My answer is that live streaming beats uploading finished videos for growing a YouTube channel, and that I now do my YouTube work live. The gain I see is not in peak viewers. It is in how long people stay, how many of them come back, and how often a live viewer becomes someone who pays. The newest section is where I finally checked that against all my data. In I Fed 1,400 Videos of Data to 3 AIs. Live Streams Make Me $50 an Hour. Shorts Made Nothing., from a live stream in October 2026, I exported everything from my six channels into Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT and found that live streams earn me about $50 an hour between ads, chats and memberships, ICP and crypto videos about the same, and my 400 to 500 Shorts and my vertical live streams basically nothing. It is also where I went from $0 to about $4,000 a month in six months, turned down a friend's idea to go meet a politician, and explained why I would need better gear before doing in-real-life dating streams.
Just before that, in I Stopped Posting Live Stream Clips and Cut Every Stream to Under an Hour, I quit uploading clips cut from my streams because they were bombing in the algorithm, capped every stream between 30 and 60 minutes so the replay gets clicked, and gave each of my six channels one topic, with the main channel kept as an off-the-cuff vlog. That section has my chat rules after VidSummit: 15-second slow mode, no moderators because moderators pick fights, treat the chat as a buffet and ignore the rest. It also has the honest reason I quit streaming before, which was showing up for tips.
The clearest evidence for the format itself is in I Tested Every YouTube Format. Live Streams Won., where I ran six brand new channels for most of a year and compared shorts, long videos and live streams on each. On my ICP channel I made 82 long videos, four live streams and eight shorts; the live streams drew about as many views per video as the long videos, almost double the average watch time, and almost triple the average revenue, while the shorts were nearly worthless. On my dating channel one live stream produced 18 hours of watch time, more than all nine of my shorts combined.
Small YouTubers Stop Making Videos. Go Live for 30 Minutes Instead. turns that into a challenge. I started six new channels 104 days before writing it and report about four and a half million impressions, almost all organic. Almost every person who joined my paid community had first been on one of my live streams.
My view did not start there. In Why Streaming to 1 Viewer Is Better Than 1000, from September 2022, I argued that a large live audience was often a trap. I had thousands of viewers on Facebook many times and found the chat full of trolls, the money stressful, and the pressure to keep a crowd made it hard to play what I wanted. The lesson still runs through everything below: the people who stay and talk matter more than the count. By April 2023, in How I Stream 3 Hours A Day on Twitch and Upload 3 Videos A Day on YouTube, I was streaming on Twitch about three hours a day, uploading roughly three videos a day, and tracking every hour in a spreadsheet.
The posts disagree on length, and my opinion has kept moving. The 2023 streams ran about three hours. The June test says the sweet spot is a 20 to 40 minute live stream, because a three to six hour stream is hard to get anyone to watch after it ends. The clips section set a hard ceiling of one hour, because a 59-minute replay gets watched and a three-hour one gets scrolled past. Then on the newest stream I ran about two hours and said I am testing lengths again: as long as the viewership holds and the conversation is good, I stay live. Clips are settled: I only film Shorts natively and go live.
What you will find below is each post in full, newest first, so you can check my reasoning and my numbers rather than trust a summary. For the Twitch side, see why I quit streaming: Twitch and gaming burnout, and for the short-form question, see my notes on Shorts, Reels and TikToks. These are results from my own channels, and yours will differ.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your own channel's format and numbers, you can book a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- I Fed 1,400 Videos of Data to 3 AIs. Live Streams Make Me $50 an Hour. Shorts Made Nothing. (October 15, 2026)
- I Stopped Posting Live Stream Clips and Cut Every Stream to Under an Hour (October 6, 2026)
- Small YouTubers Stop Making Videos. Go Live for 30 Minutes Instead. (July 3, 2026)
- I Tested Every YouTube Format. Live Streams Won. (June 23, 2026)
- How I Stream 3 Hours A Day on Twitch and Upload 3 Videos A Day on YouTube (April 27, 2023)
- Live Streaming vs Uploading Videos: What Grows a YouTube Channel (September 19, 2022)
I Fed 1,400 Videos of Data to 3 AIs. Live Streams Make Me $50 an Hour. Shorts Made Nothing.
From my live stream on October 15, 2026.
When I am recording for three minutes and quitting, giving up because I feel like I have just wasted all my time and everything is pointless, that is when I am willing to ask whether there is a better way to do this. I said that at the start of my live stream, and I was grateful to be able to say there is a better way. I found it the day before, and the way I found it was by looking at everything I had made. What it showed me was that the people watching were supporting me amazingly on the live streams.
I had uploaded about 1,400 videos that year alone on brand new channels, after I deleted everything the year before. So I exported all my data from all six channels and had three different AIs look through it: Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. I told myself, look, I need to stop creating. I need to start thinking about what I am creating and how I am creating it. That live stream was the result.
A friend told me to go meet a politician
Part of what pushed me to do this was a conversation with a local friend. He suggested I go meet a politician and see if I could make some connections in person. I thought, all right, if I had nothing going on, that would be one thing, but I already have something going. I went from $0 a month to about $4,000 a month on YouTube within six months, and that was with nearly everything I was doing seeming to fail. I did not need a new direction. I needed to know which part of what I was already doing was working.
What the data said: about $50 an hour live
The data told me I was making about $50 an hour live streaming, on average, between ad revenue, chats and memberships. That is directly from the streams, without counting anything else I sell. It also told me I was making about the same amount doing ICP and crypto videos. I thought, wow, that is all I needed to know.
What I was wasting time on was Shorts. I had put out around 400 or 500 Shorts, and they had basically been a waste of time. Almost everything else I was doing was, at least financially, a waste of time as well. Shorts, at least for me, are not efficient unless you are running a formula. I have written more about that side in my notes on Shorts versus long-form.
I also stopped live streaming vertically. The vertical live streams were a waste. The actual data on YouTube showed that basically nobody watched the vertical streams, and there was no point in me being distracted running a vertical stream alongside the main one. So I was not streaming vertical on this one, and I do not plan to go back to it.
A breakdown that was really a breakthrough
What I know about myself is that when I feel utterly defeated, miserable and hopeless all at the same time, I am reaching, I am praying, and I am thinking that this is the point where I am going to have a breakthrough. I was driving the day before and felt so miserable, and I remembered Brené Brown's book. She wrote that a lot of people viewed what happened to her around 2006 and 2007 as a breakdown, but it was really a breakthrough. That is what I felt I was on. Feeling that low is what got me to stop and look at the numbers instead of making the next three-minute video.
A changed opinion on how long to stream
In an earlier section on this page I set a hard rule of keeping every stream under an hour. This stream ran about two hours, and I said plainly that my view had moved. I am testing different lengths of time live right now. As long as there is a solid viewership, the viewership is not collapsing, and we are having a great conversation, I have the time, and I will live stream as much as I can. Live streaming seems to be the number one thing I can do. So the one-hour ceiling became a test rather than a rule: I stay on while the people are there and the conversation is good, and I watch what the numbers say afterward.
That fits what I have believed for a long time, which is that the people who stay and talk matter more than any format rule. I went through the same thinking years ago in why being a YouTuber and Twitch streamer sucks unless you do this.
Would I do in-real-life dating streams?
Someone asked whether I would consider doing in-real-life dating streams. I have tried some IRL streams, just not that many, mostly on my phone, and I know there are people who do really well with them. I think what I do best is exactly this: sit at my desk and talk to the people watching. My mic works and the internet connection is strong. Going out in real life, I would probably need to get an upgraded setup. Maybe I will test it, especially if I travel. For now the desk is where the $50 an hour comes from, so that is where I am putting my time.
If you want me to look at your own channel's data the way I looked at mine, you can get a personal video review where I spend 20 minutes on your channel or whatever situation you send me.
I Stopped Posting Live Stream Clips and Cut Every Stream to Under an Hour
From my live stream on October 6, 2026.
On this live stream I announced two rules I had been circling for months and finally committed to: I am not posting another live stream clip, and I am not letting a stream run past an hour. Both came out of the same bottom-line goal. I want every show I do live to be something you could watch even if you missed it live. That is the whole standard now. If a stream is not worth watching on demand, I did not make a good show, no matter how good the chat felt in the moment.
Every stream has to be watchable after I am gone
To make that happen I shortened the streams. I now generally keep them between 30 and 60 minutes, and I try to stay on topic and finish a thought before I jump into the chat. That second part is where my old streams fell apart as videos: halfway through a point I would answer a comment, then another, and the replay viewer lost the thread. So the rule is to say the thing all the way through, then look at the chat.
I also schedule the streams in advance as much as I can so you can see when I am going to be live instead of hoping you catch me, and if you miss it, the replay has to hold up as a finished video.
Six channels, one topic each
I have six channels right now and I may make more. Instead of everything landing on the main channel, each channel now streams one topic. If I want to talk dating, I go live on the dating channel. If I want to talk meme coins and crypto, that goes on that channel. If I want to talk about being a creator and what I am learning about YouTube, I do a dedicated stream on the creators channel. The other channels run more like videos, like a presentation on a subject, though I still respond to the chat on them.
The main Jerry Banfield channel stays an off-the-top-of-my-head vlog. That one is primarily here to interact with you, and it is the one place I am not going to force a single topic. If you do not care about dating, you are not going to get as much of it in my vlog anymore, because it has a home now. I wrote about why I started six channels from scratch in the first place, and the lesson I keep relearning is the one from picking a channel topic: a channel is a promise about what you will get when you click, and a stream that wanders breaks that promise.
No more live stream clips
A viewer put it plainly during the stream: the live stream clips are not as good as the standalone videos. I agreed. I am not going to put out any more clips, and I think what I am going to do from here on is only two things: film Shorts natively, and do live streams. The clips suck, honestly. They are bombing in the algorithm. YouTube can tell the difference between a Short made to be a Short and a slice of a long stream with a title slapped on it. Every one of those clips also took about five minutes to upload, and across the number I was pushing out that was hours a week going into videos nobody watched. They were not worth the effort. So the clips are done. It is going to be all live streams, unless for some reason I cannot go live.
On the dating channel especially, I am stopping the clips and just doing live streams there. That channel already had the watch hours for monetization and was within a few dozen subscribers of a thousand, and the streams were what got it there, not the clips.
What VidSummit taught me
Going to VidSummit is where this came together for me. Watching what other creators were doing, I realized I needed to isolate what I do best, and what I do best is live streaming. That is the best of what I do. So I should not be taking time away from it to record videos, with one exception: recording for a course. I think I will make a dating course, an AI course, an ICP course and a YouTube course, put them on my website, and have those be the premium content, distraction-free, lasered in on one subject, with a community around each one. I might take a little time to film those, and that will help monetize. But for everything else, the live stream is the product.
It also matches how I use YouTube myself. There are so many videos to watch that where I actually jump in is somebody's live stream, and I am betting the people who watch me are the same.
The chat is a buffet
I learned on a previous stream that I need to handle the chat differently. One person posted a wall of text, message after message, and it crowded everybody else out. So I put the chat on slow mode, 15 seconds between messages. If you are messaging more often than every 15 seconds, you are taking up somebody else's time. I do not want anyone to be able to crowd the chat by spamming 15 messages in a row, and to me 15 seconds is plenty. You do not need to comment more often than that. It gives everybody a fair chance to be seen.
Beyond that, I am going to avoid moderating the chat as much as I can. I do not want to time anybody out. I want to let everybody share, and you can share your opinion even if it is not mine. YouTube is already supposed to be moderating for anything outside its own terms, so I do not need to be the police on top of that. The way I think about it now is that the chat is a buffet. I pick out the things I love and want to talk about, I shout those out, and I ignore everybody else. If you want the one lesson from this whole stream, it is that: take what you want and leave the rest.
Here is what that looks like in practice. People show up saying I rugged my meme coin. I do not need to argue with them. I am hyped on the coin, I rebought a lot of it, the MaxFi team helped stabilize it, I am even having a physical coin made, and I am going to keep talking about it. Somebody says I rugged it? Fine, that is your opinion, and I am rolling. The old me would have spent ten minutes of the stream defending myself.
Several people suggested I just get mods and let them fix it. I have had mods, and here is the problem with mods: mods get in fights with people. Even someone I trusted who had been around a long time would get messed with by a troll and argue back, and now the chat is a fight instead of a conversation. I would rather not moderate the chat at all, as much as possible. Slow mode plus ignoring is the closest I can get to that.
I assume every chatter is happy
I have also learned to let the audience say what it has to say, and part of that is a reframe. If you are here chatting, even if your comment sounds like something I disagree with or something that is not true, you are still here, and your comment is signaling to YouTube that people are engaged. I do not know whether YouTube can tell from a comment whether someone is happy or angry, but I am sure that if you are sitting there watching and chatting, YouTube reads that as a satisfied viewer, so I am choosing to see it the same way. If you are chatting, I figure you are happy here, and I appreciate you, even if it does not sound like it. I am going to assume that is what is true.
Why I quit before, and what I am streaming for now
I appreciate every super chat I have ever been given, and at the same time I had to admit something to myself: I cannot just live stream, show up, and try to get you all to tip me every day. I burned out on live streaming before precisely because I showed up looking for tips and donations. I quit streaming more than once because I was not getting enough super chats, and that is the honest reason. What I have noticed is a pattern. If I do not stream for a while, you are glad to see me and a bunch of super tips come in. If I am live every day, the tips are not as much. And that is fine, because streaming daily is the best content I can create, it is what you like to watch, and it is how we make a community.
So the purpose changed. When I show up now, I am there to share a video that will be good to watch later and to connect with the community. The value I give is doing a live show, interacting with the chat, and then making that recording watchable. I am not showing up for the money anymore.
Why an hour is the line
I am keeping every stream under an hour, and I picked an hour on purpose. An hour is a psychological threshold. Past it, a video becomes a significant commitment. If you listen at double speed, you can get through my whole show in 30 minutes.
Someone in the chat said my streams should be two to three hours. I used to stream that long, but it is harder to watch for that long, and it is much harder for people to watch after I am done. When you see a three-hour live stream in your feed, you are probably going to scroll past it. When you see a 59-minute one, you might try to watch it and catch up. There is also a second reason that is about me, not the viewer. If I want to talk about content creation, I want to just talk content creation and not wander all over the place for three hours. And when I do two- or three-hour streams, I end up trying to maximize my income from the stream instead of maximizing the value I give away for free. In a tight hour I am trying to maximize the opposite, and I think that shows.
If dating is the part of my life you want to follow, that is why it has its own channel now, and everything I am doing there starts at jerrybanfield.com/date/. Everything else runs through my own website too, where anyone who buys anything gets into the main chat and can message me directly, which is where I would rather build the community than in a chat I have to moderate.
Small YouTubers Stop Making Videos. Go Live for 30 Minutes Instead.
From my video published July 3, 2026.
