My friends, you will love seeing how much money I made online in 2022. If you're new here, you'll love getting to know what it's like to be a full-time content creator online and all the different streams of income, and the expenses I have to carry to make that happen. If you've followed me for a while, you'll love seeing the details of how I actually make and spend my money, along with how the year came out. Last year was a turbulent year for me as a content creator. I lost my main source of income right at the beginning of the year, and I'm grateful for what I've got to show you here. Let's get started.
Where the money came in
The number one source of income, the money that came in, was from Uthena.com. This is a website I set up in 2019 for selling private label rights video courses. That means you can buy a course on there and then sell it somewhere else as if it's your own and keep all the profit. I lost thousands of dollars starting this in 2019. It still has not even come close to breaking even for me, and I had to spend a lot to maintain it, which I'll get into after we go through the income. But I did make a profit here.
The second biggest source of income, and what I was most known for online last year, was being one of the top Facebook gaming partners. I made over $100,000 gaming on Facebook in 2021, and in just the first couple of months of 2022 I made $24,000. I was on pace to make well over $100,000 again, except I got demonetized, and that's a whole tangent to go off on. Search Jerry Banfield Breakfast Club if you want to go down the rabbit hole for that one. On Facebook, I mainly earned through ad revenue. I would do live gaming streams, which would then go viral in the Facebook newsfeed after I was live. Some of them would bring in thousands of dollars in ad revenue.
The next biggest source of income, although this was a total loss, was selling all my Gods Unchained that I bought for the giveaway and for cards. So technically I brought in $7,000 in income here, but we're going to wipe this out in expenses.
YouTube, crypto, and the channels I'm building
Now let's take a look at the next source, and this one is going to blow up this year. I only made $5,000 off of YouTube ads last year, as my main YouTube channel was the only thing I was doing. No matter what kind of videos I put out, except a couple that went viral from Facebook gaming, almost nothing I did on my main channel worked. That motivated me to start four new channels. My new crypto channel is blowing up. We're going to shred that $5,000 this year on YouTube. I think by the end of the year I'm making $5,000 a month on YouTube with these four new channels plus my main channel. The main ways you earn on YouTube are ads, and there's also members and super chats. On the crypto channels, super chats actually equal the ad revenue getting started. That could be an outlier, but it's what I'm seeing right now.
What I'm doing right now is basically a marketing campaign. I'm only making $5,000 a month at the moment, and that's not much of an advantage on its own. There are a lot of things I can do this year that are as valuable and important as my main channel. So I'm leaning into the crypto channel and I'm going to spend a lot of money on a few different channels. That's actually what I'm doing, including starting a new channel called Top 5 Top 10.
I did nothing last year on Stack Social and made $3,000 of what people bill as passive income. It's not passive income. I did a hell of a lot of work to get that set up, and now it continues to pay out a little bit, which is dwindling. On SkillSuccess, same thing. I gave them a bunch of video courses years ago, and they gave me $2,000 last year. Then I earned $2,000 directly in crypto from Hive and from Gods Unchained. I overlapped a little bit of the Gods Unchained there. Mostly that was from Hive. I separated the Gods Unchained I sold, that I had originally bought, from the Gods Unchained I actually earned. I got some Gods Unchained given to me for making YouTube videos, and Hive has an incredibly whale-friendly system that I just make passive income off of, even though I can't stand the platform. I just keep making money. I don't even have any money on it.
Affiliate income, tips, and coaching
I also made $2,000 off of affiliate marketing through web hosting and email marketing, mostly from when I did all kinds of tutorials years ago. One email marketing company stabbed me in the back, and everybody else too, by requiring that you refer somebody every six months or they cut off your lifetime commissions. That cost me hundreds of dollars a month in commissions with one single email. I canceled my email marketing with them and got a refund. I also got about $1,000 last year in tips. I appreciate all of you dropping those tips directly on StreamLabs and StreamElements. These are all rounded to the nearest thousand for simplicity.
