go to yoga. I go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I take great care of my body. I'm there for my kids. My wife has a full-time job. I'm there for my mother. So it is important for me to maximize the time I spend live, because that is what I can offer that is special. But the challenge for me has consistently been getting sucked into instant gratification.
For example, on my original channel, I have six YouTube channels now, and over the last couple of months I've just cranked out one video a day on every one of my channels. I have a music channel and an experience channel where I'm going to be doing interviews. I have a crypto channel. If you give me two hours of real time, I can make videos very quickly. I can take 10 minutes to record a crypto video, 10 minutes to record another, 10 minutes to tell you about my day, 10 minutes to make a song. Gaming is harder to do in 10 minutes, but the experience content I can make something out of. So for a lot of the last few years on YouTube, I was just grinding out videos.
Why Grinding Out Videos Burns Out Your Audience
In the short term, this works. If you look at my crypto channel, when I grinded out videos, that worked in the short term. I grinded out all kinds of videos. If you go back further on that crypto channel, I was doing three videos a day for a while, including ICP interviews. But one thing that really changed how I see things is when I looked at T-Series. Their newest video an hour ago had 2,000 views. Two hours before that, 1,000 views. Then 27,000 on one, 24,000 on another, 63,000 on the next. They just constantly put up all these videos.
I love Busy Works Beats. He has an unbelievable hustle, an unbelievable amount of videos he cranks out. He has actually put out about the same number of videos I have in the same amount of time, but he has put them all on one channel. He does videos, he does shorts, he does lives. He grinds, and he grinds amazingly. The problem with this strategy though is that once you start grinding like this, you have to keep grinding like this. When you keep grinding, you put out two videos a day, sometimes three, plus a live stream like I showed with T-Series and like I just did on my Jerry Banfield crypto channel. And you end up putting out videos that turn your viewers off.
It only takes one video for somebody to hide your channel, to get pissed off, or to scroll past. I was doing all these crypto reviews, and people who love Internet Computer Protocol would see three or four "going to zero" videos in a row, and they would stop watching. I cranked out all these crypto course lessons, and they would stop watching. The grinding strategy with videos absolutely can work to get you views in the short term. But for me personally, one of the hardest things to learn is that you have to do something that is repeatable. For me, what is repeatable is to do live streams.
How Much Your Audience Can Actually Handle
You also want to think about how much your audience can handle watching. What I'm doing right now across my crypto channel and all my channels is one or two live streams a week, maybe two on the gaming channel. But I don't need to do more than one stream on my crypto channel. I have a crypto reviews channel that I just did a stream on a couple of days ago. I don't need to do more than one live stream a week, because live streaming is the most efficient thing for me to do.
A lot of people can make videos and edit videos. Even AI can crank out videos at this point. But one of the hardest things to do is to get a live audience, do a show, and make something off the top of your head. So it is really important to figure out what you love doing. I love being live. I hate making videos compared to being live. And I absolutely hate making shorts. So what is really important is to just do what you do best and to clear out as much other stuff as possible.
What is amazing is that in the short term, doing live streams compared to doing videos is not as efficient. In the short term, I could get more views and make more money by just grinding out videos. But again and again, the same lesson comes back: what about the long term? What if for a year I did one live stream a week, versus a video every day? The problem is, when you do a video every day, it gets harder and harder for the YouTube algorithm to recommend your videos to people. And it gets harder and harder for someone to go back through your videos and find anything they'd like to watch. I might look through a few pages of somebody's videos, but are you really going to keep scrolling to see what kind of videos I was making a year ago? The more videos you make, the more you clutter, the more you keep asking your audience for attention, and the more you scatter everything all over.
Focus, Segment, and Keep Doing It
So what is ideal is to just focus energy into one single thing once a week. On YouTube, you have to segment your content. On Twitch and Kick, you don't have to do that, but on YouTube you do. I tried variety content on my original channel, but the algorithm absolutely sucks on YouTube with variety content. If I had just done one live stream every day, it might have been fine. But at various points on that channel, I grinded out as many as eight or nine videos a day. I put out a video every few hours, and I absolutely killed my viewership doing that. That is why today I hardly get any views on that original channel, and that is why I now have my content segmented.