Small YouTubers, it is time to stop uploading videos, stop uploading shorts, and crank out live streams, exactly what I am doing right here, right now. This is the most effective thing I have found on YouTube. I know because I have done the most brutal experiment I have ever heard of a YouTuber doing. I started on YouTube in 2011. I deleted 15 channels. I had over a billion views. I deleted all of my platforms online, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, deleted all of them with over a billion views. I got that burned out. I started from scratch this year. I only started up on YouTube again because it is the best platform.
I started six new channels 104 days ago. I have got four and a half million impressions on my videos, almost all of it through organic traffic. I tested Google ads and in my experience it is garbage. I would not do that. And I am now making, from zero 104 days ago, over $1,000 a month now. The single best way I have found to monetize is to have a Skool community where you help people, like I do. And all I have to do is 30 minutes of live stream a day on my channels.
Now, I have six channels. You do not need six channels. These are results from six channels. Nothing. I had no email list. I had nothing to get anybody to watch my videos at all. And these are the results I have got, because I have tested. I have tested shorts, which in my experience are worthless and do not work unless you do certain viral things and copy other people's clips, or you do just a ton of them over time. If you started two years ago, shorts might have worked, but in my experience shorts are worthless for most people most of the time. Uploading videos certainly can work, but the absolute best thing that works for me is live streaming. And I am going to walk you through a bunch of data to support that so you can see exactly the real metrics from my channels, literally 104 days on YouTube from scratch, nothing before this.
The data from six brand-new channels
I have six channels. The top channel, Jerry Banfield ICP. This one is a very niche channel just talking about ICP every day. That is all it talks about. And this one has two and a half million impressions, 1.3 million minutes watched, on a channel that is 104 days old. And the number one most effective thing I have done is live stream. Now, I did get a lot of these impressions from videos, but when I tested videos against live streams, live streams crush it.
Next channel, I did a crypto reviews channel calling out all these garbage altcoin scams. 1.1 million impressions on this channel. 7,800 watch hours monetized. Both these channels are monetized, but I am actually making much more money through my Skool than I am through YouTube ad revenue. And this is great, because you can monetize from day one on YouTube if you make a community. And in my experience the best thing to do is join Jerry Banfield Family so we can talk through all of this stuff together on a weekly call.
So this channel is monetized on YouTube. Right now I am getting $500 plus a month in ad revenue from these channels that are just over three months old, because live streams clean up on watch hours, are super easy to monetize, and live streams really get people to connect with you as a person on a deep level. If you are not good at editing, live streams work, because people expect live streams to be unedited, and I hate editing, which is why I have learned to live stream. If you are not good at live streaming yet, just keep doing it, and you will get better, I promise you.
I have made channels across all different niches though. I have a dating channel that I made now that I am single again and just got divorced. 195,000 impressions on my new dating channel, 25,000 minutes watched, 400 and some watch hours, making progress toward monetization. But again, with all these impressions, I do not have to be monetized. People are going straight to my Skool and joining. I just launched my Skool two or three weeks ago. People have instantly been paying for memberships. And this is the formula right now.
What it actually takes to make money on YouTube
Because what you need in order to make money on YouTube is this. You need to get people to trust you. You need to get people to feel a deep connection with you. And in my experience the easiest way to do that is to do a live stream that is about 20 or 30 minutes long. Most of the time you figure live streams, well, they are too long, nobody is going to watch them. No. You basically do your live stream like it is a video on demand. I am literally leading by the exact example that I am teaching. There is no difference between what I am teaching and what I am doing.
What size PC am I running for my live videos? Check out my Jerry Banfield equipment video, so it is Jerry Banfield YouTube equipment, and I go through all of that, my PC specs and all of that, in that video. Why live streams are so important is because you build a real connection with viewers. You can talk back and forth. Then if you make multiple channels, you can make a channel for one niche audience and bring them over to other channels, and they all promote each other. You can pick six different niches if you want to. When one of them gets traction, they start filling and going over. I have a Jerry Banfield channel, just a main channel where I do whatever I want on there without a specific niche. That channel has 310,000 impressions, 1,600 watch hours, already halfway to getting monetized, lots of watch time minutes. But I am going to walk you through even more detailed metrics that will matter further for why live streams are so good.
Every impression communicates value
Here is my YouTube coach channel. Now, on the surface, people would look at my YouTube coach channel and be like, this is such a bad channel, you hardly get any views on your videos, you get like 50 or 100 views on a lot of your videos. 338,000 impressions. People have seen me and my opinions on YouTube. A thumbnail like this will more than likely go out, even if the video itself only gets 100 views. I will generally get 1,000 to 5,000 impressions. I will communicate with my title and my thumbnail to 5,000 people, or if one person sees it five times, maybe 1,000 people five times. Impressions are what you need to start building a connection with people.
When you focus on giving people a message that is fantastically helpful, this message is so helpful, now join my program. I am not hiding this from you. I am telling you out here, right in the open, exactly what I did. I am modeling it fully. What I am saying is what I am doing. There is no hiding. And just from looking at my thumbnail and my title, I am telling you exactly what to do. That way every single impression I make is communicating valuable information.
Most of these YouTube fake gurus who know way less than I do are just making clickbait that tricks you into watching the video, but you do not sign up for their programs, do you? Because I sure do not. I am like, this beginner YouTuber does not have anything to teach me, because all they did is make some clickbait with useless information in it, and they just happened to finally make one clickbait video that got lucky. What they are doing, they are not communicating any valuable information in their title and in their thumbnail. All they are doing is tricking you into watching a video that does not have information that everybody else is not already saying in their video too. And that is what I do differently. I have said, hey, all you need to do is go live 30 minutes a day. I have sent that idea out and, based on the last videos I have seen, thousands of people are practically guaranteed to receive this idea successfully.
That is how you really crush it on YouTube, because you make every one of your impressions count. If you can laser in on who your audience is, YouTube appears to have shown my videos to the same people five or 10 times very often on this channel. And when you communicate very clear value five or 10 times to somebody, that 10th time they will watch, and then you know what will happen? They will go straight into the Skool community, especially if you are live streaming. When they see you live, and they did not even watch any of your other videos, they just saw your thumbnail, they think, that was helpful. And this is often subconscious.
Somebody may see this post. This is almost certain to happen based on what I have seen already. There are probably five or 10 people who will see this and not even watch it, but the subconscious mind will internalize, Jerry Banfield, YouTube coach, gave me some valuable information. They will think about, maybe I should start live streaming, maybe that is a good idea, this worked for him, it is different from what I have heard before. Then the next time they may see me live, having never watched a video from me, but saw this thumbnail, then see me live, hop in the live stream, and say, hey Jerry, here is my question. I answer a question, or I give an actual human shout-out. And the person thinks, that is so nice, he gave me this helpful information, then he acknowledged me and saw me in the live chat. I am going straight to his Skool and joining right now so I can DM him and get on a weekly call with him. This is the mindset you will crush YouTube with.
This is a mindset. I have got four and a half million impressions, at least four million of these impressions totally organic, totally for free, all of them absolutely on the crypto channels because I cannot advertise that. So these impressions are laying a foundation for me to get up to 10 plus thousand a month within the next few months. I have literally shown you how I started from zero. I am showing you the most effective thing I am doing right now, and it works.
Here is my gaming channel. On my gaming channel, 243,000 impressions on a brand new gaming channel. And what you will notice, the gaming channel has the highest ratio of total watch time to total impressions, because I have done some three-hour live streams. People are going through and watching my live streams after I am live for three hours. I want to know what I can live stream to get you to watch three hours of a game after I am live. So this is a very high ratio of watch time to total impressions.
But look at this. You are asking, well, why am I saying live streams? First off, live streams, as I have said, insanely better conversion, insanely better conversion. Almost every person who has joined my Skool has joined after being on a live stream and after I have shouted them out. Almost everybody has joined that way. And I have got enough data. I know almost everybody who has joined. I personally talk to them and direct message them.
So I know exactly how they got in and why they got in. Almost all of them watch my live streams, talk to me on my live streams, then join from there. Just putting up videos, people are not generally going to give you $96 a month or $960 a year because they watched one video from you. I know, because I have watched a whole bunch of other people and I do not give them anything, because they have not shouted me out. They have not acknowledged me. There has been no two-way interaction. So live streams crush it because of two-way interaction. That is what you need. You need as much two-way interaction as possible if you really want to make sales.
Live streams convert; videos struggle
But even further, let us go to my monetized channels. Here is my ICP channel. Total revenue on eight live streams, $161. Now, this is just on YouTube. Remember, all the Skool revenue, all the Skool revenue comes from live streams. Did they watch some videos first? Yes. But all the people who joined have been on live streams with me before they joined. So all the Skool revenue, but even just on YouTube revenue itself, I did eight live streams for $161 and 15 YouTube video uploads for $192. Average revenue per upload or live stream, $20 for a live stream, $12 for a video. And that is because on live streams, people throw out super chats and jewels. What a jewel is, I do not fully know. Are they trying to copy TikTok with that? Why do we need super chats and jewels and memberships? But my revenue is going to continue going up too, because what I am noticing is the live streams get people to become a member.
Doing videos, it is difficult to convert someone to being a member on a video, because how many channels do you join as a member? So these people join as memberships, and that recurring revenue is absolute gold. Whereas on videos, almost no one. I have seen other people doing this exact thing. I have talked to YouTubers who schedule calls with me, and they said, dude, nobody has joined my membership. I say, that is because you are uploading videos. Why would I join a channel? I do not think I have ever been a member on a channel that just does videos, but I have joined several channels and thrown a lot of money at them, super chats, $100 super chats, gotten their memberships. I have thrown a bunch of money at channels that do live streams where I hang out in the chat and they talk to me. If you have been uploading videos and cannot figure out why nobody is joining your membership, that is exactly the knot I help YouTubers untangle, so join Jerry Banfield Family and we will map out how to switch to live streaming and start converting.
Now, if you have got a smaller channel, you would be like, well, that is nice that you are monetized, but I am not monetized and I am not doing a live stream to nobody in the chat. Look, you should be able to just film it like a video. If you have nobody in your chat, it actually makes it easier, because I do not have to answer questions. I can literally just talk about what I want to talk about the whole time on the live stream and record it like a video. Now, if you are saying, well, I need to edit it, no, you do not. I am seeing a bunch of people that upload unedited videos and get lots of views off of them. And those people, like one creator I will call out in particular, this guy is getting lots of views, thousands of views on his videos, just talking about whatever he is talking about. And he should be doing live streams instead. He would be making so much more money if he was doing live streams, because his videos are unedited, and he would build a community so much faster.
The community effect
So this is the tip of the iceberg about how much more money you make, especially when you look into super tips. It is like super chat, but you keep more of a percentage. Super tip. They just keep adding one thing after another, and that is great. What you get into even further is the community, where people in the live streams start to come together and recognize each other in the live streams as well. And then that makes a great sales pitch. It is like, hey, you have already got these people that you already know in the Skool community. So then you can DM them. You can build a relationship with them. You can talk to the other people that are in the community. When they all start seeing each other in the live streams, then it brings people who are not in the community in there.
The community, even if you do not have a Skool. Skool, to me, is one of the best ways to monetize, because you can build a community around anything. People recognize it. They already have their payment in there. And it is so much easier to just get them to go over there. So live streams will build so much more revenue, so much more community, so much more back and forth. And if you do not have anybody watching, great. Just do it like it is a video. Just record it like a video. Talk off the top of your head. And then when one person shows up, pay attention to them.
Because it makes, I love, I like attention. Obviously, because I am a YouTuber, I like attention, right? Well, when I am watching other people's videos, I like attention too. But when I am watching a video, it is hard for somebody to give me attention. I still watch ICP videos. I am pretty big in the ICP community now, so people actually do shout me out in their videos. But I want to watch live streams where I can get some attention. I want the actual content creator to shout me out, because I will give money for that. So even if you are not monetized, you are going to get monetized way faster.
Live streams win on watch time
Because the average minutes watched, here is another key data point you really need. Look at this. Live streams are heavy hitters for watch time. If you want to get monetized, what is the hardest barrier? It is not subs. Almost anyone can get a few hundred subs to get monetized. It is the minutes watched that tend to be difficult. Look at this. My live streams get two and a half or so times as much watch time per live stream. And that is because when I am actually live, people will sometimes drop what they are doing and jump in so that they can get in the chat. Whereas what kind of video am I going to put out that is going to have that effect, where somebody is just going to drop what they are doing and watch my video?
I have creators I love, like Bobby. Every new video he puts out, I am a member of his channel, even though he does not do live streams. He makes all his videos members only. I have been watching his videos for years. Every time he makes a new upload, I am excited to watch it. But I do not drop what I am doing to watch his video. That is what is special when you do live streams. You will get the maximum click-through when you are live. And that helps get your live streams out there, and that helps get people in.
And it is so nice to interact with your viewers, because on YouTube you can get a lot of toxic and negative and hate comments. But on live streams, you will tend to get a lot of love, and your supporters and your people will show up to give you love and support you and talk to you. And it means something live. When you go live, you will tend to attract a lot of people who want positive attention from you, especially when you are smaller. It is the best experience. Often when you get in bigger live streams, it is all just toxic stuff and people getting banned. And then all the positive stuff kind of gets lost, because you just get so many chats going and so many messages at once, it can be hard to stand out, and then I will pay like $20 to get my super chat so everybody sees it.
Unedited content and the AI test
And also YouTube's algorithm is geared to figure out what kind of content and what kind of viewer fit together. And live streams, if you do unedited videos, you might as well do live streams. Because what happens when people go to watch videos? There are a lot of people that expect videos should be edited. And I am glad I finally learned, after all these years on YouTube, that I hate editing my videos, so I should only live stream. Because when you see that Jerry Banfield YouTube coach was live, you do not expect a perfectly polished video. You know that I am going to ramble on and go on tangents and do 85 sales pitches for my Skool and just put a thumbnail up and talk.
And that is what happens. You get the most random stuff. So many people's edited videos, to me, are just boring. Especially in YouTube coaching, I am going to sleep two minutes into your video, because I have watched so many YouTube videos. I know so much about this. If you are not going to give me some real stuff that actually gives me something better than just the same thing everybody else is saying that AI could tell you, then I am not watching.
And I go through and I use Gemini on these YouTube coach videos. I am like, I guarantee you that this does not have anything useful in it. And I will just put it in Gemini, like, give me something useful. And it is like, no, that 20-minute video had zero value in it, zero, 100% useless. So when I make my content, it is entertaining. It is an experience. You are not just getting information that you could pull out of Gemini. You need to be thinking about your videos. And if you have not been doing that, you should be, because Gemini can turn somebody's 20 or 30 minute sales pitch into a summary. You can just pull the information out of it instantaneously. And you can see from that, if you are not giving information that is so powerful that it is really going to make somebody want to watch the video, they are going to look at the summary and be like, okay, optimize my thumbnails, join a community, rethink my titles, use AI to check my titles.
