Most YouTube advice is built for views, not income. I've been on YouTube since 2011, made more than 20 channels, deleted them all last year, and restarted five. What I've learned is how to make money even with tiny channels and hardly any views — and most of what everyone else teaches won't actually pay you.
You don't need 100,000 views
Most advice shows you how to get 100,000 views: optimize retention, perfect the packaging, chase browse features. But a channel with a few hundred subscribers and a couple thousand views can already make real money. One of my channels has ~1,600 subscribers and 71,000 total views, and it's monetized — but ad revenue is the small part. The real engine: it funnels people to jerrybanfield.com to book a roughly $200 Zoom call. My coaching income is usually 10x or more my ad revenue. With the same modest views, I make around $5,000–10,000 a month in calls, and I raise the price as the calendar fills.
Calls beat courses
What most creators get wrong is then selling courses and building communities. I find what helps most is talking to someone who's been where you want to go — I haven't bought a YouTube course in a decade. Think of my brain as an AI trained on 15 years of YouTube data: run your situation by me on a call and I give you a customized answer. Courses pull your energy away from the videos that actually generate income, and they disconnect you from your audience — I have a friend stuck for months on a course, not posting, getting fewer views, out of touch, frustrated. It's a negative spiral.
The cheap setup and the long game
The stack is cheap: build your site with Caffeine AI directly on the blockchain (I built jerrybanfield.com from a voice prompt for around $30/month, secure and hard to hack), then add Acuity Scheduling (~$16/month) synced to your Google Calendar. Under $50/month and you can make hundreds or thousands even with small views. Then grind out daily, specific videos — the most-watched channels in the world publish constantly. And don't sleep on search: unlike browse traffic that spikes and fades, YouTube search compounds over time, and search-friendly videos keep pulling views and calls for months. One viewer in a thousand booking a call can make a 1,000-view video worth $2,000. If you want help, watch my YouTube coaching playlist here.