Here are my YouTube stats for the last 90 days across six different channels, including channels I've had for a really long time and channels I've just started. I want to walk through each one, what it's doing, and what I've learned running all of them at once.
My most active channel: Jerry Banfield at Crypto
This is my most active channel right now. It's Jerry Banfield at Crypto. I started this channel about a year ago, and it just blew up off of crypto videos. We had some bumps along the way, like the channel got terminated for a week, so there were zero views for that week, but it came back from that. And I've done a bunch of different strategies on it: live streams, long format, shorter format videos. Right now we're averaging about 5,000 views a day, which is awesome. It's down a little bit at the moment, but that's still really strong.
Sometimes I do get butthurt looking at the disgusting, low quality clickbait crap that other people put out and how many views they get. And then I'm like, I'm putting out really quality education that is easy and makes a big difference. But then again, this is starting from zero in a single year. So these are really good numbers. Most people would be really happy with these, and I'm very happy with them.
The YouTube ad revenue on this channel is great, especially because a lot of that ad revenue came in the later half of the year. I really grinded on this channel for quite a while after being taken down and switching my strategy. The first half of the year was pretty up and down, but it's been consistent growth since then.
My crypto clips channel
I've got a bunch of other channels as well. I started another crypto channel, a crypto clips channel, because just putting out one video a day on a single channel is the most I'd recommend. I don't think you should generally ever put out more than one video a day on a channel. So I have a crypto clips channel for the overflow.
I actually started this off as a crypto reviews channel. In the last year, when my main channel was taken down for a week, I expected to get put back up, but in the meantime I started making videos on my crypto clips channel, which had been my crypto reviews channel. You'll notice I wasn't really using it before that. Technically I'd started it, but I wasn't posting. Then when my other channel was taken down, I started putting videos out, and this one has grown really well too. It's gotten up to several thousand views a day.
So between both of these channels, I get something like 10,000 views a day on my crypto videos. This channel also earned the most of its revenue toward the last half of the year, and it picked up 14,000 more subscribers. The way I run it is I put a video out at 9 a.m. on the main crypto channel and 9 p.m. on this one. Those are the two main channels people are watching right now.
If you want to dig into how I built up the crypto side of all this, I keep that whole conversation going in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
My original channel: 250,000 subscribers and an absolute disaster
I also have an original channel, which has 250,000 subscribers. I put 4,000-plus videos on this channel, and it has been an absolute disaster the last few years. If you look at the lifetime, this channel really ripped at various points. We had some days where I was running ads, which is how we got to like 50,000 views in a day. But there were other days that got 10,000, 20,000 views a day organically. Lately though, this channel has just slowly been dying. It only did about a thousand dollars in ad revenue the whole year.
I actually deleted all the videos off this channel in September. Out of 4,000-plus videos on YouTube, I finally got my first ever community guideline violation on a two-year-old video, after they updated the algorithm and then handed me a strike on it. So I'm like, you want to play games? Okay. I deleted all my old videos so I'm not going to violate any of that. In the past I wasn't paying quite as close attention. I mean, I was very aware, but on certain issues I would speak up even if it was against the terms. Now I look at it like this: if I'm going to be on YouTube, I'll just be a good boy and keep my mouth shut on anything that doesn't completely and clearly follow the terms and conditions. My hope is that you'll think outside the box, that you'll be aware of the terms and conditions, that you won't be completely blind to them, and that you'll keep an open mind.
This channel was getting a decent amount of organic views just from search results. I did another experiment in June last year where I took all the videos down for a while, made them private, then put them all back up, and we were getting like hundreds of views a day. Then I deleted them all after the community guidelines violation. I'm recording this video live on Twitch, and I'm going to put it up on this original channel. The channel's done all right, but I've thought about deleting the whole thing so many times. It's my original YouTube channel, though. It's the one I got my little silver play button off of, and it does reconnect with some of the old viewers sometimes. So I'm going to keep it. That's kind of my throwaway channel where I'll put any old thing up. We'll just throw whatever up on that channel.
My new experiment: the autobiography channel
I've also created a couple of new channels recently, because I just love creating new YouTube channels. The one I'm most excited about in terms of growth percentages right now is a channel I made called Jerry Banfield Autobiography. This is an original format for a channel. I've never seen anybody do this, but I think everybody should.
I've read a lot of people's autobiographies. I love reading autobiographies. And the idea with this channel is that I'm going to make my autobiography and put up one video or so a week, really thinking about what should be included in my autobiography versus what I should just dump on my regular channel as a vlog. The goal is that this is something you might go through and listen to if you really wanted to get to know my whole life story. It's a channel where you could just start with the first video and watch my whole life story like a book, like a podcast. Start with the first video, click through the playlist, and I'll keep adding a short video, maybe 10 or 20 minutes, every week. So I'll constantly be creating my autobiography, so that 20, 30, 40 years from now, you've got my entire autobiography you could listen to all on one channel.