Shorts are working, but you have to do them just right. What you need to give in your videos is an experience that you cannot get just from summarizing. And that is what I do with my videos. My live streams are entertaining. Now, yes, if you do not know the community guidelines, you have got to watch what you talk about. I know the community guidelines. And that is why I have lots of channels too. If I mess up on one channel, well, it is just on that channel. That does not affect the rest of them. So the best thing you can craft yourself to do on YouTube is to get good at live streaming. Get good at live streaming, and you do that by practicing. And then when people see you were live, they have an accurate expectation, if you are not editing your videos. If live streaming still feels intimidating and you would rather have someone walk you through the confidence and the workflow, you can join me in Jerry Banfield Family and we will get your first streams set up together.
Being live creates desire
And the beauty is that most views on this will probably come after I am live. I hope so, because we have got two or three views on this right now. So we are probably going to have hundreds of views on this after I am live. Most people will watch this after I am live. Well, what happens when you watch this, when I did this live and you missed it? What does that create within you? It creates desire. When you watch this after I am live, what you will have is this desire, like, I want to catch this dude next time he is live. Look at this, talking crazy stuff, answering a question about how do I get a side chick. It is fun. And that is what is missing, especially these days.
There is so much AI slop coming onto the platform, and it is not AI slop you would immediately spot either. I did this big dating video that took like 10 hours, and I recommend you go to the Jerry Banfield dating channel and watch that, because there is tons of incredible research. I am going to go live on there next. The video is called "I Studied 100 Dating Videos So You Can Skip the Nonsense." So I did this massive research with AI, put in like 10 hours. I did a four-hour live stream on that video. And then it is there indefinitely. And the idea with doing these videos is it creates the desire to show up there live if you missed me being live. It is like, I want to catch this guy live so I can get answers to questions, so I can talk to him, so I can get a shout-out, whereas videos do not create that result. When somebody is just uploading videos, it does not create that result. So you want to set yourself up so that you can give that.
How to spot the AI slop
So when I was researching this dating video on my Jerry Banfield dating channel, I went through 100 dating creators. And look, I am pitching the Skool membership in there too. That is what is great. I pitch the Skool membership on my dating, my crypto, my gaming, and my regular channel. Crypto, I pitch it everywhere. And you get a nice diverse community in there.
And I was shocked to find so much of the new dating content is AI generated slop. Now, a lot of people might not be able to spot this. But for example, there is this one video of an AI woman with a golden retriever on a couch behind her. And every single video on this channel, the dog is in the same position on his back. I am like, you lazy fuck. The AI generation is kind of limited, so you risk losing the avatar. But there are so many of these AI slop videos today where they are literally just putting a prompt into ChatGPT. They are putting an image generation prompt in and they are having some fake person, an AI person that does not even exist, which I guess would just be an AI avatar. But it looks like a real person until you are like, that skin does not look right, your skin is a little off, isn't it? My skin looks different every day. You can tell that I am a real person.
But especially in the YouTube coaching niche, I have not seen this as much lately, but in certain niches, there is all this AI junk content. And sadly, people are watching this. They are not realizing it. My friend sent me this video, and I am like, that is an AI video. That is a bad video that somebody made for an ad with AI. That is not actual, that is AI sloppy animation. But then people are making videos that look like they are real people doing a podcast, and they have AI narration, but it sounds like the person. And then people are watching that stuff for dating advice. So how do you stand out from that slop, ugly, nasty AI? Well, live streams. AI cannot do live streams like this.
The future of YouTube favors real humans
And on the future of YouTube, YouTube looks like it is pushing hard to feature human content. At no point in human history that I have seen on YouTube, and I started in 2011, I have done over 10,000 videos online, I have had multiple channels with over 50,000 subs, one channel over several hundred thousand subs, I have never seen it this easy to start from zero with a real human face and a real human message and get views. YouTube's AI seems to be smart enough to do a decent job at detecting real human content, and giving these AI slop channels a kick or shoving them off to the side in the algorithm, which is awesome. So live streams, when you are doing a live stream, people can be almost certain that it is a real human behind it too. And again, a lot of these are subconscious signals that people may not even realize they are taking action on.
Here is another statistic showing you, on my crypto reviews channel, average revenue. Now, this is not spectacular or anything, but this is just, again, YouTube ad revenue. This does not include people joining my Skool. On some of my crypto reviews, people have literally seen one single live stream and went straight in and joined from there. Still, if you look at average income and average minutes watched, live streams are crushing it.
Your simple challenge: 30 minutes live a day
So I invite you, all you have to do on YouTube is 30 minutes. If you have one channel, try to do 30 minutes live every day. And for your workflow, I use a ChatGPT-generated thumbnail. I just dictate into ChatGPT. I say, listen, I am thinking about this, I want to do a video about this, tell me what the hook is, give me some title ideas. I look at what it says. I bounce back and forth and try to find the best title. And I always try to get my titles and thumbnails to communicate something genuinely helpful, even if you never watch the video, because most people on YouTube are not actually even going to watch your video. You are just thinking about making repeated impressions over and over. Every thumbnail and title, you are contributing to how people feel about you with that title and thumbnail. If you want to go deeper on all of this, I have put everything into my my YouTube Coaching playlist.
So I hope this has been insanely helpful information for you. And I am excited. At this rate, in my experience, I am on track to be making 10 plus grand a month in a few months, starting with brand new YouTube channels, documenting all of exactly how I did it and showing you how I have done it the entire time. And I am going to go live on my dating channel next.
I Tested Every YouTube Format. Live Streams Won.
From my video published June 23, 2026.
I tested every format on YouTube in the last year on six brand new channels to see which one would work the best. Shorts, long form videos, anywhere from longer like an hour to just a few minutes, or live streams. And based on my data, live streams are a big winner. That's why I'm doing this as a live stream.
Now, my results are not necessarily what everybody is going to get. But there's a very clear takeaway: if you can live stream, live streaming is the absolute best thing you can do, especially on YouTube currently with the algorithm right now. Live streaming is the best way to be a real human. If you're going to do videos and not live streams, you really do need to edit them for retention to get everything just perfect. But the beauty of live is it's the easiest way to just be an authentic human. It's the only truly interactive experience.
So let me go through the data right now from all the videos I tested to figure this out. And keep in mind, I've been on YouTube since 2011. I've gotten over a billion views online as a creator, and I got so burned out that I deleted and burned all of it to the ground in 2025. I started six brand new channels this year, only on YouTube. I didn't start any other platforms. Technically, I did take an X account somebody held for me.
Why I tested shorts but didn't trust them
I had this conversation with Gemini, which is YouTube's AI. I use all of them — Claude, ChatGPT — and here's the bottom line. I tested doing shorts because I saw some people, like Lord Heck and a few others, getting huge amounts of views with YouTube shorts and tons of subscribers. But my question is this: I want to be a full time YouTuber. I want to make like 10 grand a month consistently. I don't want to put myself in a position where my content is all about somebody else, because yeah, in the short term you can clip viral videos and make some money off it, but you're putting your channel at a lot of different risks. Including that nobody cares about you in particular. But there are other ones too, like copyright strikes, takedowns, lawsuits, copy content, policy violations, and just wasting your time clipping all these other things and not really communicating anything.
So I tested some shorts. And I tested mostly long form videos. And I have six different channels in different niches, so you can see how it looks across all of them.
Channel one: Jerry Banfield ICP
This first one is Jerry Banfield ICP. This is a channel I've had for a while. And keep in mind, I've grown all these channels organically. I tested some paid ads. Those sucked. So I put all those videos unlisted and didn't use them again. In my experience, paid ads were worse than useless. I did some videos about that — paid ads were worse than useless. So everything I'm showing here is organic views. This Jerry Banfield ICP channel also had no paid ads on it because it's a crypto channel.
This one: 82 long forms, four live streams, eight shorts. Total views, 204,000. From long form, 10,000 from lives, 10,000 from shorts. Views per video for shorts and lives were about the same, and lives and longs were about the same. But look at the watch time. Look at the watch time per video. Yes, I got a lot of subs from long form videos, and I got some good revenue from long form videos. But I did 20 times fewer live streams. I did 20 times fewer live streams. If I'd done 20 times more live streams, in my estimation I'd have gotten twice as many watch hours, probably even three or four times. I'd have probably gotten more views per video, and more total views, and probably at least double the revenue, and probably more subs.
Now, the shorts ended up being nearly worthless. Look at the insights. While the shorts got about the same views, you had to publish twice as many shorts to get the same views. The revenue and the watch time for shorts were negligible. Live streams are high value. The live streams are the most efficient format for views per video. They drive significant watch time and revenue relative to the amount of them. Long form is the engine — my standard videos grew the channel. But if I'd just done all live streams, I'd have probably grown even better.
So if your goal is immediate revenue and deep authority, shorts are underperforming. I then put it into averages. Look at these averages: more average views for a live stream, almost double the average watch time, almost triple the average revenue. The only reason I actually got more subscribers from long form is because I started a new channel from scratch and didn't hardly live stream on it. If I had live streamed on it, the average subscribers probably would have been higher, but I already had the subscribers when I started live streaming. So live streams are a revenue and retention powerhouse — the revenue was 150 times more than a short.
Channel two: from crypto to money
Now let's look at a different channel. This was originally crypto content, but I pivoted into money. This channel got a thousand views on average — these are averages this time to make it easier. A thousand average views for a long form, less on a live stream, less on shorts. But look at the average revenue: like almost 50 times more average revenue from a live stream. Keep in mind, this is a smaller channel that just barely got monetized recently, within two months of me starting it. Average subscribers were a little less, but again, I put a lot of videos up.
Look at the average minutes watched though — four times the average minutes watched per live stream. That is huge. Live streaming, and ultimately YouTube, is an attention game. If you really want people to do things like convert on your offers, this matters.
If you want to sell stuff — one on one calls, for example, I just had a one on one call — live streams are so much better because they have more watch time. And if you want to sell something, you're going to need more time with people. The more time you have with people, the more you're going to be able to build trust and turn somebody from a casual viewer into a super fan. Ultimately, if I want you to come join Jerry Banfield Family, you're going to probably need to be a super fan. If this is your first video watching, it's unlikely you're going to book immediately.
Now, I'm an outlier. I like never join anybody else's stuff, because they're offering too little value for too much money and they don't live stream. I don't trust somebody editing some video and trying to make themselves look smart. I trust somebody who can go live and talk off the top of their head to actually know about something. And then maybe I'll think about your offer if it's a great value for the price. And if you want to be able to deliver value, you're going to need to be able to sustain yourself financially. So to me, the number one way to do that is to get those minutes watched up.
Why live streams get more minutes watched
The reason the minutes watched are higher comes down to two big reasons with live streams. First, when that notification pops up — Jerry Banfield is live — people often drop what they're doing and come watch, whereas it's easy to scroll past another video. And second, the live streams tend to be longer and they're interactive with the viewers, which makes them more interesting than some edited video.
Also, for me, I hate editing videos. If you hate editing videos, you've got to live stream, because long form videos that are unedited just consistently don't do very good. The live stream is nice because if you're not going to edit your videos like me, the live stream sets the expectation up front that it's going to be unedited, which is really helpful. (I've written more about this in why you don't need to edit your YouTube videos to go viral.) What I can see with the different formats is that you want to give people clear expectations up front. When you see that Jerry Banfield YouTube coach was live for 30 minutes, you know it's a live stream. You know it's not going to be some edited, polished video. You know it's going to be real and raw off the top of my head.
That is the hardest thing right now for AI to do. AI can crank out videos. AI can crank out shorts. AI cannot functionally jump in and do a live stream like this — interact with the audience and do all of it in real time. Maybe in a few years it will be able to. But right now, that is something that gives the highest level of human experience. And for people wanting a human experience, live streams are extremely attractive.
Make your live streams watchable after you're live
Now, I tested in the past doing all kinds of live streams, AFK live streams — never do that. And the key with live streams is to make them watchable after you're live. The biggest mistake I see people make with live streams, and that I've made myself, is doing YouTube live streams like you do Twitch live streams. Nobody's going to watch a Twitch live stream after you're live, unless you go viral or something — for changing your race like I did. Unless you go viral changing your race like I did, then people watch your video on demand. But other than that, nobody's going to watch your Twitch video on demand.
On YouTube, you want to do live streams that essentially are a video. I've made the mistake on YouTube of doing this three, four, five, six hour live stream. Nobody's going to watch that afterwards. That makes sense if you have a huge following and you're trying to optimize for cash flow and attention and concurrent viewers. But if you want to build your audience and optimize for overall money and growth, every live stream should be done like it's a video. So I never do an introduction to my live streams. I never have a "going live" screen. I never have anything like that.
I mean, if you have enough followers, you can get away with crap like that. But if you want to grow, and you're watching this, you probably want to optimize every second of your live stream so that as soon as you hit live, you start talking like it's a video.
More data: the dating and gaming channels
Now we'll go through the rest of the data. On Jerry Banfield Money, the live stream drastically outperformed in revenue and minutes watched. And notice, this was only one single live stream on this channel against nine shorts and 25 long form videos.
Next channel: Jerry Banfield Dating. Nine shorts, a crappy amount of views, only 13 watch hours. 21 videos, 3,400 views, 124 watch hours. But look — I just did the second live stream on that channel. One live stream, 117 views, 18 hours of watch time. So do the multiplication on that. If you multiply that by 20, it might have gotten fewer views, but multiply the watch time hours by 20, and you're looking at a huge increase in watch time hours and more subscribers.
I'm just breaking down why live streams to me are the dominant form of content to make on YouTube, especially as a beginner. Even if you think "I can't talk live like you do, I can't just talk off the top of my head" — practice. I've done thousands and thousands of hours of live streaming, and the best way to get good at talking off the top of your head is live streaming and just practicing at it. Now, I have a presentation in the background here, but on some videos I just literally have a background up and talk. This one made sense to be data driven.
So if you look at the live stream numbers on the dating channel, I probably would have gotten many more subscribers, much more watch time, and I probably actually would have gotten more views also, compared to just doing videos. With just one live stream, I generated more watch time than all nine of my shorts combined.
People ask where I do my thumbnails — I just crank them out on ChatGPT. I have the $100 a month ChatGPT and crank them out on there.
Now here's the Jerry Banfield Games channel. On this channel I did a number of live streams that were not as engaging, like where I was just playing a video game in the background. Notice on this one, on my Jerry Banfield Games channel, I actually got one video to get like 4,000 views, even though I had like barely 100 subscribers. One video got like 4,000 views. That was an outlier though. The one video did take off, but here's the thing: if I had done a live stream of that same game, Hearts of Iron 4, I almost guarantee you I'd get more watch time and probably about the same amount of views, if not more, but probably double the watch time.
While on this gaming channel shorts did get a decent amount of attention, look at the subscribers. The one live stream I did got seven subscribers. The nine shorts got six subscribers. And yes, this one looks like it didn't include some of the newest subscribers, because I actually got more than that. But the shorts were the least effective tool for gaining subscribers. And to me, subscribers are what you really need if you want to monetize on YouTube. The long form videos accounted for 81% of my total watch time. That's because I had some that went off. If I'd have done all of the long form in the same format as a live stream, it would have been much higher.
So those are the data from several different channels. Across all different kinds of content, it's very clear: live streams overall are the best thing for me to do.
