The Bad News Most Small YouTubers Need to Hear
If you're a small YouTuber, which most are, I got bad news for you. No title and no thumbnail is going to work for you to really get the success that everyone's promising you. Almost all the YouTube advice people are giving you is garbage. And the one direction of trying to make these videos and be the next Mr. Beast, that's not going to work for you at all. And the second direction, trying to niche down and just make money off selling people coaching. Most of the time, that's not going to work either. And even if it does, you're going to get bored. And I'm inviting you to actually get pretty hopeless about creating on YouTube because I've been on YouTube since 2011.
I've uploaded thousands of videos. I got so hopeless on YouTube, I literally deleted all my hundreds of thousands of subs and deleted all my channels. I had 15 channels. I deleted all of them. I deleted all of them in 2025. And yet I started back. I now have two monetized YouTube channels and all my channels are on the way to getting monetized. So this one, this Jerry Banfield ICP channel is monetized. This one is monetized and is going to get ads soon. My YouTube coach channel here is on the way to getting monetized. And I have a couple other channels. But monetization is not the main way I even make income.
If you want to watch me walk through exactly how I rebuilt these channels, I keep all of it together in my my YouTube Coaching playlist.
I offer collaborations on my website because this to me is the main thing. YouTube. Actually need to do to go beyond the titles, the thumbnails and things like that. But let me step back for a minute. I just wanted to give you my very own personal history and keep this real and raw and give you authentically where I'm sharing from, because I see so many people that are misleading you with what they're saying on YouTube. And one, there's two basic reasons they're doing that. One, they don't understand YouTube that well themselves. And or two, they do. They do understand YouTube. All they care about is taking money from you.
That is probably going to be the number one case. All these YouTube coaches. Why do you think they make channels? They make channels so they can sell you courses and make as much money as possible off of you. And that's in many cases, some will say whatever they need to say to sell you on their course. And then you'll consistently be disappointed when you take the course. But they've made their money already.
The Hard Reality: Audience and Pay to Play
I'm going to give you the hard reality here. The hard reality is this. YouTube has. Three main things you should know about, and this totally defeats the vast majority of small YouTubers. One, if you already have an audience, it is very easy to get people to continue watching your videos. I just make a video about anything. Now, I was frustrated that I wasn't ever going anywhere in the algorithm because my audience was so garbaged up, but I would always just get guaranteed impressions and guaranteed views. Second thing, if you really want to grow and get to be on the top on YouTube, I hate to tell you it's pay to play.
Did you not already know that? It's pay to play. Devin Nash did a great video about this and I've seen it myself too. I ran over a hundred thousand dollars of paid ads and I built myself up like so many of these other YouTube coaches and I built myself up in a bunch of different niches all on one channel. I sold millions of dollars of online courses and how did I do it? I just spent a whole bunch of money and created a flywheel where I paid money to advertise, Google sent traffic to my videos, I sent people to sell online courses and buy those online courses.
Then I took the money I made from online courses and put it back into ads and then Google gave me more people and then I sent those people to courses. You see what I did? And I blew up. And you know what happened? When I stopped putting money into my ads and I stopped constantly fueling and I stopped selling online courses, my whole viewership collapsed because the two main things on YouTube is do you already have an audience and if you want to grow, are you paying to grow? I think it's incredibly naive. They think you're going to grow on YouTube just by putting up thumbnails and titles that you've researched really well.
Now did that and see this is survivorship bias. So you can look at Mr. Beast and say, well, he, did really well growing like that. Yes. And Brad Pitt did well going and waiting tables and trying to be an actor in LA, but most people have tried to wait tables and be an actor in LA you've never heard of because it didn't go well for them. Maybe. Maybe it went well enough and they had a regular life, but they didn't get to the celebrity dream or whatever. And I don't think most of you'd want to have a life like Mr. Beast anyway. The point is if you start getting hopeless that you're not going to crack the perfect title and thumbnail, because I am going somewhere with this.
I do have very clear advice that actually works. I've got two YouTube channels monetized in just, a little over a month, two out of five already with organic traffic, all on those channels. No ads at all on those channels. There are real opportunities on YouTube, but you need to get hopeless that what everybody else is telling you is going to work at all. And then I'll just tell you for free. And you know what? I'm actually doing it myself. And even if you do crack one viral video, you're often never going to get it. You're going to get those highs again, and it's going to just trend back downwards afterwards.
I've seen people crack videos, with, hundreds of thousands, millions of views. And you check their channel a year later, they're getting about the same amount of views they were before that video. Sometimes maybe a few hundred more, maybe a few thousand more, but there's so many people already have an audience. It's difficult to keep an audience once you even get it. And most of the top. Top positions, you can just, if you have enough money or somebody else has enough money, or you know somebody that has money, you can just pay and do a whole bunch of ads and sponsorships and collaborations. You can just pay your way to the top.