I brought in about $1,000 in coaching last year, mainly from people wanting to make money online and asking me for advice. Since I've made millions online, people have come to me over the years for coaching and help on their businesses, and I've helped some people you might recognize, like Joe Paris. He hired me for coaching in the past, and I helped give him guidance to build up his new crypto channel. I've helped several others, some who don't even want to be named, build up huge success on Udemy and on other platforms. I've already made more than this in 2023. For most of 2022 I wasn't offering coaching at all; I literally took it off my available services. In my experience, the best way for us to actually work together on this now is inside my community, where I share what's working and answer questions directly. You can join the Jerry Banfield Family here. This year I'm consistently connecting with people every week, mostly to talk crypto tied to my new crypto channel.
Another thing I was selling last year and the year before was sponsored live streams. Gods Unchained actually sponsored two live streams. As a big message to everybody who said I was finished after I got demonetized on Facebook, I sold several more sponsored live streams after the demonetization. I love seeing how wrong people are, and it even entertains me when I'm wrong. Gods Unchained sure came out way ahead after sponsoring me a couple of times. I got a bunch of other people to play the game, and I put way more into it than I got out of it.
On Twitch, I did Twitch full time for several months and made, in my opinion, a lousy $1,000 out of it. That's why I'm done with Twitch. In my experience it's one of the worst platforms to earn on. Only about two out of a thousand Twitch streamers make a full-time income, if you define a full-time income as $100,000, which I do. I know some of y'all might not, but I do. So Twitch is not worth my time, and I'm done streaming there.
On Audible, I have 14 audiobooks, including a 12-hour speaker meeting where I talk through my history in addiction, ranging from alcoholism, sex, gambling, food, and even video games, and my time in recovery. I have a book called Officer Banfield that has all my best police stories. I even have a book on Twitch. I was the first one to put a book on Audible about Twitch, and then I didn't follow my own advice. How funny is that? But it did work for other people.
Now the expenses
Let's take a look at the expenses, because one of the big lessons I did not get early in business was that it's not just about how much you make, it's about how much you spend. The single largest category was $22,000 in advertising. I spent $11,000 on Gods Unchained. Remember I said I sold $7,000 in Gods Unchained back, so that's a net loss of $4,000. This number was inflated because, for simplicity and accounting, I counted all the ETH I bought to buy Gods Unchained cards as advertising, since I was streaming the games and that was my business. Then when I sold off all the cards, I just put that in as income.
Advertising also includes the thousands of dollars I gave away on Twitch to my viewers when I was trying to get everybody over from Facebook to Twitch. I was giving away $100 per live stream at one point. Boy, what a nightmare that net loss was. I'm glad some of the top viewers did win the giveaways, but hardly anybody actually came back consistently after winning $100. Lesson learned there. This category also accounts for web hosting, including the Uthena hosting, which is $100 a month, and my own website. Since I was playing video games as my main business, I'm able to expense things like games, equipment, and software for my studio here. That all counts under advertising.
Now we'll go over our next biggest area of expense, contract labor. Almost all of this was to pay instructors and staff on Uthena.com. Only maybe a thousand or so was for things besides Uthena, like video editing. Counting the advertising also subtracted from Uthena, I might have made five or six thousand at most from Uthena after all the expenses were deducted. Facebook gaming was by far the most profitable thing I did in 2022.
The next area, listed by Schedule C in the USA, is supplies, and we'll get to the net profit by the end of this. On supplies I spent $5,000 on things like games, equipment, and shirts like this that I paid to have printed. I spent probably about $500 getting Jerry Banfield shirts last year. Maybe I should sell some of those. Again, this is stuff for my equipment and studio. It doesn't really matter whether you put it in advertising or in supplies. An expense is an expense. If I was audited, no one would care which category I put it in. It's logical: if I'm creating gaming content and making money off it, then the games and equipment are things I get to expense, which is great.
Next, loan interest. I have an SBA loan and I had a bank loan. I paid the bank loan off, so I just have an SBA loan locked at 3.75%. I paid about $1,000 in loan interest on that, which is way down from the year before. I got myself in massive credit card debt borrowing money for Uthena while not reducing my expenses. I was used to living on over $100,000 a year as a content creator, and then I spent $70,000 more than I made in 2019 while not reducing my expenses, and that destroyed me.