If you look at some of the top YouTubers in the world, like MrBeast, he does about one video a week, and that is much better. Sometimes MrBeast will go two weeks, or almost a month, without putting out a video. It is better to do one video a week. From where I can see going forward, it is better to do one live stream a week per channel. And if you are going to be live on Twitch, go live most days, but with just one single theme. What doesn't work on things like Twitch and Kick is doing music and gaming and autobiography and crypto all in one single live stream. You need to pick a topic, and if you get people watching on that topic, you want to keep them there.
MrBeast puts out a video every week or two, sometimes almost a month apart. It is much better to focus your audience on a much smaller amount of videos. He also has a MrBeast 2 channel that puts out more, but still it is one video two weeks ago, one video a month ago, and then live streams. Live streams on YouTube are a bit more difficult, because it is easier to do videos and mostly people are on YouTube to watch videos. But I'm glad I finally know myself. I don't want to just grind out videos all week. I want to do live streams. And that means whatever you do in life, if you're successful at it, you should be prepared to keep doing it.
Where I've wasted the most time
Where I've gone wrong and wasted so much time is doing stuff I didn't actually want to repeat. I made videos that got a lot of views, but I didn't want to keep making them. What I intend to remember going forward is that it's worth the trade-off in the short term to get fewer views, just doing live streams. Because in the long term, if somebody comes to my crypto channel, do I want them to have 300 videos to wade through, or 50? If I have 50, they can easily go through a year's worth of videos. And if there's one topic they really want to listen to, I have three hours all in one spot. Versus 31 ten-minute videos, which is much harder to sort through. If they find a topic they like, it's harder to find that same topic again later.
So I'm doing this today to remind myself to stick with live streaming. Yesterday I was frustrated. I thought, I should just go back to making ten-minute music videos. Those get more views. I should just go back to doing what I've done before. But I don't want to waste any more time, and where I've wasted time is having to learn the same lessons over and over again.
The lessons I keep relearning
Stop chasing short-term viewership. Stop uploading to platforms where you're not being treated fairly, like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. In my experience, I'm not treated fairly on these platforms. My content generates a lot of income for them and gives them a lot of value, and they give me almost nothing back. So I'm not uploading to those platforms anymore. And the only way I could actually stop uploading was to completely delete them.
Then I put my time into platforms like YouTube, which has great organic discovery, along with Kick and Twitch, where if you get somebody following, there's a good chance they'll stick with you for the long term. Those are the platforms that are optimized for what I do best, which is live streaming. On YouTube, in my experience it's better to do one live stream a week on each channel about something you really care about and go deep, deep into it, than to be blathering all over the place across a pile of different videos.
Doing this for myself
So I'm doing this for me today, to remember. My autobiography channel on YouTube literally got one single view on this. I don't know if I got any on Kick. But that's what's great about Twitch: there are several of you watching this, and I hope it's useful for your own life to reflect on. Where are you putting your time and energy that just leaves you drained, versus how can you deliver what you do best in a way that works best for everybody? Right now it looks like what's best for me is to go live on YouTube, Twitch, and Kick most days.
I actually did a presentation here literally titled something like "stop streaming," on Twitch and on YouTube. Isn't it crazy when you have something you're amazing at? Picture some of the best actors or musicians or tennis players. Isn't it wild that you can be really good at something and then trick yourself into stopping doing it altogether? I want to remember that too. I don't see anything better for me to do than live streaming in the long term. In the short term there might be better things to do, but I don't ever want to get stuck thinking short term again. I want to stick to long-term thinking. If reflecting on your own work this way is helpful, I've gathered more of these conversations in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
I appreciate all of you being here. I think that's enough on this one. I'll be back live on a different YouTube channel tomorrow, and maybe we'll do some gaming. I'll be back on the same Twitch and Kick channels too.