So from the point of view that people already have established audiences and YouTube, and this is not just YouTube specifically, but content creation platforms generally are just mostly pay to play and establish audiences. So how are you going to break into that with your thumbnail and title? It's ridiculous. It's ridiculous to think that you're going to do that for, 99 out of a hundred of you.
There Is a Way That Actually Works
Now there is a way though, where you can create on YouTube and it can be fun and you can monetize. And the bad news with that is it's just a grind. You get hopeless that you're ever going to crank out this viral video. You get hopeless that you can ever stick to one niche and just create content on that. You get hopeless about. Yeah. You're going to create this perfect YouTube course and sell it. Now that stuff can work, but I think it's exploitive. It tends to not work over time. And a lot of the YouTube gurus I've seen have done just like me. They built all this up with all these paid ads and then they crashed and burned at some point and it was all revealed as, a charlatan or you're not some YouTube guru.
Look at your destroyed channel. Now that you stopped your, I'd spend thousands of dollars a month in paid ads. Once you stop all that, it's like now where'd all your traffic go? And even if even Mr. Beast has had, his videos have been drastically dropped in the last few months by, hundreds of millions of views down from what he's used to. This is a, YouTube is a rough environment. And some of you are right to comment on my videos and say, this is an awful environment. To me, the reason to do YouTube is because you love it and then show up to help somebody every day and then set up a monetization that gives someone genuine value rather than, and and that's, that's good for you.
Why Collaborations Beat Courses Every Time
To me, the number one thing to do is to offer a collaboration. I would love to see more YouTubers offering a collaboration. I would pop in with all kinds of small YouTubers, even if you have a hundred subs, because collaborations on YouTube, they've now made it so that you can tag both channels. It's one of the easiest ways to get people to discover you. And here's the thing. When you're paying for courses, most of the time you're wasting your money. I know because I've sold people millions. I've sold, I've got hundreds of thousands of students in my courses, millions of dollars in sales. And most of them didn't go anywhere with the courses they bought.
I go deeper into how small channels can lift each other up in How to Use Niche YouTube Channels to Promote Each Other.
And I, I've had other YouTubers tell me like, Jerry, people buy my $300 course. Most of them don't even watch one video and almost nobody finishes the course. With most courses, you're just getting tricked into buying something, thinking you're doing something. You're wasting your money. So everybody telling you to create courses is almost all of them are just ripping you off. Almost everybody telling you to maximize your thumbnails and titles, just wasting your time and telling you, trying to give you hope. It's just not going to happen. You will not win. To me, the guaranteed way you can win is collaborating with other people. When you have a real conversation with a real person and you record that and put that up, then you've got something that added value to both of you, even if nobody watches it.
And I have paid collaborations because, well, I'm the one who's filmed thousands of videos. I can do videos by myself easily every day, and I'm not going to cold message people, trying to do collaborations and work out on schedules and calendars and all that. I'm here, and I make collaborations super easy. And I think that's the best way forward on YouTube for most of us as small YouTubers collectively is to work with each other. And somebody's got to kind of get the ball rolling.
The Brightest Future for Small YouTubers
But the more collaborations I have, the more you'll see other people doing collaborations with me, and you can message them, like, hey, I saw you do a video with Jerry. Let's do one together with us. The future to me that's brightest for small YouTubers, and I've never heard anybody say this before, is imagine. Imagine if each of us as small YouTubers does videos with like 100 other small YouTubers and all of us, because it's actually hard to discover small YouTubers. That's the silly thing, like actually even finding a small YouTuber is hard. Most small YouTubers quit before they even get monetized. Most small YouTubers quit after 20 videos.
And you want to prove you're different, like me. I created five new YouTube channels. This YouTube coach channel has 12 videos. I have 25 videos on it. My new Jerry Banfield channel has 25 videos on it. That's 37 videos. This gaming channel has 20 videos. That's 57 videos. This ICP channel has 38 videos, 57 plus 38. What is that going to be? 95, that's 95 videos. And this reviews channel has 27 videos. So to do more math for more fun. I have 122 videos that I've cranked out in a little over a month. If you look at this, the Jerry Banfield YouTube coach, the first channel I created, I created this on March 21st, 2026, it's May 2nd, 2026, just a little bit over a month, I've cranked out 122 videos.
If that pace sounds impossible, I broke down the routine that makes it doable in One Video a Day: The Simple YouTube Strategy Nobody Wants to Hear.
That's the bad news for you.
Crank Out Videos as Fast as Possible
If you want to be YouTuber, you need to crank out videos. And one of the easiest ways to crank out videos. Is to work with somebody else and make a video together and get in the habit of just cranking out videos because the one area you can help as a small YouTuber is you can make videos that are in demand. And you often are not even going, you're just going to stumble into in demand videos. The videos you watch, you can just make videos. And so my suggestion is to make videos as fast as possible. I just did a video with a YouTuber as two subs.