The Bottom Line on Last Year
In the short term, financially, I am extremely grateful I only paid $1,000 in loan interest last year. I paid something like $10,000 at least in 2020. That was a huge reduction over the last couple of years as a function of cutting my expenses, paying off my debt, and consolidating into that SBA loan indirectly. I lumped a lot of other things in here too, because there are deductions like the home office, internet, phone, and so on. That part is pretty self-explanatory, just anything too small to even go through line by line.
So here is the overall picture: revenue of $81,000, expenses of $50,000, coming out to $31,001 in profit. Aside from 2019, where I spent more than I made, this was one of the lowest years I have had since 2013. Even in 2020, after I had so much loan interest, I made more than this. Honestly, I am a little embarrassed to show you how little I made given how much experience I have online, having uploaded over 10,000 videos and gone viral on almost every platform. At least last year I made a profit, but in my mind it still feels like a miserable failure in terms of income, even if I learned a lot of valuable lessons.
Thankfully, right before I got demonetized on Facebook, my wife picked up her income to over $60,000, so between the $26,000 I made and what she brought in, we were able to reach six figures as a household. It is a good thing we did not have to depend on my income alone.
Turning the Corner With Crypto
My target for 2023 is over $100,000. Most of the end of 2022 was a loss, and I only just turned a profit in the last month because of the crypto channel. The momentum on the crypto channel is going strong, and at this rate I should be making 10, maybe 20 grand a month by the end of the year, mostly from the crypto channel and as the rest of my YouTube channels pick up alongside it.
I also made some additional income last year: about $6,000 profit on crypto trades. Every single crypto trade was a loss except for one. I bought one crypto and then sold it across three different sells, and I made $15,000 on that. Then I proceeded to lose $9,000 of it trading other cryptos, which was a good learning experience. I am really excited for the four different YouTube channels I have created, with the crypto one going up, and I think it will probably be the largest income source, if not the largest, in 2023.
Coaching, Investing, and the Millionaire Mastermind
It seems I can help others more effectively than I can help myself in some cases, and this to me is one of the biggest income areas I am seeing right now in my business. If you want to talk about your business and get real feedback on what you are doing, the best way to work with me on that today is to join my community, the Jerry Banfield Family. What is great about coaching is that as a content creator it is something you can do too, and you can adjust your approach to whatever you are teaching about. It is pretty logical: if people are trading crypto, an hour of focused help can pay for itself many times over, because I am often able to help someone save hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars in a single conversation. They tell me what they are doing, I give them feedback, and we go from there.
I also launched a Millionaire Mastermind, because clearly I have got making money down. Even though last year was a rough year with a lot of unexpected things happening, and I had spent years setting up my Facebook gaming only to have it destroyed, I still made $30,000 profit despite all of that. I figure, okay, maybe that is not a total failure. I am great at making money, and there are two other areas you need to be a millionaire. You need to be good at investing money, because most millionaires build their net worth through investing. And you need to be good at living the lifestyle of your dreams for the lowest cost.
For example, in my experience an unlimited yoga membership costs about $100 a month, versus personal training, which can cost $600 a month for just a couple of lessons. It is much cheaper to go do yoga and exercise classes, and I could even join a gym for less than the yoga membership. It is amazing how you can save huge amounts of money with relatively small actions. In this Millionaire Mastermind we have several members now, and all of us are committed to building our net worth, not just making more money but actually growing it, investing successfully in crypto, and finding the cheapest ways to live the lifestyle of our dreams.
Where I Am Headed
I really appreciate you reading all the way through this. If you want more of this kind of breakdown, along with the lessons I have learned as an entrepreneur, you can dig into my YouTube Coaching playlist, where I go deeper on how to make money online.
I think you will love seeing how this year goes after the turbulence of the last few, and I am genuinely excited about the direction all of this is heading. Much love, and I hope to see you soon.