When you start a YouTube channel, there's one key decision you need to make. Are you doing this for fun, for character building, as a hobby, or do you want to be a professional? Most of you should be choosing that this is a hobby — that you're just doing it for fun. And in that case, the number one thing to create is a vlog. Just go about your life, talk about what you're doing, and share your life with everybody with no thought of making money. This is what I do on my Jerry Banfield channel. I do a video every day just talking about my life, and I'm grateful that this channel is now consistently getting lots of views — up to 48,000 views. I've made 109 videos on this channel since March 21st. To me, this is a channel everyone on earth should have. Just tell us about your day, talk about whatever's interesting, whatever's fun, whatever you're thinking about, and don't worry about making money. The whole purpose of the channel is to challenge you — to build and to grow and to develop as a person. And that is valuable. You don't need to think about monetization. You don't need to think about ad revenue, clients, niching, any of that crap. Honestly, everyone should be starting YouTube just as a hobby, not even thinking that you might want to be a professional. The number one decision to make: are you doing this for fun, or are you trying to be a professional? I would suggest everybody start for fun.
Start for Fun — and Never Buy Anybody's YouTube Course
If you're going to do it for fun, never buy anybody's YouTube course. You don't need a guru. You don't need some authority. You need to have fun. Just make your videos and have fun. I would definitely do a vlog channel. And if you have something else you want to do — gaming videos, music videos, videos about something else you just care about — then make another channel and do those on that channel. That's two channels you can have just for fun, doing whatever you want to. Make the videos as fast as possible. Just try. Get them done as fast as possible. For your vlog, you just hit record — you can do it super easy. Get your phone, hold it up, and holler at it. Make sure your audio is very clear, so talk loud, project your voice, and then upload it to YouTube. Super easy. Don't worry about the title. Your title doesn't matter. Nobody knows you, and there's no reason for the algorithm to feature you. Don't worry about your title. Don't worry about your thumbnail. Just put any old title, any old thumbnail. The point is to get it out there, to do it, and to see if you like it — see if you have fun. And then maybe you have a second channel that's some niche thing like gaming or crypto research.
Here's what I have: I have my vlog channel. I have a dating channel — and I'm grateful the dating videos are going up, love that. A gaming channel. I have music videos. I have my YouTube coach channel. I have two crypto channels. That's what I've got. And I am a professional. I'm not doing this just for fun.
Even Professionals Need a Foundation of Fun
Now, it's important as a professional to start with a foundation of fun. I began in 2011 as a YouTuber having fun. Over the next 14 years, I got over a billion impressions across all platforms and tens of millions of views on YouTube, with over 20 YouTube channels started. By 2025, I had millions of followers. I stopped having fun. And I deleted all my channels everywhere. Facebook — millions of followers. I had about 400,000 subscribers on YouTube. All my TikTok, Instagram — deleted all of it. I stopped, because I stopped having fun. So the essential thing you really need to do is have fun.
Almost all these trash creators who are selling you all this crap are ruining the fun of YouTube for you immediately. They're telling you to be an authority, to pick a niche, to make money, to coach, to have a product, to use YouTube ads — all the stuff they're saying. If you want to be a professional, maybe some of that makes sense. But if you're just trying to do YouTube to make money, in most cases that's not the best thing for you to do. In my experience, most of you would do much better just building relationships in person and making money locally. Local, especially with AI — in-person, relationship-based work can pay huge amounts of money, and you don't have to have any of this crap online.
How to Know If You Should Go Professional
Now, I will tell you, here's how you know if you want to do YouTube as a professional. First, are you having fun? Do you love doing the videos? Are you able to do them fast? If it takes you 10 hours to upload one video — okay, that might be a bit of an exaggeration — but if it takes you more than an hour to do a vlog and upload it, you're so far from being a professional. You need to be able to grind out content rapidly. You are delusional if you think you're going to make clickbait videos with perfect titles and thumbnails and get a huge audience. In 99% of cases, you are delusional. You are not the next Mr. Beast. And there are channels that have more views than Mr. Beast — and what do they do? They grind out videos.
So if you want to be a professional, you need to be ready to devote serious time to grinding out a lot of videos. I'm talking, in my case, six videos a day on average. I have six channels, and on average I make a long-form video like this on all of them every day. Then I grind out extra shorts when I have time to get additional views and discovery back to my long-form videos. If you think you want to be a professional, I encourage you to see how fast you can make six videos. And you're going to need some different subjects — subjects you have fun with. You've got to keep the fun. This is where burnout happens. This is why I do my vlogs for fun. My dating channel is a passion channel. My gaming channel is for fun. My music is for fun. My YouTube coach channel is for money. My two crypto channels are for money. And then I monetize at jerrybanfield.com.