The sweet spot is a 20 to 40 minute live stream
I'll show you some actual videos from my gaming channel. On this gaming channel, here's one — I got 5,000 views on a five minute video on my channel. But if I had live streamed this, I probably would have gotten about the same amount of views. Except instead of a three minute video, the average watch time probably would have been a 20 or 30 minute average watch time if I did an hour or two hour live stream.
But now what I'm doing with my live streams is keeping them generally to a maximum of 40 minutes, a minimum of 20 minutes. That way, I can go live and make a video on demand that's worth watching, but not go so long that it's just blowing up your time. There seems to be a sweet spot on YouTube where if you hit a certain length, then people watch the whole video. Like this one yesterday I did on the crypto channel — I actually got double the views on this live stream that I got on the recent video. The watch time on the live stream compared to the video is crazy. The live stream was so much higher.
What I want to do also is have the most consistent format: live streaming. If I just do all live streams — there are a lot of people who watch shorts, they don't watch long form videos or live streams, and vice versa. There are lots of people who watch long form content, mostly edited videos; they don't watch live streams, they don't watch shorts. YouTube knows which people like to watch live streams, and I need to find my people. If you are trying to figure out which format and which niche will actually surface your people, I would love to dig into that with you, so join Jerry Banfield Family and we will build your plan around it together.
Find your people
What's important is to find your people on YouTube, and live streaming is the easiest way to get ahold of your people for most of us, because it's the most real, the most raw, the most human, the most authentic. With everything happening with AI on YouTube right now, and all this AI slop that's getting ground out, and everybody doing all this insane editing, the way to stand out to me is to be live. If you want to dig deeper into this mindset, I've shared a lot of it in why I love being a "failure" on YouTube, and you can also watch more of my newest videos in my YouTube Coaching playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGI0fuGonTRbfcxe3FLYWqbgcPXOBmKC0.
There's a point people raise that shorts are great for instant subs but can fry channels — that managing a few big ones leads to an average view duration of 10 seconds, and that everything besides shorts dies since everyone is used to shorts, not long form. Well, here's the thing. YouTube knows which people like to watch live streams. So when you just live stream, YouTube is trying to find the people it already knows are likely to watch live streams. It's trying to show your content to them.
Dating is a perfect example. If I'm putting out videos that are unedited, I might as well be live streaming, because my unedited videos are competing with everybody else's edited videos. Whereas when I go live, like I just did on my Jerry Banfield dating channel, I'm not competing with people's unedited videos. Well, in some ways I might be, but in other ways I'm the only live channel on YouTube talking about dating, or one of the very few.
While the initial dating video, while it was live, got four views — it actually got like nine, but the studio said four — here's the thing. This live stream could end up getting 100 views, or 80 views. But the goal is how much watch time. The more watch time someone spends on my video, the more likely they are to watch the next one. So imagine if, instead of doing all these videos on this dating channel where the most got 600 views, I had done all live streams instead, and YouTube's whole algorithm was pointed at live viewers and live streams, and everybody who watched on average watched much longer.
This is June 23rd when I'm recording this. You'll be able to see how I progress over time as I do every single video live from now on. And I'm really excited, because in the past I've had the sense that I should just live stream and I shouldn't even do videos, because I don't edit, and you really have to edit. I'm really excited to see where this goes in the future.
Live streaming across multiple niches
What's really cool is that, being full time now — well, I've been a content creator, I haven't done anything else for work besides this, I haven't done a job or anything since 2012 — I have all these different niches I can live stream to. And then sometimes people will go subscribe to another one. That's a unique feature of live streams. With videos, if I'm doing a five minute video about dating, it can be hard to get enough of you interested that, if you also play video games, you'll watch that dating video and then go over and watch my gaming videos, or listen to my music, or find my other YouTube channels.
But live streams are so deep. For example, my ICP crypto channel currently has the most views. And keep in mind, all of these channels were created within the last three months — this is starting from scratch. What you also don't realize is that for this many views, I probably got 10,000 or 20,000 impressions on this live stream and then a couple thousand views. So people know that I live stream. And what happens is people from this live stream — a few of them went over and subscribed to my dating channel, because I mentioned I'd be doing a dating live stream. A few people went over and subscribed to my gaming channel. So when I go live on two or three different channels, I get two or three different notifications. And if somebody's in the mood for one of those one day, they come by and hang out. A number of the people from this ICP crypto channel went over and subscribed to the Crypto Reviews channel. So that's the beauty: when you do live streams, it's really easy to cross promote all the different stuff you do.
Live streaming and conversions
As I said earlier, when you've got enough attention for long enough, then everything gets much easier. Since I've started switching to live streaming, I don't have enough data yet, but it seems like the conversion on people actually going and joining went up. Which makes sense, because in a 30 minute live stream I can mention my community two or three times — statistically, lots of people are only going to hear the first one. And it also seems reasonable that when I'm talking for 30 minutes, I can mention it a few times for less amounts of time, when it's relevant. Whereas if I'm doing a five minute video, I often get stuck doing a one minute outro, which leaves the video on a not-as-good note.
So live streams, to me — I hardly see anybody on YouTube talking about how amazing live streams are. And from my experience, I'm all in on live streams. I'm not doing any more videos or shorts. The only time that's worth doing is if you can totally outsource it. I've thought about trying to do it with AI, but that's distracting too — you need a human to supervise it, and you can only do so much work. I've tried clipping my live streams, but then you have to upload another video. So at some point, if I was making 20 or 30 thousand a month, I might just record all my lives, send them to somebody, and have somebody put them together and upload them all completely without my input. But even there, you're taking additional risks — that somebody screws up, or a community guidelines violation, or who knows.
There's a crazy live stream workflow some people use: you go live, export the live in YouTube studio, so that one live can become one to five long forms. I've actually got an easier workflow than that. In the past, I've broken some of my clips — I'll just hit record on OBS, talk, and then I'll have a clip already done, so I don't have to do anything else with it. But that makes for not as good of a live stream experience. That makes more sense if I'm doing an hour or two hour long live stream. If I'm just trying to make a video on demand, and I'm doing a live stream for two hours and then take five clips out of it and upload those clips, it'd be better to just do more live streams for less amounts of time than to try and clip all those. If I'm going to put energy into titles and thumbnails, I should just do the live stream once.
Going viral versus steady growth
There's a common belief that live streams are more algorithm friendly, that most viral videos are five to ten minutes, and that live streams are good for connection but not views. Well, yes — if you want to go viral, the little five to 15 minute videos are certainly effective. But even Mr. Beast is now uploading 30 minute long videos. So to me, a 20 to 40 minute video with an average set at like 30 minutes is absolutely ideal.
And I've had live streams go viral. As I said, with the race change example — I changed my race and that went viral. A live stream can go viral. Now, I'm not trying to get stuff to go viral these days, because when you're trying to build a community, you don't need to go viral. What you need is to develop people to discover you, to find you, and to develop and deepen relationships over time. So what I'm looking to do is just consistently, steadily grow over time.
What doesn't work well is suddenly going viral. Your whole business system breaks. Your mindset goes crazy. And then two years later, you feel like you're starting over and you have nothing. So I aim for consistent, regular growth. I know a lot of YouTube teaches you to try and go viral, but I don't like editing videos. I'm not paying a video editor. And it seems like, to me, I really love live streams more than any other form of content. Live streams are the only thing I'll drop what I'm doing and go watch somebody for. I don't care how good your video is. A live stream just instantly cuts through the rest of the feed. This whole approach lines up with how I think about creating in general — I've described it before as how YouTubers follow the Cult of Done Manifesto.
The League of Legends live stream that beat everything
There's no point in me pretending otherwise. I've tried uploading thousands and thousands of videos. And one of my very top YouTube videos ever was a live stream. It was a sloppy live stream with a long, awkward intro.
I did a League of Legends stream 10 years ago where I hired this professional League of Legends player who had retired and was coaching. I paid him 30 euros, and I titled it "Can a pro coach help me get out of bronze in League of Legends?" And this live stream literally took two or three minutes of me trying to connect to Skype, share my screen with him, and get the live stream going. It was a long, awkward intro. And then I played one game of League of Legends — me paying $30, doing a live stream — that got 800,000 views on YouTube, all organically. It made me an entire League of Legends following. And then I was getting hundreds of concurrent viewers all the time on all my League of Legends streams after that.
So that actually outperformed everything. That was the highest viewed organic video on all of my YouTube channels, and it was a live stream. It was an inspired live stream, to be sure. But the live stream pairs the best with me. I had some other videos technically with millions of views, but I advertised those to kind of rank them in the algorithm. Most of those videos, I could have done them live as well. That one League of Legends video destroyed the algorithm — it was one of the most popular League of Legends videos for quite a while. It got me tens of thousands of subscribers off of one single video.
So of all the content I've done on YouTube, a live stream was the number one organic piece of content I ever did. And that's good for me to remember going forward. In fact, if I had to do YouTube again, I probably would live stream the entire time and never do videos outside of right when I first started. If I had just only done live streams on YouTube over the years, I think it would have been a totally different thing.
Going forward: only live streams
So going forward, I'm only doing live streams, and I think I've made it really clear why. And it's so cool too — I love the interaction. I love having the audience for live streams. But you should do live streams as if there is an audience. Just pretend, if there's not an actual audience, that there's an audience, and perform. The smaller you are, just act as if there's an audience. That is practice. And what's cool is you never know which live stream could blow up. I could do a video game stream that gets 10,000 plus views, and all my other channels could get hundreds of subscribers from that video. Then I could have a dating video blow up off of that.
The thing is, if I'm doing videos and live streams both, it's kind of segmenting my content. But if I laser in and do only live streams for everything I do on YouTube, then from there we can specialize, monetize, and visualize.
One final point. What's really nice on live streams too is that if someone watches a video that was previously live, it can create a desire. It's like, "Hey, I missed the live stream, but next time this guy goes live, I want to catch him live." And that sets up a much deeper relationship where you watch live and interact for free. We build free community, and from there it's much easier to step into something paid versus if you just watch videos. There are people that showed me their paid community a hundred times, and I still am not even thinking about joining. But if I had been on their live streams, hanging out with the community, and other people in the community were telling me about it in the chat, then I probably would have joined. That's exactly the kind of free-to-paid path I'm building — first you hang out live, then you go deeper.
I'm really excited because what's cool is I have all these different niches I can live stream to, and live streaming is the easiest way to find your people, deepen relationships, and grow steadily over time. Going forward, every single video I do is going to be live.
How I Stream 3 Hours A Day on Twitch and Upload 3 Videos A Day on YouTube
From my video published April 27, 2023.
My friends, if you're a content creator, a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer, and you want to be more productive, you want to get more videos out there faster and stop wasting your time, you'll love to see the way I track my videos and my live streams and the exact system I use to produce so much in such a short period of time. I'm a full-time YouTuber. I have five channels, and I'm a Twitch streamer. I stream about three hours a day on Twitch playing Gods Unchained, which is a crypto NFT customizable card game. And then, on average, I upload three YouTube videos a day. This rarely takes me longer than about five hours in a single day. So this means I'm live for about three hours. In the other two hours, I crank out and upload two videos plus a recording of my live stream, including thumbnails, titles, and all of that.
Yes, my mind is obsessed with constantly coming up with title and thumbnail ideas for my channels, and I've got several different channels here. The key I've found over the years to being successful, especially as a content creator, but in any aspect of life, is to track it.
Track everything, every day
I have a scale every morning that I use to track my weight, which helps me stay in shape and never go back to being fat again. After being overweight most of my life, I'm tired of that, and my scale keeps me accountable. I can see exactly how much I weigh. I go to AA meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous, most days during the week to track my sobriety and to be accountable to other people. And for my work, I have a spreadsheet where I put down exactly what I do, and then I average this out.
This spreadsheet adds up and averages everything I'm doing. So you can see that in the last month I've been live about 100 hours and I put up about 112 videos. The number one mistake I see content creators make is doing it all on your own, not having anyone experienced who actually talks to you and looks at what you're doing. In my experience, the best way to fix that today is to stop working in isolation and get around other creators who are doing the same thing. If you'd like to work with me on this and see the exact system I use, the best way is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community, where I share the tracking spreadsheet and everything else I've learned.
My daily live stream on Twitch
What I do every day is I go live on my Twitch. I'm grateful I finally found a game on Twitch that I love playing and that people love watching. I just started playing this game again after taking a few months off. So if you look back to last month and the month before, I barely was even streaming on Twitch. I finally figured out exactly what I want to do with myself and what other people want to watch, and I've committed to a consistent time. I'm putting in a lot of time. I stream at the same time if I can, as many days a week as I can. And if I can't, well, I just stream whenever I can that day. So I'm usually live between about 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. during the weekdays, and then I try and hit that time on the weekends or in the afternoon as well.
So I do my live stream on Twitch playing Gods Unchained. Then I have a new gaming channel I just made a few months ago, and I record that entire live stream and upload it. The secret is that I actually start out each live stream by looking at the deck I'm playing that day. Gods Unchained is kind of like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, and I've seen what other YouTubers are doing for those games. So I make the beginning of the video very watchable and very clickable, and a few people stick around and watch the whole thing. My average watch time is 10 plus minutes. It only takes me about five minutes to upload my live stream to YouTube, and yet I'm getting followers consistently going back and forth. People from YouTube come over and follow on Twitch.
Find synergy across platforms
If you really want to be successful as a content creator, you need to find a synergy among the different platforms. I have tested every different thing you could imagine in the last 12 years as a content creator. If you want to live stream, Twitch is the only place to stream. And the best place to create content is on YouTube, and the main thing to create on YouTube is long-form videos. Therefore, if you want to be a Twitch streamer and a YouTuber, stream on Twitch and pick a YouTube channel that you can upload all your Twitch streams to.
However, if I just did Gods Unchained and streaming on Twitch, this actually costs me more money by the time I buy the cards, give away gods, and so on. This is purely a loss. So I'm grateful I'm able to make thousands a month on a new crypto channel. I'll do a video soon showing my exact income from YouTube and my other income. But long story short, this crypto channel pays the bills. If you want to be a content creator, you do need to figure out something you're going to create that pays the bills, that you can create relatively quickly. These crypto videos don't take me that long to create. A lot of these crypto videos, I can make a 20-minute video like this in about an hour or so of work time.
My studio setup and why I don't edit
Up in the studio here I've got a very efficient setup with six monitors and two different computers, a streaming one and a gaming one. The gaming and recording is on those two, and I'm recording this on my other PC. I've got my setup very efficient, and the key for me is that I don't edit most of my videos. I'm able to achieve that by, well, setting my standards a little bit lower, which saves a ton of time, and by practice. I've done over 10,000 videos and live streams in the last 12 years. I'm practiced at talking with no script, just from the heart, because if you actually know this stuff, if your brain is already used to it, you can just say it. A script is for people who either don't really know things, or who aren't confident about what they do know, or who are into perfectionism.
Now, some of you would argue that a script and doing very edited videos is more considerate of your viewer's time. What I've found as a content creator is that it's more important, generally, to just grind out content consistently, ideally every day. If you really want something to grow, you want to put something out almost every day.