And they're both. My channels. And he's just starting out on YouTube and I told him, I want you to make 100 videos as fast as possible. Because most people quit on YouTube after 20 videos. So you make 100 videos, you've done five times, you're five times past the point where most people quit. And if you make your videos as fast as possible, you don't have to put as much time into your videos. And when you don't put as much time into your videos, then effective dollars per hour you make goes up drastically out of monetize. Like right now, I'm on pace to start getting thousands of dollars a month in ad revenue by making taking an hour or so a day to make videos.
So that comes out to a reasonable income. And then when people actually schedule videos with me, then my income shoots up. And I have videos that now help people find another small YouTuber. I then get a lot of value by having a real human conversation on a variety of different topics. And then I've helped somebody else on YouTube as well. That's why I love doing this because the thing is, I end up feeling like I did something useful every day. I've seen YouTubers absolutely brokenhearted when they've spent a month researching a title and a thumbnail and scripting and putting everything together and their video gets 300 views. If that's been you, schedule a private call with me and we'll pull up your channel together privately and figure out where your effort is actually getting wasted.
But you see, when I make a video. And I'm advertising some of my videos on my YouTube coach channel. Because here's the truth. When I put 30 000 views on this video of ads, all my videos get more views organically. Because even when somebody watches my video in an ad, YouTube is more likely to show them the rest of my videos. You see how this works? So I'm testing ads on my channels. This video got 5 000 views and no ads. And so did this inauthentic content one. And these were videos I just cranked out rapidly. This is a 13 minute video. The whole thing probably took me less than 30 minutes to make.
Same thing with this video, about 30 minutes. So imagine if you can just rapidly crank out a video and then upload it and help somebody. And then you feel good because you tried to help somebody. Like I did this last video talking about YouTube gurus profit when their advice fails. Like the advice people are giving you mostly fails. And then you figure, well, it's you, not them. They're the expert. They got the quantity of views on their channel. They must know what they're doing. So I should buy their $6 000 course. Then you take their $6 000 course, which I've never done because I know better because I taught the courses.
I know they don't have any information in their course that's that good. I know because I've been in this environment. I know the deal. And the people who've taken those courses have came back and told me, yep, that course sucked. It was worthless. They tricked me into buying it. And I could got information that was just as good by watching YouTube videos. And I put a video like this out and I feel good filming this and having this discussion. I get 45 organic views based on thousands of organic impressions. And I've helped somebody and I've set myself up to then make a full time living off of it by doing collaborations.
And then with the, ad revenue and any potential sponsorships. Yeah.
Coaching That Happens in Public
And this to me, if you want to get coaching, your coaching should be public. Like I see people offering coaching, but the only way I'd pay for somebody else's coaching is if I could record it and upload it to YouTube. That's what's great with me. You can record a video with me and have me look at your channel and give them give feedback in real time. And my perspective is different because I've been here and I've done this longer than almost anybody else. And the cool thing is, some people have dissed me that like you only have a couple under subs. What do you know?
Well, I got a couple hundred subs on a YouTube advice channel, which is a hard niche to build from scratch with no subs because people often don't respect a lack of quantity, but I'm building a YouTube coach channel from scratch in 2026 and I'm, I feel good about it. I'm getting out there and helping people. I've got tens of thousands of organic views already, and I've got, tens of thousands of paid views on this channel as well. I have helped people in the comments. I've seen people in the comments who said no. I thought this, I thought that the YouTube crews were profiting when their advice fails.
Nobody else ever said this. Thank you. I've seen people on my videos saying, thank you. This video really helped me. Thank you for showing me, what you did to monetize this channel. So I hope this helped you today. Now I know lots of times in life where I was trying to talk, hope and be positive, but I find the best change comes. Actually. I get hopeless. Like doing YouTube, trying to go viral is hopeless. Doing YouTube, trying to coach and be a niche and an authority expert is useless. Now sure. You could argue my YouTube coach is a little bit of a niche, but this is a passion project.
If you want to keep this conversation going and go deeper on your own channel, you can schedule a one-on-one call with me.
I want to help you do better on YouTube. So this is kind of a niche, but I'm also, all I'm selling is collaborations. Like I'm not selling a course, all my stuff's up here for free. And I have a, like my Jerry Beats. Danfield channel is not a niche. I can do whatever I want on that. I guess I have some little layers of niching, but it's sustainable and I don't have to have the same conversations with people do the same collaborations. So if this is helpful, I'd love to hear your feedback in the comments. I'd love to hear your questions. I answer consistently. I provide answers wherever I can.
And I invite you try, try doing a video with me. You'll feel good. You'll get a video out of it. You'll get your channel tagged. If I can advertise it in Google ads, I absolutely will. Google ads terms are hella restrictive, but if I can advertise in Google ads, I will. I don't advertise all my videos in Google ads, but the ones I make that can get advertised in Google, I put them in there and I get those Google views. Hope to do a video with you soon.