After 10,000 Videos, This Is My Simple YouTube Growth Formula
From my video published June 13, 2026.
I've uploaded more than 10,000 videos and gotten over a billion views, and I've boiled all of it down to one almost embarrassingly simple system — the same one I'm running today. It covers everything: getting views, getting discovered, building real fans, and monetizing so you can do this full time.
Step one: one short video a day
The most basic move is to upload one video a day per channel. No excuses, no matter how rough your thumbnail or title is — one a day. If you can film five, six, or seven at once and schedule them out, even better. Keep each one to about five minutes so you don't disappear into 30-minute tangents; a pile of short videos beats a handful of long ones. I broke this habit down in detail in one video a day: the simple YouTube strategy nobody wants to hear.
Do that consistently and the algorithm starts to discover you, even on a brand-new channel. Keep showing up. Put your own face on camera instead of leaning on AI slop — use your phone if that's all you have. If you can be a real human being on video every day, you're most of the way there.
Step two: a paid community to monetize
The second half of the system is a community where you can bring people in and monetize. You can start it even if you have nobody yet, and mention it in every single video. I use Skool — my Jerry Banfield Family is hosted there, with a sales page for it on my own site, but you don't need a website to begin.
Make it paid, not free. You're already giving away free value on YouTube, so a paid community is the natural next step — a free one makes sense only when you don't have a discovery engine feeding it. YouTube is that engine: it's by far the best platform for both discovery and community, which is why I don't bother with the others. I mirror some of my crypto content to X because it gets reach there, but the vast majority of my videos just go on YouTube.
Make the community worth staying in
For this to work, the community has to deliver real value. One of the easiest ways is to include one-on-one and group calls with members. That recurring membership is far better than a one-off tip jar, and the thing people value most is each other — bringing your viewers together. Brand it as somewhere people stay indefinitely rather than a single-topic stop they churn out of. That's why mine is the Jerry Banfield Family: one place for everything I do — dating, YouTube, crypto, and the rest — instead of a separate community per niche.
Give first, sell last
Inside each five-minute video, spend the first four or four and a half minutes purely giving value, then keep the pitch to the very end. My value here is exactly that: I've taken everything everyone else teaches about YouTube and compressed it into one five-minute video a day plus a community on Skool. You can make it fancier later with a website, shorts, or live streams once you have an audience, but you don't need any of that to start. Five-minute daily videos and a paid community are the whole machine. If you want the deeper YouTube and business training, you can watch my YouTube coaching playlist.
What I Learned After Uploading 5,000 Videos to YouTube
From my video published August 8, 2024.
I've uploaded more than 5,000 videos to YouTube across more than 10 different channels, and I want to dump everything I've learned into a completely free course, right here on YouTube. My goal is to teach you everything I've picked up over the last 13 years so that this is easier for you than it was for me. You might not have 13 years to just burn learning all of this the hard way, and this will be really helpful whether you're a small streamer, a brand-new channel, or someone who has been doing YouTube a long time and finally wants to make a full-time income.
I've been making a full-time income as a content creator for 12 years, so I know what I'm doing. I've run so many different business models that I'm going to go straight to the absolute best ones. And the best one, in my experience, is exactly what I'm doing here: putting out free courses on YouTube, one video at a time, the way I do on my website at jerrybanfield.com. The most money I've ever made online came from teaching online classes. That money was made by selling those classes, but if I had simply put them up for free, I believe I would have made so much more in the long term. So now I'm putting all kinds of free courses on YouTube. This is the first video in my YouTube course, and I think you're going to be blown away by what you learn. I'll put out a video every day or two, each on one particular topic.
The real question: is this fun for you?
If you want to do well on YouTube, the first thing you need to ask is: is this fun for me? Doing YouTube is hard. It might look easy, and the camera and the filming and all of that is genuinely easy stuff you can learn to do. What's hard is the emotional roller coaster. What's hard is figuring all of this out: the amount you have to use your brain to put the data and the titles together, to figure out how to make it work, to handle the money, and to operate with integrity. You've seen some of the biggest YouTubers who don't worry about the integrity part, and in my experience that always comes back to haunt you.