Segment your content by channel
I have five YouTube channels. On this old one, I made the mistake of constantly putting out videos on every topic on one channel, and that absolutely doesn't work because of the low click-through rate and the low watch time, which kills any recommendations you're going to get out of YouTube. What does work is carefully segmenting your content. So if I put crypto videos on my crypto channel, gaming videos on my gaming channel, business videos on my business channel, and recovery videos on my recovery channel, that works great for the algorithm. I generally get a video out every day on my crypto channel and every day on my gaming channel, and then I aim to get out a few a week on my business and recovery channels.
These are essentially bonus channels for me, where I can feel the joy of sharing my knowledge on how to be a content creator and entrepreneur online, and where I can share my knowledge about things like sobriety, health, and recovery on my recovery channel. You could argue that right now the crypto channel pays all the bills and these three I just do for fun at this point. However, the longer I keep grinding all these channels out, the more people from the crypto channel go over to the other ones, people from the other ones find the crypto channel, and it all feeds on itself. Someday, perhaps relatively soon, the crypto channel will have a hundred thousand subs and all these other channels will have thousands of subs and be monetized, and I won't have to do any more work. I just keep doing four or five hours a day of work, and I keep doing my spreadsheet.
Why long-form and live wins
I've done so much research, and to me this is the most efficient creative format. The live stream is the highest quality of what I create. You can come hang out on Twitch, which is just Jerry Banfield. I'm generally going to be doing a lot of work on my crypto channel, and I'll answer as many questions as I can. I give away crypto, I'm playing a video game, we're having fun, and we have a great community. For me, I love watching people live whenever I can. Then the videos allow me to get access to the YouTube algorithm, which is the best algorithm in the world for bringing high-quality, relevant traffic.
I've tried TikTok. I've gone viral on TikTok, I've got millions of views, I've got tens of thousands of followers relatively easily, and it sucks. They're worthless. What you really need, if you want to be successful as a content creator, is to make a meaningful connection with someone, and usually you need to do that in long-form videos. In most cases, you need five minutes to an hour of somebody's time to make a meaningful connection. That's why often starting a new channel can be a bit daunting, but if you have several channels and you live stream, you can bring people from one channel to another, from your live stream to your other channels, and then you can grow and build relationships with people over time. If you want to be a YouTuber and/or a Twitch streamer, this is the absolute best way to do it.
I love what I do. I'm able to crank out thumbnails really fast. If you get into the upper echelons of YouTube, like MrBeast, at his level he's paying other people to do his thumbnails, to research the thumbnails, to film the video topics. He has a huge staff that helps with everything under his guidance and direction. Well, most of you are going to be working by yourself, and I have optimized my system for doing it by yourself. I've optimized a system where I have no video editors that I pay and no graphic designers that I pay. If you want to do this as a YouTuber or a Twitch streamer, you really need at least five hours a day, seven days a week. And then you need to make your time worth it.
Why I Don't Edit or Script My Videos
If you're wondering how my videos can be pretty good quality when I don't edit them and I don't script anything beforehand, here's the honest answer: I literally just get the idea for a topic in my head, bring up whatever I need in the background, and start talking. Then I upload it straight from there. Some of these I've taken 10 or 20 minutes to put together a little presentation in the background, because sometimes that can greatly enhance the quality of what I'm showing you. But for something like entering into a spreadsheet, it's really just about showing up consistently and loving what I do. I'm genuinely grateful that I'm able to be so efficient every single day.
Part of that efficiency comes from what I do in the rest of my life. When I've got five hours here to crank these live streams and videos out, that requires me to have high energy. It requires me to be in good health. It requires me to be in a good emotional state. I can't do a good live stream or make good videos if my heart is closed or my mind is all screwed up. There's a lot of pressure being a content creator, because whatever I'm going to give you is based on where I'm at. The crypto channel has just done great, and these are all organic views. I don't run any paid ads. All I do is share my videos on Twitter, on a new Twitter account I made, and on my Facebook page. Almost all the traffic comes in straight from YouTube organic, from the browse features and from search.
How I Take Care of Myself Off Camera
I'm able to do this because I take great care of myself the rest of the day when I'm not on camera. I'm hanging out with my family. I'm cleaning up around the house. I'm at yoga about five days a week, an hour each time. I go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for an hour. I spend about an hour every day with my mom, who lives across the street, and a few hours every day with the family. I eat a mostly whole plant vegan diet, mostly in the morning and around lunchtime after I get up. I get eight to nine hours in bed every night, with about seven to eight hours of actual sleep, because I go to bed and then rest and meditate. I'm in bed around 10 p.m. most nights and up at 7 a.m.
I'm not out here grinding like some of the YouTubers and content creators I see burning themselves out, working a job and cranking videos out on top of it. I'm not doing that. In my experience, keeping everything balanced in my life is exactly what lets me keep producing. And I keep track of what I put out right here, because I've tested it. I've tested trying to create fewer things that are higher quality, and for most of us it just doesn't work. Most of us simply need to grind.
Grind First, Hire Help Later
If I grind enough to get my YouTube channel making tens of thousands of dollars a month, which I've done in the past on this channel, back when I was teaching courses, and originally on crypto here, then I can afford to pay a video editor to go through and clean everything up. I could pay somebody to do a whole bunch of crypto research for me and then just read a presentation. Sure, I may consider taking the quality of my videos up one day. But I don't want to do that until I have way, way more money than I need to make it happen.
What I've done in the past is I've been too quick to hire video editors. I was making tens of thousands a month live streaming on Facebook, and I did hire. The problem was that by the time I hired a video editor, told him what I wanted, and trained him to edit the videos, in a lot of cases I could have just clipped it and done the work myself. So if you're a content creator, in my experience you realistically need to plan on doing everything yourself. That can seem like a daunting task, but what I've found is all I needed to do was learn a few key skills.
The Equipment and Workflow That Keep Me Fast
I use Adobe Photoshop to make some of these thumbnails. The thumbnail I made yesterday is a good enough thumbnail. I've got a green screen right behind me in my studio, and I keep a whole list of all the equipment I use. The main place you do want to invest money as a creator is on equipment that makes your workflow faster. This camera is a Canon XA11 that I got used for a thousand dollars, and the picture quality is very nice. I plug it into a Cam Link 4K into my computer and it looks great. Then I use OBS to record everything, and I have a Stream Deck.
When I first started as a YouTuber, I was on a laptop with a crappy camera and a crappy mic, and my filming process was really slow. I could crank out a video about like I do today, but then it took so long to take my microphone audio, put it in with the camera, render the video, and edit it. My computer was slow, and I hated that it took 10 minutes to film a video and about an hour to upload it. Now it takes me about 20 minutes to film a 20 minute video. I hit record to start, talk, hit record again, and immediately upload. That is what allows me to do so much in such a short period of time.
Yes, sometimes I foul up the very beginning of a video. But I've gotten to a place where either the video is useful and helpful to somebody or it's not. Don't worry so much about whether you got every word right. If you're Mr. Beast trying to get 100 million views, sure, you should probably scrutinize every single frame to make the video as good as it can be. But most of you are never going to get there, and that's fine. Mr. Beast grinded like crazy on YouTube until he was making enough money and had a big enough following to pay all those people to optimize every single minute of his videos. I watched a lot of his earlier videos, and they were as bad as some of my early videos. This workflow is ideal for getting to a place where, if you do make a ton of money and get a ton of followers, you can always pay for help. But I'd prefer to never have to pay for help and to just be able to do everything with the workflow I've got.
Why a Mentor Beats Figuring It Out Alone
The main thing with content creation is that people just get used to and comfortable watching the same people over and over again. That's why I've got these other channels. If you found me on my crypto channel and you're also a content creator, you'd probably rather listen to me talk about creating than somebody else. If you've been watching my gaming videos and you're also into crypto or recovery, you automatically have a much higher chance of wanting to hear me on those subjects, just because I'm familiar.
If you're brand new at this, one of the worst things you can do is try to watch all these videos and figure it all out for free. That's exactly why a mentor is so helpful. If you want to be successful in something, get somebody who has been in it and done the very thing you think would be amazing to achieve. The best way to do that with me today is to join my community, where you can drop all your questions and I can give you answers that took me a lot of time and energy to figure out, like what's the best camera to use. Come work with me directly over at the Jerry Banfield Family.
I love helping creators, and I've helped a lot of creators be successful over the years. Joe Paris has done coaching with me and had a bunch of video calls with me. I was talking to him before he set his crypto channel up, and I helped him get the idea, follow through, and stay accountable on getting it going. I hang out with other successful content creators and YouTubers, and that community is where I can pass all of that along. I'm a full time YouTuber and Twitch streamer, and I make great money. At this rate I should easily earn about $100,000 this year. Last year was kind of rough. I only made $30,000, did a lot of trial and error, and got demonetized on Facebook while I was making $10,000 a month. It was a rough year as a creator, but we're right back in the game this year, and if anything I expect to see new all time highs with my income over the next couple of years.
While I know all of this may look amazing to you, it's just normal to me, because I've been doing it so long. If you want to go deeper on all of this, you can watch my YouTube Coaching playlist and check out those other channels too. So whether you're a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer, or any kind of content creator online, I hope this has been helpful for you. I would truly love to get to know you better and see what you go on to build.
Live Streaming vs Uploading Videos: What Grows a YouTube Channel
Originally published September 19, 2022.
My answer is that live streaming beats uploading finished videos for growing a YouTube channel, and that I now do my YouTube work live. The gain I see is not in peak viewers. It is in how long people stay, how many of them come back, and how often a live viewer becomes someone who pays. Below are four posts from 2022 to 2026. Read together, they show how my view changed and why.
The clearest evidence is in I Tested Every YouTube Format. Live Streams Won., where I ran six brand new channels for most of a year and compared shorts, long videos and live streams on each. On my ICP channel I made 82 long videos, four live streams and eight shorts. The live streams drew about as many views per video as the long videos, almost double the average watch time, and almost triple the average revenue. The shorts were nearly worthless there. On my dating channel one live stream produced 18 hours of watch time, more than all nine of my shorts combined, which had about 13. It is six small channels, not a controlled study, and I say that in the post too.
The newest post, Small YouTubers Stop Making Videos. Go Live for 30 Minutes Instead., turns that into a challenge. I started six new channels 104 days before writing it and report about four and a half million impressions, almost all organic. I tested Google ads, found them not worth it, and did not rely on them. Almost every person who joined my paid community, I say, had first been on one of my live streams. That is my own account of my own numbers, and I give it as I wrote it rather than as a proven method.
My view did not start there. In Why Streaming to 1 Viewer Is Better Than 1000, from September 2022, I argued that a large live audience was often a trap. I had thousands of viewers on Facebook many times. I found the chat full of trolls, the money stressful, and the pressure to keep a crowd made it hard to play what I wanted. That post is about the size of the crowd rather than the format, but the lesson I took from it still runs through everything below: the people who stay and talk matter more than the count.
By April 2023 I was writing about a schedule. In How I Stream 3 Hours A Day on Twitch and Upload 3 Videos A Day on YouTube I described streaming on Twitch about three hours a day, uploading roughly three YouTube videos a day, and tracking every hour in a spreadsheet. Twitch was where I went live, and YouTube was where I uploaded the recordings and finished videos. I also said TikTok had given me millions of views that were worth very little to me, and that a real connection usually takes five minutes to an hour of someone's attention.
The 2026 posts flip the order. In the June test I said that going forward I was only doing live streams, and that every video I make is going to be live. In the July post I give small channels a plain challenge: 30 minutes live a day, on YouTube itself, rather than shorts or uploads. My reasoning is that a live stream sets the expectation up front that it is unedited, which suits someone who hates editing, and that a replay of a live stream makes people want to catch the next one live.
The posts disagree on length, and the difference matters. The 2023 streams ran about three hours. The 2026 posts say the sweet spot is a 20 to 40 minute live stream, because a three to six hour stream is hard to get anyone to watch after it ends, while a shorter one can be run like a video and still be live. My own rule now is to keep each stream generally inside that band.
What you will find below is each post in full, newest first, so you can check my reasoning and my numbers rather than trust a summary. If you read only one, read the June test, which has the most detailed breakdown. For the Twitch side, see why I quit streaming: Twitch and gaming burnout, and for the short-form question, see my notes on Shorts, Reels and TikToks. These are results from my own channels, and yours will differ.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your own channel's format and numbers, you can book a personal video review at https://jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- Small YouTubers Stop Making Videos. Go Live for 30 Minutes Instead. (July 3, 2026)
- I Tested Every YouTube Format. Live Streams Won. (June 23, 2026)
- How I Stream 3 Hours A Day on Twitch and Upload 3 Videos A Day on YouTube (April 27, 2023)
Small YouTubers Stop Making Videos. Go Live for 30 Minutes Instead.
From my video published July 3, 2026.
Small YouTubers, it is time to stop uploading videos, stop uploading shorts, and crank out live streams, exactly what I am doing right here, right now. This is the most effective thing I have found on YouTube. I know because I have done the most brutal experiment I have ever heard of a YouTuber doing. I started on YouTube in 2011. I deleted 15 channels. I had over a billion views. I deleted all of my platforms online, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, deleted all of them with over a billion views. I got that burned out. I started from scratch this year. I only started up on YouTube again because it is the best platform.
I started six new channels 104 days ago. I have got four and a half million impressions on my videos, almost all of it through organic traffic. I tested Google ads and in my experience it is garbage. I would not do that. And I am now making, from zero 104 days ago, over $1,000 a month now. The single best way I have found to monetize is to have a Skool community where you help people, like I do. And all I have to do is 30 minutes of live stream a day on my channels.
Now, I have six channels. You do not need six channels. These are results from six channels. Nothing. I had no email list. I had nothing to get anybody to watch my videos at all. And these are the results I have got, because I have tested. I have tested shorts, which in my experience are worthless and do not work unless you do certain viral things and copy other people's clips, or you do just a ton of them over time. If you started two years ago, shorts might have worked, but in my experience shorts are worthless for most people most of the time. Uploading videos certainly can work, but the absolute best thing that works for me is live streaming. And I am going to walk you through a bunch of data to support that so you can see exactly the real metrics from my channels, literally 104 days on YouTube from scratch, nothing before this.
The data from six brand-new channels
I have six channels. The top channel, Jerry Banfield ICP. This one is a very niche channel just talking about ICP every day. That is all it talks about. And this one has two and a half million impressions, 1.3 million minutes watched, on a channel that is 104 days old. And the number one most effective thing I have done is live stream. Now, I did get a lot of these impressions from videos, but when I tested videos against live streams, live streams crush it.
Next channel, I did a crypto reviews channel calling out all these garbage altcoin scams. 1.1 million impressions on this channel. 7,800 watch hours monetized. Both these channels are monetized, but I am actually making much more money through my Skool than I am through YouTube ad revenue. And this is great, because you can monetize from day one on YouTube if you make a community. And in my experience the best thing to do is join Jerry Banfield Family so we can talk through all of this stuff together on a weekly call.