The Number One Way to Monetize
If you want to monetize, the number one way to monetize is to have your own business system via your website, and to sell things to people like coaching, like courses, like downloads, like chat and community. Ideally, you will sell all of that like I do. Does the idea of using AI to build out an entire website that has all this stuff sound intimidating to you? Then don't think about being a professional. Because if you want to be a professional, you should also be very comfortable using AI. I'm running Claude right now. Claude in the background is taking a transcript of my videos, grinding out my metadata for YouTube, and pulling the thumbnail out of the video. I literally upload three videos at once, grab all the metadata, copy and paste, and all the videos are done. All I have to do is show up, hit record in OBS, talk, dump it in Claude, hit long video form, and paste everything in. My workflow is disgustingly fast. That's what a professional looks like. An amateur is sitting there doing piss-poor video editing that takes a whole bunch of time, that didn't even make the video any better, and then doesn't have a business system to back any of it up when they actually do get views.
Get a Mentor First
So if you want to be a professional, I'd suggest you get a mentor first. If you were going to a job, you would have a boss or a coworker who would show you how to do your job. But if you show up to YouTube and you think you're just going to make money, you are delusional, because there is a lot to learn on YouTube and you need a mentor. And I will position myself: I'm the absolute best mentor available for YouTube right now based on the ease of accessing me and the cost. For example, if you go to jerrybanfield.com, you'll see you can do this easily. You want to talk right now? If I'm online, you can just talk to me right now for 10 minutes and show me your channel. I'm putting up a service for a channel audit. You can also pay whatever amount of money, send me your channel, and I'll send you back a video review of your channel. I have a Zoom call you can schedule where we'll sit down and go over a YouTube channel for 30 minutes. You can join my Skool community, DM me your channel, and I'll take a look and give you a quick reply. I have a chat community that the first person just bought today, and I have a leaderboard on my website showing off the people who've spent money with me — Map Technical Forecasting just joined my chat community for life today. You can chat and ask me any questions.
I've built all of this with AI directly on the ICP blockchain, so there are no third parties, which means I don't have to deal with censorship or anybody else stealing my revenue. And I keep adding more and more. That means out of all these other people who do YouTube content, I've got vast experience — tens of thousands of videos online — and you can access me easily, while most of them make you buy some stupid program or course, which I guarantee teaches you absolutely nothing that's more valuable than what I'm teaching you right here. Why? Because I've seen it all. I've seen what they're doing. I know how it works. I know the secret stuff that I can't even say here. If you want to go viral, I can tell you exactly how to go viral, because there's certain stuff you need to say, certain narratives you need to hop on, certain things bots will push your videos on. It's a whole dark, dirty world, and I know about all that stuff too.
Professionals Get Paid
The thing to do when you start a YouTube channel is to get an idea: are you a professional, or are you an amateur? If you went to play tennis for the first time, would you delude yourself into thinking that you're going to go on the pro tour? Most of you should try playing on YouTube for a while just for fun. But what's crazy is when you quit your job and decide you're going to be a professional at something when all you've done is play around with it a little bit and never made money. That'd be like deciding you're going to quit your job and play professional tennis when you've never gotten paid to go play anywhere. If you're going to be a professional, you need to get paid. That's what makes you a professional. YouTube just increased the monetization requirements. But ad revenue should not be your primary source of income. It is not my primary source of income. I get hundreds of dollars a month in ad revenue on channels I just created four months ago — and that's just two of them that are monetized. And I make much more money from all the other stuff, like the community, like the Zoom calls, and now like these other services I've set up on my website.
So I want to help you. I want you to succeed on YouTube. I want you to not waste your time on YouTube. If you've been doing YouTube a long time and you're still not sure whether you should be a professional or not, I'm a great person to talk to — and I share a lot more of what I've learned in my YouTube Coaching playlist. I got so burned out by doing all the authority building and optimizing totally for money that — I mean, I had thousands of dollars a month coming in last year, and I just deleted everything. I had an easy $10,000 a month I could make on YouTube, and I just quit because I was so tired of it. So I've been burned out. I've built the big channels. And I'm building everything from scratch again today, and AI makes this all easier than ever.
YouTube is a great place to have fun. It's a great place to build your character. It's a great place to share and connect with others. It is a tough place to make a living. You've got to really be set up. My entire personality, my entire life, is set up so I can do YouTube full time. Everything I'm doing, everything I'm thinking, everywhere I'm going is mining material for YouTube videos. Even when I'm dating — every interaction I'm having dating is generating material for my vlog and for my dating channel. Some women have not wanted to be a part of that, and I've lost several dates with women I've liked, because they see my YouTube videos and they're like, "I don't want to be on your next YouTube episode." Well, don't go out with me then. Because I'm going to do YouTube, and I'm going to find a woman that likes doing YouTube with me.
So get a mentor. Decide whether you're going to be a professional or not. And I'd love to see you up on the leaderboard at jerrybanfield.com.