So the journey for me has been this: how do I create on YouTube in a way that feels fun and joyful and also gives value to other people? I've done plenty of things in the past that were fun and joyful, and I've done plenty of things that gave value to other people, but it was often hard to combine the two. When you put all of that together, that's the sweet spot. I love teaching, and across this course I'll answer all the questions you have about YouTube. I keep that whole conversation going in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
The format that the algorithm rewards
Live streaming versus recording, long format versus short format: what seems to me to be the absolute sweet spot is to do roughly 15-minute videos. Ten minutes, 20 minutes, whatever works, but more of a longer format rather than a short. Then have a playlist or a series of videos where people watch them over and over again. What the YouTube algorithm loves the most is when you find some new channel, click on a video, and then binge a bunch of their other videos. That's what YouTube loves best.
That's why I'm setting this up as a course instead of just throwing random videos out about YouTube and then trying to sell you on something. If you really want to succeed on YouTube, you need to keep people on YouTube. You'll notice I'm keeping you on YouTube for this entire course. I'm never sending you off to my website to buy anything except time with me directly as a mentor. If you want to greatly accelerate your journey, getting a mentor helps, and I've used a YouTube coach myself. I would watch as much of the free courses first, and then add a mentor. You can join Jerry Banfield Family if you want that help directly.
Consistency has been my biggest challenge
My biggest challenge on YouTube has been consistency. Right now I upload four YouTube videos a day across four different channels, every single day, and I have eight YouTube channels. The top one has hundreds of thousands of subscribers; I've got the silver YouTube play button somewhere here in my office. I've blown up and gotten millions of views and gone viral, and I've also been destroyed and killed channels. I've deleted a whole bunch of channels, so I know the mistakes not to make.
One of those: you generally do not want to delete your videos. The only scenario I would delete a video in is if you're sure there's a policy violation or a copyright violation in it. If you're newer on YouTube, there are thousands of little things like that to learn, and you really need one place and one person to learn them from.
If you want to really do YouTube, get comfortable, because it is a grind. It is uploading video after video after video. Mr. Beast, who maybe isn't the YouTube teacher people want to learn from anymore, said that if you really want to do YouTube you just need to upload 100 videos. So I'd suggest exactly that: upload 100 videos as fast as you can make them. Take one video, upload it, make another, upload it, learn, and improve over and over again. After 5,000 videos, I'm able to film enough in an hour or two of real time to upload four videos a day. In a couple of hours I can film two 20-minute crypto course lectures and a YouTube lecture like this one. One thing that can really help you as a creator is to build a community somewhere outside of YouTube too, like on Twitch, because you don't want your whole community in one place. In my view, the ideal formula if you want to be a successful YouTube creator is to also have a website on your own .com. If for some reason you only ever watch this first video, I want to give you the major takeaways anyway.
Stop editing and start shipping
I have not scripted this video at all. I didn't even know exactly what I was going to say to start it. But if you really know what you're talking about, you can just put videos out there, and the best thing you can do is not edit them. I know there are all these cute little viral edited videos, but people are desperate for raw, real, authentic content, and they will love you and trust you and interact with you much better when you don't edit. Not editing will also force you to get better.
Don't sit there and record video after video and delete it. You get an idea for a video, you show up, you hit record, you film it, and you upload it. Then you do another one, and another one, and another one. If you don't have 100 videos on YouTube, in my opinion you have no business even thinking about getting views, no business thinking about what the algorithm can do for you, and no business feeling like you even deserve an audience yet. If you've done fewer than 100 videos, you've barely tried once. Once you get 100 videos up, you might be at a level of skill and value where you can start to think about the algorithm and analytics. You can see how I think about that over the long haul in my simple growth formula after 10,000 videos.