So this channel is monetized on YouTube. Right now I am getting $500 plus a month in ad revenue from these channels that are just over three months old, because live streams clean up on watch hours, are super easy to monetize, and live streams really get people to connect with you as a person on a deep level. If you are not good at editing, live streams work, because people expect live streams to be unedited, and I hate editing, which is why I have learned to live stream. If you are not good at live streaming yet, just keep doing it, and you will get better, I promise you.
I have made channels across all different niches though. I have a dating channel that I made now that I am single again and just got divorced. 195,000 impressions on my new dating channel, 25,000 minutes watched, 400 and some watch hours, making progress toward monetization. But again, with all these impressions, I do not have to be monetized. People are going straight to my Skool and joining. I just launched my Skool two or three weeks ago. People have instantly been paying for memberships. And this is the formula right now.
What it actually takes to make money on YouTube
Because what you need in order to make money on YouTube is this. You need to get people to trust you. You need to get people to feel a deep connection with you. And in my experience the easiest way to do that is to do a live stream that is about 20 or 30 minutes long. Most of the time you figure live streams, well, they are too long, nobody is going to watch them. No. You basically do your live stream like it is a video on demand. I am literally leading by the exact example that I am teaching. There is no difference between what I am teaching and what I am doing.
What size PC am I running for my live videos? Check out my Jerry Banfield equipment video, so it is Jerry Banfield YouTube equipment, and I go through all of that, my PC specs and all of that, in that video. Why live streams are so important is because you build a real connection with viewers. You can talk back and forth. Then if you make multiple channels, you can make a channel for one niche audience and bring them over to other channels, and they all promote each other. You can pick six different niches if you want to. When one of them gets traction, they start filling and going over. I have a Jerry Banfield channel, just a main channel where I do whatever I want on there without a specific niche. That channel has 310,000 impressions, 1,600 watch hours, already halfway to getting monetized, lots of watch time minutes. But I am going to walk you through even more detailed metrics that will matter further for why live streams are so good.
Every impression communicates value
Here is my YouTube coach channel. Now, on the surface, people would look at my YouTube coach channel and be like, this is such a bad channel, you hardly get any views on your videos, you get like 50 or 100 views on a lot of your videos. 338,000 impressions. People have seen me and my opinions on YouTube. A thumbnail like this will more than likely go out, even if the video itself only gets 100 views. I will generally get 1,000 to 5,000 impressions. I will communicate with my title and my thumbnail to 5,000 people, or if one person sees it five times, maybe 1,000 people five times. Impressions are what you need to start building a connection with people.
When you focus on giving people a message that is fantastically helpful, this message is so helpful, now join my program. I am not hiding this from you. I am telling you out here, right in the open, exactly what I did. I am modeling it fully. What I am saying is what I am doing. There is no hiding. And just from looking at my thumbnail and my title, I am telling you exactly what to do. That way every single impression I make is communicating valuable information.
Most of these YouTube fake gurus who know way less than I do are just making clickbait that tricks you into watching the video, but you do not sign up for their programs, do you? Because I sure do not. I am like, this beginner YouTuber does not have anything to teach me, because all they did is make some clickbait with useless information in it, and they just happened to finally make one clickbait video that got lucky. What they are doing, they are not communicating any valuable information in their title and in their thumbnail. All they are doing is tricking you into watching a video that does not have information that everybody else is not already saying in their video too. And that is what I do differently. I have said, hey, all you need to do is go live 30 minutes a day. I have sent that idea out and, based on the last videos I have seen, thousands of people are practically guaranteed to receive this idea successfully.
That is how you really crush it on YouTube, because you make every one of your impressions count. If you can laser in on who your audience is, YouTube appears to have shown my videos to the same people five or 10 times very often on this channel. And when you communicate very clear value five or 10 times to somebody, that 10th time they will watch, and then you know what will happen? They will go straight into the Skool community, especially if you are live streaming. When they see you live, and they did not even watch any of your other videos, they just saw your thumbnail, they think, that was helpful. And this is often subconscious.
Somebody may see this post. This is almost certain to happen based on what I have seen already. There are probably five or 10 people who will see this and not even watch it, but the subconscious mind will internalize, Jerry Banfield, YouTube coach, gave me some valuable information. They will think about, maybe I should start live streaming, maybe that is a good idea, this worked for him, it is different from what I have heard before. Then the next time they may see me live, having never watched a video from me, but saw this thumbnail, then see me live, hop in the live stream, and say, hey Jerry, here is my question. I answer a question, or I give an actual human shout-out. And the person thinks, that is so nice, he gave me this helpful information, then he acknowledged me and saw me in the live chat. I am going straight to his Skool and joining right now so I can DM him and get on a weekly call with him. This is the mindset you will crush YouTube with.
This is a mindset. I have got four and a half million impressions, at least four million of these impressions totally organic, totally for free, all of them absolutely on the crypto channels because I cannot advertise that. So these impressions are laying a foundation for me to get up to 10 plus thousand a month within the next few months. I have literally shown you how I started from zero. I am showing you the most effective thing I am doing right now, and it works.
Here is my gaming channel. On my gaming channel, 243,000 impressions on a brand new gaming channel. And what you will notice, the gaming channel has the highest ratio of total watch time to total impressions, because I have done some three-hour live streams. People are going through and watching my live streams after I am live for three hours. I want to know what I can live stream to get you to watch three hours of a game after I am live. So this is a very high ratio of watch time to total impressions.
But look at this. You are asking, well, why am I saying live streams? First off, live streams, as I have said, insanely better conversion, insanely better conversion. Almost every person who has joined my Skool has joined after being on a live stream and after I have shouted them out. Almost everybody has joined that way. And I have got enough data. I know almost everybody who has joined. I personally talk to them and direct message them.
So I know exactly how they got in and why they got in. Almost all of them watch my live streams, talk to me on my live streams, then join from there. Just putting up videos, people are not generally going to give you $96 a month or $960 a year because they watched one video from you. I know, because I have watched a whole bunch of other people and I do not give them anything, because they have not shouted me out. They have not acknowledged me. There has been no two-way interaction. So live streams crush it because of two-way interaction. That is what you need. You need as much two-way interaction as possible if you really want to make sales.
Live streams convert; videos struggle
But even further, let us go to my monetized channels. Here is my ICP channel. Total revenue on eight live streams, $161. Now, this is just on YouTube. Remember, all the Skool revenue, all the Skool revenue comes from live streams. Did they watch some videos first? Yes. But all the people who joined have been on live streams with me before they joined. So all the Skool revenue, but even just on YouTube revenue itself, I did eight live streams for $161 and 15 YouTube video uploads for $192. Average revenue per upload or live stream, $20 for a live stream, $12 for a video. And that is because on live streams, people throw out super chats and jewels. What a jewel is, I do not fully know. Are they trying to copy TikTok with that? Why do we need super chats and jewels and memberships? But my revenue is going to continue going up too, because what I am noticing is the live streams get people to become a member.
Doing videos, it is difficult to convert someone to being a member on a video, because how many channels do you join as a member? So these people join as memberships, and that recurring revenue is absolute gold. Whereas on videos, almost no one. I have seen other people doing this exact thing. I have talked to YouTubers who schedule calls with me, and they said, dude, nobody has joined my membership. I say, that is because you are uploading videos. Why would I join a channel? I do not think I have ever been a member on a channel that just does videos, but I have joined several channels and thrown a lot of money at them, super chats, $100 super chats, gotten their memberships. I have thrown a bunch of money at channels that do live streams where I hang out in the chat and they talk to me. If you have been uploading videos and cannot figure out why nobody is joining your membership, that is exactly the knot I help YouTubers untangle, so join Jerry Banfield Family and we will map out how to switch to live streaming and start converting.
Now, if you have got a smaller channel, you would be like, well, that is nice that you are monetized, but I am not monetized and I am not doing a live stream to nobody in the chat. Look, you should be able to just film it like a video. If you have nobody in your chat, it actually makes it easier, because I do not have to answer questions. I can literally just talk about what I want to talk about the whole time on the live stream and record it like a video. Now, if you are saying, well, I need to edit it, no, you do not. I am seeing a bunch of people that upload unedited videos and get lots of views off of them. And those people, like one creator I will call out in particular, this guy is getting lots of views, thousands of views on his videos, just talking about whatever he is talking about. And he should be doing live streams instead. He would be making so much more money if he was doing live streams, because his videos are unedited, and he would build a community so much faster.
The community effect
So this is the tip of the iceberg about how much more money you make, especially when you look into super tips. It is like super chat, but you keep more of a percentage. Super tip. They just keep adding one thing after another, and that is great. What you get into even further is the community, where people in the live streams start to come together and recognize each other in the live streams as well. And then that makes a great sales pitch. It is like, hey, you have already got these people that you already know in the Skool community. So then you can DM them. You can build a relationship with them. You can talk to the other people that are in the community. When they all start seeing each other in the live streams, then it brings people who are not in the community in there.
The community, even if you do not have a Skool. Skool, to me, is one of the best ways to monetize, because you can build a community around anything. People recognize it. They already have their payment in there. And it is so much easier to just get them to go over there. So live streams will build so much more revenue, so much more community, so much more back and forth. And if you do not have anybody watching, great. Just do it like it is a video. Just record it like a video. Talk off the top of your head. And then when one person shows up, pay attention to them.
Because it makes, I love, I like attention. Obviously, because I am a YouTuber, I like attention, right? Well, when I am watching other people's videos, I like attention too. But when I am watching a video, it is hard for somebody to give me attention. I still watch ICP videos. I am pretty big in the ICP community now, so people actually do shout me out in their videos. But I want to watch live streams where I can get some attention. I want the actual content creator to shout me out, because I will give money for that. So even if you are not monetized, you are going to get monetized way faster.
Live streams win on watch time
Because the average minutes watched, here is another key data point you really need. Look at this. Live streams are heavy hitters for watch time. If you want to get monetized, what is the hardest barrier? It is not subs. Almost anyone can get a few hundred subs to get monetized. It is the minutes watched that tend to be difficult. Look at this. My live streams get two and a half or so times as much watch time per live stream. And that is because when I am actually live, people will sometimes drop what they are doing and jump in so that they can get in the chat. Whereas what kind of video am I going to put out that is going to have that effect, where somebody is just going to drop what they are doing and watch my video?
I have creators I love, like Bobby. Every new video he puts out, I am a member of his channel, even though he does not do live streams. He makes all his videos members only. I have been watching his videos for years. Every time he makes a new upload, I am excited to watch it. But I do not drop what I am doing to watch his video. That is what is special when you do live streams. You will get the maximum click-through when you are live. And that helps get your live streams out there, and that helps get people in.
And it is so nice to interact with your viewers, because on YouTube you can get a lot of toxic and negative and hate comments. But on live streams, you will tend to get a lot of love, and your supporters and your people will show up to give you love and support you and talk to you. And it means something live. When you go live, you will tend to attract a lot of people who want positive attention from you, especially when you are smaller. It is the best experience. Often when you get in bigger live streams, it is all just toxic stuff and people getting banned. And then all the positive stuff kind of gets lost, because you just get so many chats going and so many messages at once, it can be hard to stand out, and then I will pay like $20 to get my super chat so everybody sees it.
Unedited content and the AI test
And also YouTube's algorithm is geared to figure out what kind of content and what kind of viewer fit together. And live streams, if you do unedited videos, you might as well do live streams. Because what happens when people go to watch videos? There are a lot of people that expect videos should be edited. And I am glad I finally learned, after all these years on YouTube, that I hate editing my videos, so I should only live stream. Because when you see that Jerry Banfield YouTube coach was live, you do not expect a perfectly polished video. You know that I am going to ramble on and go on tangents and do 85 sales pitches for my Skool and just put a thumbnail up and talk.
And that is what happens. You get the most random stuff. So many people's edited videos, to me, are just boring. Especially in YouTube coaching, I am going to sleep two minutes into your video, because I have watched so many YouTube videos. I know so much about this. If you are not going to give me some real stuff that actually gives me something better than just the same thing everybody else is saying that AI could tell you, then I am not watching.
And I go through and I use Gemini on these YouTube coach videos. I am like, I guarantee you that this does not have anything useful in it. And I will just put it in Gemini, like, give me something useful. And it is like, no, that 20-minute video had zero value in it, zero, 100% useless. So when I make my content, it is entertaining. It is an experience. You are not just getting information that you could pull out of Gemini. You need to be thinking about your videos. And if you have not been doing that, you should be, because Gemini can turn somebody's 20 or 30 minute sales pitch into a summary. You can just pull the information out of it instantaneously. And you can see from that, if you are not giving information that is so powerful that it is really going to make somebody want to watch the video, they are going to look at the summary and be like, okay, optimize my thumbnails, join a community, rethink my titles, use AI to check my titles.
Shorts are working, but you have to do them just right. What you need to give in your videos is an experience that you cannot get just from summarizing. And that is what I do with my videos. My live streams are entertaining. Now, yes, if you do not know the community guidelines, you have got to watch what you talk about. I know the community guidelines. And that is why I have lots of channels too. If I mess up on one channel, well, it is just on that channel. That does not affect the rest of them. So the best thing you can craft yourself to do on YouTube is to get good at live streaming. Get good at live streaming, and you do that by practicing. And then when people see you were live, they have an accurate expectation, if you are not editing your videos. If live streaming still feels intimidating and you would rather have someone walk you through the confidence and the workflow, you can join me in Jerry Banfield Family and we will get your first streams set up together.
Being live creates desire
And the beauty is that most views on this will probably come after I am live. I hope so, because we have got two or three views on this right now. So we are probably going to have hundreds of views on this after I am live. Most people will watch this after I am live. Well, what happens when you watch this, when I did this live and you missed it? What does that create within you? It creates desire. When you watch this after I am live, what you will have is this desire, like, I want to catch this dude next time he is live. Look at this, talking crazy stuff, answering a question about how do I get a side chick. It is fun. And that is what is missing, especially these days.
There is so much AI slop coming onto the platform, and it is not AI slop you would immediately spot either. I did this big dating video that took like 10 hours, and I recommend you go to the Jerry Banfield dating channel and watch that, because there is tons of incredible research. I am going to go live on there next. The video is called "I Studied 100 Dating Videos So You Can Skip the Nonsense." So I did this massive research with AI, put in like 10 hours. I did a four-hour live stream on that video. And then it is there indefinitely. And the idea with doing these videos is it creates the desire to show up there live if you missed me being live. It is like, I want to catch this guy live so I can get answers to questions, so I can talk to him, so I can get a shout-out, whereas videos do not create that result. When somebody is just uploading videos, it does not create that result. So you want to set yourself up so that you can give that.
How to spot the AI slop
So when I was researching this dating video on my Jerry Banfield dating channel, I went through 100 dating creators. And look, I am pitching the Skool membership in there too. That is what is great. I pitch the Skool membership on my dating, my crypto, my gaming, and my regular channel. Crypto, I pitch it everywhere. And you get a nice diverse community in there.