This is an experiment I'm really excited about, and it looks like there's been some nice organic traffic on it. One video already got a thousand views. I haven't promoted this much at all, and it's getting as many views as my original channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, even though I'm putting fewer videos on it. It's not monetized yet, so I imagine this will probably be the next channel I get monetized. I think this could be one of the best experiences I create on any of my channels, because every single video on it is really, potentially watchable.
My third gaming channel
The last one I'm going to showcase is my third gaming channel. Literally my third. The gaming content is very niche. It's not for everybody. I deleted two other gaming channels where I really threw all kinds of content up. So on this one, I thought carefully about what this channel should actually have.
This channel got a video that went off organically, my Marvel Snap video. It went off organically, though it only got around 50 likes. This was almost all from people who'd never seen my videos before, so it went out to a cold audience and got a lot of dislikes because I was kind of negative on Marvel Snap. I played it for 10 hours and decided I don't think I'm going to play it anymore. So people who love Marvel Snap saw it and dropped dislikes on it. But I did get some subscribers from that video, and it actually went out in the browse features, which is good. YouTube actually recommended this video, so it got out there a good bit.
My plan with the gaming videos is to just keep it simple. I love playing games on Twitch, so I figure maybe once every week or two I'll throw up a gaming video based on whatever I think would be useful for someone. This channel is not monetized either. So those are the five channels I'm really running on YouTube.
My music channel
I also have a music channel on YouTube. I'm hoping to sync this up with my original channel as an artist channel at some point. I have all the albums I've put out on here, the albums that are up everywhere you listen to music: Spotify, Amazon, Apple, and so on. I can't really look at standalone analytics for it the same way, but it syncs up the analytics in a different way. If I make a music video and the song is on there, it'll sync up in YouTube Music. So that's my sixth YouTube channel.
Totaling it all up: the revenue picture
If you total it all up, I made about 20-something thousand dollars in ad revenue in the last year across all my channels combined. And I imagine we're going to grow significantly this year, because for at least six months out of last year I was barely even making a thousand dollars a month in ad revenue. I'm very excited for your support, and I'm grateful for it.
This kind of multi-channel setup is exactly the sort of thing I love talking through with people who are building their own channels. If you want that ongoing back-and-forth, you can join the Jerry Banfield Family and we'll work through your numbers together.
Why I film on Twitch and post on YouTube
Unlike last year, I intend to be live on Twitch most days this year, which is really nice. To me, some of the best synergy I see as a content creator is going live on Twitch, filming my videos on Twitch, and then posting the videos on YouTube. YouTube is primarily a video watching platform, but the live streaming experience on Twitch is so far superior.
I've tested multistreaming. I've tested basically everything at this point. I just did a video about testing live streaming, and multistreaming is not as good. I multistreamed all this time across all these sites. Sometimes you can really grow in the algorithm doing that. But to me, YouTube is great for getting you out there and getting you discovered, getting you in search results and the algorithm and browse features. What Twitch is really good for is bringing people back repeatedly. If I had 270,000 followers on Twitch, I'd have so much more of an active, engaged community. But on YouTube, if you fall out of the algorithm, you're done.
You can see that with my own numbers. After I deleted all the other videos on my original channel, my most popular video left was one called "I listened to AI music for 12 hours." If I'd put that on a brand new channel, the video probably would have gone off so much more than it did on that original channel. Original music doesn't do so well, though. I tried a music channel and a gaming channel and a business channel and a recovery channel, and I deleted all of those. It was too many channels, and they weren't growing organically very well. This original channel does better for the things that are hard to grow. Original music is hard to grow organically on YouTube, whereas some gaming videos you can grow pretty well, and crypto videos with search you can grow really well. I'm grateful that this original channel usually gives at least 100 views per video on average. That's more than zero, which is what you might get on a brand new channel.
So to me, the best setup I see as a creator is to put videos up on YouTube and then live stream on Twitch. Most people won't watch it on Twitch, and they won't come over from YouTube to Twitch. But the people who do come over to Twitch, you can really deepen relationships with, and they tend to stick around a lot longer. If I'd done this strategy for the last eight years instead of all the other stuff I did, I'd probably have a lot more subscribers across all my YouTube channels. Instead of having around 5,592 followers on Twitch, I'd probably have 20, 30, 40, 50,000 followers there. We'd have 10 or 20 times as many people watching.
I think I've finally got a beautiful formula down as a creator: record videos live on Twitch, then upload them to different YouTube channels. If you're thinking through your own channel strategy and want to go deeper on any of this with me directly, you're always welcome to come be part of the Family. I'm really excited to see where we go from here, and I hope to see you again on another video soon.