When I started out, the best thing I did was just film the worst videos. My very first video was literally me saying the f-word in different intonations and ridiculous ways. It was so bad, and my next 20 videos were just as bad. That's part of why they're deleted now. I actually deleted my first several thousand videos off of YouTube, because there were so many undetected policy violations and it was just a disorganized pile of trash.
One channel for everything was my biggest mistake
I had one channel with gaming videos, crypto videos, music videos, inspirational videos, technical tutorials, how to use Adobe Audition. I just dumped all of it onto one channel: live streams, shorts, longs, mediums, everything. Don't do that. To start off, you could do a vlogs channel and experiment, but don't mix technical tutorials and vlogs and everything else on one channel. The algorithm, unfortunately, is not smart enough to understand how to push all those different videos to the right people.
For a long time I thought the YouTube algorithm was much smarter than it really is. In my opinion, the algorithm is pretty basic. It's magical sometimes, and maybe there are other forces at work, like your dead grandmother wanting you to see a video and then manipulating your cell phone and the algorithm to stick it in front of you even though it never should have shown up based on how the engineers coded it. That kind of thing definitely seems to happen on YouTube. But the algorithm itself is shockingly basic. You really need to make channels that have the same kinds of videos on them. Don't make music videos and then crypto videos on the same channel. That was one of the biggest mistakes I made.
If I could go back, I would have started a Jerry Banfield Gaming, a Jerry Banfield Music, a Jerry Banfield Crypto, and a Jerry Banfield Thoughts or Life Coaching channel years ago. That's basically what I've got now: eight channels covering all the major things I love, and I've written about how to use niche channels to promote each other. I have a music channel, and music is one of the things I'm having the most fun learning and producing right now. I crank out a music video every day, because in an hour or two I can film 12 videos. On my music production channel I recorded myself making 12 songs in 100 minutes, and then I made myself some controversy, because instead of learning something, people like to get defensive and butthurt.
Start with an autobiography channel
You'll come to know I'm your YouTube teacher, the teacher you've been desperate for, while a lot of these other people are just circling you for your money and your time without giving you any real value. That's why I unsubscribe from their channels. I'm tempted to name them, but that's rude and I don't want to promote them. If you feel offended that I'm giving it to you this straight, that's a sign you found your teacher.
If you don't know where to start on YouTube, start with an autobiography channel. This is a channel I would love for everyone in the world to have. It's where you just do vlogs and tell stories about your life. Look at it this way: if you were to die within the next year, which stories from your life would you really want people to know? For me, I'll put my whole life story out there. I'll talk about how I got sober through Alcoholics Anonymous, how I met my wife, how I lost 75 pounds and have kept it off since 2014, how I became a top 10 instructor on Udemy and then got banned, how I was a police officer and what that was like, and how I was a professional gamer. I'll give you a tour of my studio, talk about my alcoholism, talk about the night my daughter was born. My fifth video on YouTube is one I can look back on 13 years later.
I talk about all these big experiences, and some of them we revisit repeatedly and in more detail. I talk about the hard stuff too. I stopped talking to my mother for a few months, and then I put up a video where I said I'm sorry to my mother, and I took the trip to Michigan. I've set this channel up so that if I pass at any time, my autobiography is being written as it actually happens. This is the number one channel idea I have. There are people with $6,000 YouTube courses that don't give you information this good. Doing an autobiography YouTube channel, telling your entire life story and breaking it into smaller parts, is the best channel idea for pretty much anyone in the world.
In some cases you could do one long-format video, but those often don't work as well; it's generally better to do little consistent entries. It can be difficult, especially starting out, to talk straight for an hour. I've tended to do most of my videos in 10- to 20-minute increments, although I once did a speaker meeting for two and a half hours straight, uninterrupted. It takes no experience to tell the stories from your own life and to be real and raw and authentic.
You have to offer something unusual
We don't need any more fake people handing out money, running illegal lotteries, doing whatever it takes to get as many subscribers and followers as possible. They don't care if they rip their subscribers off, steal money, waste people's time, or make people sick. We don't need any more YouTubers like that. We need real, authentic, raw people who give somebody a unique, special experience.