And I was shocked to find so much of the new dating content is AI generated slop. Now, a lot of people might not be able to spot this. But for example, there is this one video of an AI woman with a golden retriever on a couch behind her. And every single video on this channel, the dog is in the same position on his back. I am like, you lazy fuck. The AI generation is kind of limited, so you risk losing the avatar. But there are so many of these AI slop videos today where they are literally just putting a prompt into ChatGPT. They are putting an image generation prompt in and they are having some fake person, an AI person that does not even exist, which I guess would just be an AI avatar. But it looks like a real person until you are like, that skin does not look right, your skin is a little off, isn't it? My skin looks different every day. You can tell that I am a real person.
But especially in the YouTube coaching niche, I have not seen this as much lately, but in certain niches, there is all this AI junk content. And sadly, people are watching this. They are not realizing it. My friend sent me this video, and I am like, that is an AI video. That is a bad video that somebody made for an ad with AI. That is not actual, that is AI sloppy animation. But then people are making videos that look like they are real people doing a podcast, and they have AI narration, but it sounds like the person. And then people are watching that stuff for dating advice. So how do you stand out from that slop, ugly, nasty AI? Well, live streams. AI cannot do live streams like this.
The future of YouTube favors real humans
And on the future of YouTube, YouTube looks like it is pushing hard to feature human content. At no point in human history that I have seen on YouTube, and I started in 2011, I have done over 10,000 videos online, I have had multiple channels with over 50,000 subs, one channel over several hundred thousand subs, I have never seen it this easy to start from zero with a real human face and a real human message and get views. YouTube's AI seems to be smart enough to do a decent job at detecting real human content, and giving these AI slop channels a kick or shoving them off to the side in the algorithm, which is awesome. So live streams, when you are doing a live stream, people can be almost certain that it is a real human behind it too. And again, a lot of these are subconscious signals that people may not even realize they are taking action on.
Here is another statistic showing you, on my crypto reviews channel, average revenue. Now, this is not spectacular or anything, but this is just, again, YouTube ad revenue. This does not include people joining my Skool. On some of my crypto reviews, people have literally seen one single live stream and went straight in and joined from there. Still, if you look at average income and average minutes watched, live streams are crushing it.
Your simple challenge: 30 minutes live a day
So I invite you, all you have to do on YouTube is 30 minutes. If you have one channel, try to do 30 minutes live every day. And for your workflow, I use a ChatGPT-generated thumbnail. I just dictate into ChatGPT. I say, listen, I am thinking about this, I want to do a video about this, tell me what the hook is, give me some title ideas. I look at what it says. I bounce back and forth and try to find the best title. And I always try to get my titles and thumbnails to communicate something genuinely helpful, even if you never watch the video, because most people on YouTube are not actually even going to watch your video. You are just thinking about making repeated impressions over and over. Every thumbnail and title, you are contributing to how people feel about you with that title and thumbnail. If you want to go deeper on all of this, I have put everything into my my YouTube Coaching playlist.
So I hope this has been insanely helpful information for you. And I am excited. At this rate, in my experience, I am on track to be making 10 plus grand a month in a few months, starting with brand new YouTube channels, documenting all of exactly how I did it and showing you how I have done it the entire time. And I am going to go live on my dating channel next.
I Tested Every YouTube Format. Live Streams Won.
From my video published June 23, 2026.
I tested every format on YouTube in the last year on six brand new channels to see which one would work the best. Shorts, long form videos, anywhere from longer like an hour to just a few minutes, or live streams. And based on my data, live streams are a big winner. That's why I'm doing this as a live stream.
Now, my results are not necessarily what everybody is going to get. But there's a very clear takeaway: if you can live stream, live streaming is the absolute best thing you can do, especially on YouTube currently with the algorithm right now. Live streaming is the best way to be a real human. If you're going to do videos and not live streams, you really do need to edit them for retention to get everything just perfect. But the beauty of live is it's the easiest way to just be an authentic human. It's the only truly interactive experience.
So let me go through the data right now from all the videos I tested to figure this out. And keep in mind, I've been on YouTube since 2011. I've gotten over a billion views online as a creator, and I got so burned out that I deleted and burned all of it to the ground in 2025. I started six brand new channels this year, only on YouTube. I didn't start any other platforms. Technically, I did take an X account somebody held for me.
Why I tested shorts but didn't trust them
I had this conversation with Gemini, which is YouTube's AI. I use all of them — Claude, ChatGPT — and here's the bottom line. I tested doing shorts because I saw some people, like Lord Heck and a few others, getting huge amounts of views with YouTube shorts and tons of subscribers. But my question is this: I want to be a full time YouTuber. I want to make like 10 grand a month consistently. I don't want to put myself in a position where my content is all about somebody else, because yeah, in the short term you can clip viral videos and make some money off it, but you're putting your channel at a lot of different risks. Including that nobody cares about you in particular. But there are other ones too, like copyright strikes, takedowns, lawsuits, copy content, policy violations, and just wasting your time clipping all these other things and not really communicating anything.
So I tested some shorts. And I tested mostly long form videos. And I have six different channels in different niches, so you can see how it looks across all of them.
Channel one: Jerry Banfield ICP
This first one is Jerry Banfield ICP. This is a channel I've had for a while. And keep in mind, I've grown all these channels organically. I tested some paid ads. Those sucked. So I put all those videos unlisted and didn't use them again. In my experience, paid ads were worse than useless. I did some videos about that — paid ads were worse than useless. So everything I'm showing here is organic views. This Jerry Banfield ICP channel also had no paid ads on it because it's a crypto channel.
This one: 82 long forms, four live streams, eight shorts. Total views, 204,000. From long form, 10,000 from lives, 10,000 from shorts. Views per video for shorts and lives were about the same, and lives and longs were about the same. But look at the watch time. Look at the watch time per video. Yes, I got a lot of subs from long form videos, and I got some good revenue from long form videos. But I did 20 times fewer live streams. I did 20 times fewer live streams. If I'd done 20 times more live streams, in my estimation I'd have gotten twice as many watch hours, probably even three or four times. I'd have probably gotten more views per video, and more total views, and probably at least double the revenue, and probably more subs.
Now, the shorts ended up being nearly worthless. Look at the insights. While the shorts got about the same views, you had to publish twice as many shorts to get the same views. The revenue and the watch time for shorts were negligible. Live streams are high value. The live streams are the most efficient format for views per video. They drive significant watch time and revenue relative to the amount of them. Long form is the engine — my standard videos grew the channel. But if I'd just done all live streams, I'd have probably grown even better.
So if your goal is immediate revenue and deep authority, shorts are underperforming. I then put it into averages. Look at these averages: more average views for a live stream, almost double the average watch time, almost triple the average revenue. The only reason I actually got more subscribers from long form is because I started a new channel from scratch and didn't hardly live stream on it. If I had live streamed on it, the average subscribers probably would have been higher, but I already had the subscribers when I started live streaming. So live streams are a revenue and retention powerhouse — the revenue was 150 times more than a short.
Channel two: from crypto to money
Now let's look at a different channel. This was originally crypto content, but I pivoted into money. This channel got a thousand views on average — these are averages this time to make it easier. A thousand average views for a long form, less on a live stream, less on shorts. But look at the average revenue: like almost 50 times more average revenue from a live stream. Keep in mind, this is a smaller channel that just barely got monetized recently, within two months of me starting it. Average subscribers were a little less, but again, I put a lot of videos up.
Look at the average minutes watched though — four times the average minutes watched per live stream. That is huge. Live streaming, and ultimately YouTube, is an attention game. If you really want people to do things like convert on your offers, this matters.
If you want to sell stuff — one on one calls, for example, I just had a one on one call — live streams are so much better because they have more watch time. And if you want to sell something, you're going to need more time with people. The more time you have with people, the more you're going to be able to build trust and turn somebody from a casual viewer into a super fan. Ultimately, if I want you to come join Jerry Banfield Family, you're going to probably need to be a super fan. If this is your first video watching, it's unlikely you're going to book immediately.
Now, I'm an outlier. I like never join anybody else's stuff, because they're offering too little value for too much money and they don't live stream. I don't trust somebody editing some video and trying to make themselves look smart. I trust somebody who can go live and talk off the top of their head to actually know about something. And then maybe I'll think about your offer if it's a great value for the price. And if you want to be able to deliver value, you're going to need to be able to sustain yourself financially. So to me, the number one way to do that is to get those minutes watched up.
Why live streams get more minutes watched
The reason the minutes watched are higher comes down to two big reasons with live streams. First, when that notification pops up — Jerry Banfield is live — people often drop what they're doing and come watch, whereas it's easy to scroll past another video. And second, the live streams tend to be longer and they're interactive with the viewers, which makes them more interesting than some edited video.
Also, for me, I hate editing videos. If you hate editing videos, you've got to live stream, because long form videos that are unedited just consistently don't do very good. The live stream is nice because if you're not going to edit your videos like me, the live stream sets the expectation up front that it's going to be unedited, which is really helpful. (I've written more about this in why you don't need to edit your YouTube videos to go viral.) What I can see with the different formats is that you want to give people clear expectations up front. When you see that Jerry Banfield YouTube coach was live for 30 minutes, you know it's a live stream. You know it's not going to be some edited, polished video. You know it's going to be real and raw off the top of my head.
That is the hardest thing right now for AI to do. AI can crank out videos. AI can crank out shorts. AI cannot functionally jump in and do a live stream like this — interact with the audience and do all of it in real time. Maybe in a few years it will be able to. But right now, that is something that gives the highest level of human experience. And for people wanting a human experience, live streams are extremely attractive.
Make your live streams watchable after you're live
Now, I tested in the past doing all kinds of live streams, AFK live streams — never do that. And the key with live streams is to make them watchable after you're live. The biggest mistake I see people make with live streams, and that I've made myself, is doing YouTube live streams like you do Twitch live streams. Nobody's going to watch a Twitch live stream after you're live, unless you go viral or something — for changing your race like I did. Unless you go viral changing your race like I did, then people watch your video on demand. But other than that, nobody's going to watch your Twitch video on demand.
On YouTube, you want to do live streams that essentially are a video. I've made the mistake on YouTube of doing this three, four, five, six hour live stream. Nobody's going to watch that afterwards. That makes sense if you have a huge following and you're trying to optimize for cash flow and attention and concurrent viewers. But if you want to build your audience and optimize for overall money and growth, every live stream should be done like it's a video. So I never do an introduction to my live streams. I never have a "going live" screen. I never have anything like that.
I mean, if you have enough followers, you can get away with crap like that. But if you want to grow, and you're watching this, you probably want to optimize every second of your live stream so that as soon as you hit live, you start talking like it's a video.
More data: the dating and gaming channels
Now we'll go through the rest of the data. On Jerry Banfield Money, the live stream drastically outperformed in revenue and minutes watched. And notice, this was only one single live stream on this channel against nine shorts and 25 long form videos.
Next channel: Jerry Banfield Dating. Nine shorts, a crappy amount of views, only 13 watch hours. 21 videos, 3,400 views, 124 watch hours. But look — I just did the second live stream on that channel. One live stream, 117 views, 18 hours of watch time. So do the multiplication on that. If you multiply that by 20, it might have gotten fewer views, but multiply the watch time hours by 20, and you're looking at a huge increase in watch time hours and more subscribers.
I'm just breaking down why live streams to me are the dominant form of content to make on YouTube, especially as a beginner. Even if you think "I can't talk live like you do, I can't just talk off the top of my head" — practice. I've done thousands and thousands of hours of live streaming, and the best way to get good at talking off the top of your head is live streaming and just practicing at it. Now, I have a presentation in the background here, but on some videos I just literally have a background up and talk. This one made sense to be data driven.
So if you look at the live stream numbers on the dating channel, I probably would have gotten many more subscribers, much more watch time, and I probably actually would have gotten more views also, compared to just doing videos. With just one live stream, I generated more watch time than all nine of my shorts combined.
People ask where I do my thumbnails — I just crank them out on ChatGPT. I have the $100 a month ChatGPT and crank them out on there.
Now here's the Jerry Banfield Games channel. On this channel I did a number of live streams that were not as engaging, like where I was just playing a video game in the background. Notice on this one, on my Jerry Banfield Games channel, I actually got one video to get like 4,000 views, even though I had like barely 100 subscribers. One video got like 4,000 views. That was an outlier though. The one video did take off, but here's the thing: if I had done a live stream of that same game, Hearts of Iron 4, I almost guarantee you I'd get more watch time and probably about the same amount of views, if not more, but probably double the watch time.
While on this gaming channel shorts did get a decent amount of attention, look at the subscribers. The one live stream I did got seven subscribers. The nine shorts got six subscribers. And yes, this one looks like it didn't include some of the newest subscribers, because I actually got more than that. But the shorts were the least effective tool for gaining subscribers. And to me, subscribers are what you really need if you want to monetize on YouTube. The long form videos accounted for 81% of my total watch time. That's because I had some that went off. If I'd have done all of the long form in the same format as a live stream, it would have been much higher.
So those are the data from several different channels. Across all different kinds of content, it's very clear: live streams overall are the best thing for me to do.
The sweet spot is a 20 to 40 minute live stream
I'll show you some actual videos from my gaming channel. On this gaming channel, here's one — I got 5,000 views on a five minute video on my channel. But if I had live streamed this, I probably would have gotten about the same amount of views. Except instead of a three minute video, the average watch time probably would have been a 20 or 30 minute average watch time if I did an hour or two hour live stream.
But now what I'm doing with my live streams is keeping them generally to a maximum of 40 minutes, a minimum of 20 minutes. That way, I can go live and make a video on demand that's worth watching, but not go so long that it's just blowing up your time. There seems to be a sweet spot on YouTube where if you hit a certain length, then people watch the whole video. Like this one yesterday I did on the crypto channel — I actually got double the views on this live stream that I got on the recent video. The watch time on the live stream compared to the video is crazy. The live stream was so much higher.
What I want to do also is have the most consistent format: live streaming. If I just do all live streams — there are a lot of people who watch shorts, they don't watch long form videos or live streams, and vice versa. There are lots of people who watch long form content, mostly edited videos; they don't watch live streams, they don't watch shorts. YouTube knows which people like to watch live streams, and I need to find my people. If you are trying to figure out which format and which niche will actually surface your people, I would love to dig into that with you, so join Jerry Banfield Family and we will build your plan around it together.
Find your people
What's important is to find your people on YouTube, and live streaming is the easiest way to get ahold of your people for most of us, because it's the most real, the most raw, the most human, the most authentic. With everything happening with AI on YouTube right now, and all this AI slop that's getting ground out, and everybody doing all this insane editing, the way to stand out to me is to be live. If you want to dig deeper into this mindset, I've shared a lot of it in why I love being a "failure" on YouTube, and you can also watch more of my newest videos in my YouTube Coaching playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGI0fuGonTRbfcxe3FLYWqbgcPXOBmKC0.
There's a point people raise that shorts are great for instant subs but can fry channels — that managing a few big ones leads to an average view duration of 10 seconds, and that everything besides shorts dies since everyone is used to shorts, not long form. Well, here's the thing. YouTube knows which people like to watch live streams. So when you just live stream, YouTube is trying to find the people it already knows are likely to watch live streams. It's trying to show your content to them.