Some of you might be taken aback and think, well, I don't know if that's me, I'm just a regular person, I don't know if I'm special. If you're going to do YouTube, you're going to need to offer something unusual, not just the regular. And what's unusual is to be your unfiltered self. Sometimes you may get demonetized over that, as I did on Facebook. But YouTube has been the most supportive platform for me. I've uploaded thousands of videos and only ever had one single detected community guidelines violation, and I'm vigilant about following the guidelines.
Follow the guidelines and play the long game
Make sure you actually read all of the community guidelines. If you don't want to follow them, then post somewhere else; this is unfortunately the world we live in. You can use Rumble, you can post videos on X, but it's better to focus your energy and think long term. Riding dirty on YouTube's terms will leave you paranoid and afraid of getting your channel banned, and you don't want that.
Don't use other people's stuff for copyright, either. That's one thing I've done really well. Every single copyright strike that's been filed against me, I've filed a counter-notification and said take it to trial, because I know I'm in fair use. That's because I've never done reaction videos, just sitting there watching other people's videos. So don't shortcut. Be raw, be authentic, and the more you practice, the better you'll get. Watch someone who has what you want. I've been a full-time creator for 12 years; I have a personality that engages and entertains people, and I love what I do. I don't need a script. Drop your script.
Drop the script, drop the editing
You'll get better by being faster and more consistent and cutting out all the waste. When I first started, I made sucky videos and then tried to edit them. I say sucky because they're kind of funny now. I'd have a dolphin shower curtain in the background while I talked about dating, the audio was crappy, and some of the tips were pretty funny, like, if you don't kiss on the first date, then don't even bother with a third date. I'd try to clean up the awkward pauses and make it sound better, and I hated the editing process. I had a crappy laptop that could hardly handle the editing and rendering, and it slowed me down.
I eventually got to the point where I needed a process where I could just hit record, talk, hit stop, and upload. The setup I've got now is one of the most efficient I've ever seen anywhere: four videos a day, in only two or three hours of real time. The easiest way to film is to use OBS and a stream deck with a camera set up so you can hit record, talk, and upload immediately. Take a video idea and make a minimum viable thumbnail, not a viral, clickbait, 100-million-views thumbnail, just a simple thumbnail that gets the idea across.
You don't need 16 hours a day
Some of these people out there putting 12 to 16 hours a day into YouTube, uploading a video, going for clickbait titles, changing the title after it comes out, optimizing constantly, those people are failures in my view. I can support myself, be a full-time creator, and really help people in two or three hours a day. If you're putting 12 to 16 hours a day into YouTube, to me you're failing, because you're giving up too much of your life. Eventually all the videos on your channel are going to be deleted, so you need to have fun while you make them and take the least amount of time to do them, because you have other things to do.
I have a family. I play tennis, I go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, I go to yoga, I have friends, I walk my dog, I play basketball. I don't have 12 to 16 hours a day to sit in an office compromising my sleep and my health. In my opinion, a lot of the people with YouTube courses getting tons of views are sick, burned-out people you should not learn from. That's why I made this course. I have the kind of life you'd want to have as a YouTuber: I work two or three hours a day, take maybe a day off a week, don't stress most of the time, have fun, and talk about what I want to talk about. The most dedicated people come hang out with me while I'm live, and it's awesome. This is also the foundation for how you only need one view a day to go full-time on YouTube.
Why I give it all away for free
Watch every single video in this course, because there's so much I want to teach you. If you want more, I have a coaching package, and I've helped a bunch of people build massive YouTube channels with it; some of them now have more followers and more views than I do. I know how to do YouTube, I'm really good at it, and I hold myself to high ethics and integrity.
Right now I could sell a high-priced YouTube course, but that disgusts me, and to me that's failure. If you can't put your whole course out there for free, then in my view you're not doing the best you could for everybody. So I'm putting this course out completely for free, and I'm cranking out a whole bunch of other free courses on a whole bunch of other channels too.