Dating is a perfect example. If I'm putting out videos that are unedited, I might as well be live streaming, because my unedited videos are competing with everybody else's edited videos. Whereas when I go live, like I just did on my Jerry Banfield dating channel, I'm not competing with people's unedited videos. Well, in some ways I might be, but in other ways I'm the only live channel on YouTube talking about dating, or one of the very few.
While the initial dating video, while it was live, got four views — it actually got like nine, but the studio said four — here's the thing. This live stream could end up getting 100 views, or 80 views. But the goal is how much watch time. The more watch time someone spends on my video, the more likely they are to watch the next one. So imagine if, instead of doing all these videos on this dating channel where the most got 600 views, I had done all live streams instead, and YouTube's whole algorithm was pointed at live viewers and live streams, and everybody who watched on average watched much longer.
This is June 23rd when I'm recording this. You'll be able to see how I progress over time as I do every single video live from now on. And I'm really excited, because in the past I've had the sense that I should just live stream and I shouldn't even do videos, because I don't edit, and you really have to edit. I'm really excited to see where this goes in the future.
Live streaming across multiple niches
What's really cool is that, being full time now — well, I've been a content creator, I haven't done anything else for work besides this, I haven't done a job or anything since 2012 — I have all these different niches I can live stream to. And then sometimes people will go subscribe to another one. That's a unique feature of live streams. With videos, if I'm doing a five minute video about dating, it can be hard to get enough of you interested that, if you also play video games, you'll watch that dating video and then go over and watch my gaming videos, or listen to my music, or find my other YouTube channels.
But live streams are so deep. For example, my ICP crypto channel currently has the most views. And keep in mind, all of these channels were created within the last three months — this is starting from scratch. What you also don't realize is that for this many views, I probably got 10,000 or 20,000 impressions on this live stream and then a couple thousand views. So people know that I live stream. And what happens is people from this live stream — a few of them went over and subscribed to my dating channel, because I mentioned I'd be doing a dating live stream. A few people went over and subscribed to my gaming channel. So when I go live on two or three different channels, I get two or three different notifications. And if somebody's in the mood for one of those one day, they come by and hang out. A number of the people from this ICP crypto channel went over and subscribed to the Crypto Reviews channel. So that's the beauty: when you do live streams, it's really easy to cross promote all the different stuff you do.
Live streaming and conversions
As I said earlier, when you've got enough attention for long enough, then everything gets much easier. Since I've started switching to live streaming, I don't have enough data yet, but it seems like the conversion on people actually going and joining went up. Which makes sense, because in a 30 minute live stream I can mention my community two or three times — statistically, lots of people are only going to hear the first one. And it also seems reasonable that when I'm talking for 30 minutes, I can mention it a few times for less amounts of time, when it's relevant. Whereas if I'm doing a five minute video, I often get stuck doing a one minute outro, which leaves the video on a not-as-good note.
So live streams, to me — I hardly see anybody on YouTube talking about how amazing live streams are. And from my experience, I'm all in on live streams. I'm not doing any more videos or shorts. The only time that's worth doing is if you can totally outsource it. I've thought about trying to do it with AI, but that's distracting too — you need a human to supervise it, and you can only do so much work. I've tried clipping my live streams, but then you have to upload another video. So at some point, if I was making 20 or 30 thousand a month, I might just record all my lives, send them to somebody, and have somebody put them together and upload them all completely without my input. But even there, you're taking additional risks — that somebody screws up, or a community guidelines violation, or who knows.
There's a crazy live stream workflow some people use: you go live, export the live in YouTube studio, so that one live can become one to five long forms. I've actually got an easier workflow than that. In the past, I've broken some of my clips — I'll just hit record on OBS, talk, and then I'll have a clip already done, so I don't have to do anything else with it. But that makes for not as good of a live stream experience. That makes more sense if I'm doing an hour or two hour long live stream. If I'm just trying to make a video on demand, and I'm doing a live stream for two hours and then take five clips out of it and upload those clips, it'd be better to just do more live streams for less amounts of time than to try and clip all those. If I'm going to put energy into titles and thumbnails, I should just do the live stream once.
Going viral versus steady growth
There's a common belief that live streams are more algorithm friendly, that most viral videos are five to ten minutes, and that live streams are good for connection but not views. Well, yes — if you want to go viral, the little five to 15 minute videos are certainly effective. But even Mr. Beast is now uploading 30 minute long videos. So to me, a 20 to 40 minute video with an average set at like 30 minutes is absolutely ideal.
And I've had live streams go viral. As I said, with the race change example — I changed my race and that went viral. A live stream can go viral. Now, I'm not trying to get stuff to go viral these days, because when you're trying to build a community, you don't need to go viral. What you need is to develop people to discover you, to find you, and to develop and deepen relationships over time. So what I'm looking to do is just consistently, steadily grow over time.
What doesn't work well is suddenly going viral. Your whole business system breaks. Your mindset goes crazy. And then two years later, you feel like you're starting over and you have nothing. So I aim for consistent, regular growth. I know a lot of YouTube teaches you to try and go viral, but I don't like editing videos. I'm not paying a video editor. And it seems like, to me, I really love live streams more than any other form of content. Live streams are the only thing I'll drop what I'm doing and go watch somebody for. I don't care how good your video is. A live stream just instantly cuts through the rest of the feed. This whole approach lines up with how I think about creating in general — I've described it before as how YouTubers follow the Cult of Done Manifesto.
The League of Legends live stream that beat everything
There's no point in me pretending otherwise. I've tried uploading thousands and thousands of videos. And one of my very top YouTube videos ever was a live stream. It was a sloppy live stream with a long, awkward intro.
I did a League of Legends stream 10 years ago where I hired this professional League of Legends player who had retired and was coaching. I paid him 30 euros, and I titled it "Can a pro coach help me get out of bronze in League of Legends?" And this live stream literally took two or three minutes of me trying to connect to Skype, share my screen with him, and get the live stream going. It was a long, awkward intro. And then I played one game of League of Legends — me paying $30, doing a live stream — that got 800,000 views on YouTube, all organically. It made me an entire League of Legends following. And then I was getting hundreds of concurrent viewers all the time on all my League of Legends streams after that.
So that actually outperformed everything. That was the highest viewed organic video on all of my YouTube channels, and it was a live stream. It was an inspired live stream, to be sure. But the live stream pairs the best with me. I had some other videos technically with millions of views, but I advertised those to kind of rank them in the algorithm. Most of those videos, I could have done them live as well. That one League of Legends video destroyed the algorithm — it was one of the most popular League of Legends videos for quite a while. It got me tens of thousands of subscribers off of one single video.
So of all the content I've done on YouTube, a live stream was the number one organic piece of content I ever did. And that's good for me to remember going forward. In fact, if I had to do YouTube again, I probably would live stream the entire time and never do videos outside of right when I first started. If I had just only done live streams on YouTube over the years, I think it would have been a totally different thing.
Going forward: only live streams
So going forward, I'm only doing live streams, and I think I've made it really clear why. And it's so cool too — I love the interaction. I love having the audience for live streams. But you should do live streams as if there is an audience. Just pretend, if there's not an actual audience, that there's an audience, and perform. The smaller you are, just act as if there's an audience. That is practice. And what's cool is you never know which live stream could blow up. I could do a video game stream that gets 10,000 plus views, and all my other channels could get hundreds of subscribers from that video. Then I could have a dating video blow up off of that.
The thing is, if I'm doing videos and live streams both, it's kind of segmenting my content. But if I laser in and do only live streams for everything I do on YouTube, then from there we can specialize, monetize, and visualize.
One final point. What's really nice on live streams too is that if someone watches a video that was previously live, it can create a desire. It's like, "Hey, I missed the live stream, but next time this guy goes live, I want to catch him live." And that sets up a much deeper relationship where you watch live and interact for free. We build free community, and from there it's much easier to step into something paid versus if you just watch videos. There are people that showed me their paid community a hundred times, and I still am not even thinking about joining. But if I had been on their live streams, hanging out with the community, and other people in the community were telling me about it in the chat, then I probably would have joined. That's exactly the kind of free-to-paid path I'm building — first you hang out live, then you go deeper.
I'm really excited because what's cool is I have all these different niches I can live stream to, and live streaming is the easiest way to find your people, deepen relationships, and grow steadily over time. Going forward, every single video I do is going to be live.
How I Stream 3 Hours A Day on Twitch and Upload 3 Videos A Day on YouTube
From my video published April 27, 2023.
My friends, if you're a content creator, a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer, and you want to be more productive, you want to get more videos out there faster and stop wasting your time, you'll love to see the way I track my videos and my live streams and the exact system I use to produce so much in such a short period of time. I'm a full-time YouTuber. I have five channels, and I'm a Twitch streamer. I stream about three hours a day on Twitch playing Gods Unchained, which is a crypto NFT customizable card game. And then, on average, I upload three YouTube videos a day. This rarely takes me longer than about five hours in a single day. So this means I'm live for about three hours. In the other two hours, I crank out and upload two videos plus a recording of my live stream, including thumbnails, titles, and all of that.
Yes, my mind is obsessed with constantly coming up with title and thumbnail ideas for my channels, and I've got several different channels here. The key I've found over the years to being successful, especially as a content creator, but in any aspect of life, is to track it.
Track everything, every day
I have a scale every morning that I use to track my weight, which helps me stay in shape and never go back to being fat again. After being overweight most of my life, I'm tired of that, and my scale keeps me accountable. I can see exactly how much I weigh. I go to AA meetings, Alcoholics Anonymous, most days during the week to track my sobriety and to be accountable to other people. And for my work, I have a spreadsheet where I put down exactly what I do, and then I average this out.
This spreadsheet adds up and averages everything I'm doing. So you can see that in the last month I've been live about 100 hours and I put up about 112 videos. The number one mistake I see content creators make is doing it all on your own, not having anyone experienced who actually talks to you and looks at what you're doing. In my experience, the best way to fix that today is to stop working in isolation and get around other creators who are doing the same thing. If you'd like to work with me on this and see the exact system I use, the best way is to join the Jerry Banfield Family community, where I share the tracking spreadsheet and everything else I've learned.
My daily live stream on Twitch
What I do every day is I go live on my Twitch. I'm grateful I finally found a game on Twitch that I love playing and that people love watching. I just started playing this game again after taking a few months off. So if you look back to last month and the month before, I barely was even streaming on Twitch. I finally figured out exactly what I want to do with myself and what other people want to watch, and I've committed to a consistent time. I'm putting in a lot of time. I stream at the same time if I can, as many days a week as I can. And if I can't, well, I just stream whenever I can that day. So I'm usually live between about 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. during the weekdays, and then I try and hit that time on the weekends or in the afternoon as well.
So I do my live stream on Twitch playing Gods Unchained. Then I have a new gaming channel I just made a few months ago, and I record that entire live stream and upload it. The secret is that I actually start out each live stream by looking at the deck I'm playing that day. Gods Unchained is kind of like Magic: The Gathering or Hearthstone, and I've seen what other YouTubers are doing for those games. So I make the beginning of the video very watchable and very clickable, and a few people stick around and watch the whole thing. My average watch time is 10 plus minutes. It only takes me about five minutes to upload my live stream to YouTube, and yet I'm getting followers consistently going back and forth. People from YouTube come over and follow on Twitch.
Find synergy across platforms
If you really want to be successful as a content creator, you need to find a synergy among the different platforms. I have tested every different thing you could imagine in the last 12 years as a content creator. If you want to live stream, Twitch is the only place to stream. And the best place to create content is on YouTube, and the main thing to create on YouTube is long-form videos. Therefore, if you want to be a Twitch streamer and a YouTuber, stream on Twitch and pick a YouTube channel that you can upload all your Twitch streams to.
However, if I just did Gods Unchained and streaming on Twitch, this actually costs me more money by the time I buy the cards, give away gods, and so on. This is purely a loss. So I'm grateful I'm able to make thousands a month on a new crypto channel. I'll do a video soon showing my exact income from YouTube and my other income. But long story short, this crypto channel pays the bills. If you want to be a content creator, you do need to figure out something you're going to create that pays the bills, that you can create relatively quickly. These crypto videos don't take me that long to create. A lot of these crypto videos, I can make a 20-minute video like this in about an hour or so of work time.
My studio setup and why I don't edit
Up in the studio here I've got a very efficient setup with six monitors and two different computers, a streaming one and a gaming one. The gaming and recording is on those two, and I'm recording this on my other PC. I've got my setup very efficient, and the key for me is that I don't edit most of my videos. I'm able to achieve that by, well, setting my standards a little bit lower, which saves a ton of time, and by practice. I've done over 10,000 videos and live streams in the last 12 years. I'm practiced at talking with no script, just from the heart, because if you actually know this stuff, if your brain is already used to it, you can just say it. A script is for people who either don't really know things, or who aren't confident about what they do know, or who are into perfectionism.
Now, some of you would argue that a script and doing very edited videos is more considerate of your viewer's time. What I've found as a content creator is that it's more important, generally, to just grind out content consistently, ideally every day. If you really want something to grow, you want to put something out almost every day.
Segment your content by channel
I have five YouTube channels. On this old one, I made the mistake of constantly putting out videos on every topic on one channel, and that absolutely doesn't work because of the low click-through rate and the low watch time, which kills any recommendations you're going to get out of YouTube. What does work is carefully segmenting your content. So if I put crypto videos on my crypto channel, gaming videos on my gaming channel, business videos on my business channel, and recovery videos on my recovery channel, that works great for the algorithm. I generally get a video out every day on my crypto channel and every day on my gaming channel, and then I aim to get out a few a week on my business and recovery channels.
These are essentially bonus channels for me, where I can feel the joy of sharing my knowledge on how to be a content creator and entrepreneur online, and where I can share my knowledge about things like sobriety, health, and recovery on my recovery channel. You could argue that right now the crypto channel pays all the bills and these three I just do for fun at this point. However, the longer I keep grinding all these channels out, the more people from the crypto channel go over to the other ones, people from the other ones find the crypto channel, and it all feeds on itself. Someday, perhaps relatively soon, the crypto channel will have a hundred thousand subs and all these other channels will have thousands of subs and be monetized, and I won't have to do any more work. I just keep doing four or five hours a day of work, and I keep doing my spreadsheet.
Why long-form and live wins
I've done so much research, and to me this is the most efficient creative format. The live stream is the highest quality of what I create. You can come hang out on Twitch, which is just Jerry Banfield. I'm generally going to be doing a lot of work on my crypto channel, and I'll answer as many questions as I can. I give away crypto, I'm playing a video game, we're having fun, and we have a great community. For me, I love watching people live whenever I can. Then the videos allow me to get access to the YouTube algorithm, which is the best algorithm in the world for bringing high-quality, relevant traffic.
I've tried TikTok. I've gone viral on TikTok, I've got millions of views, I've got tens of thousands of followers relatively easily, and it sucks. They're worthless. What you really need, if you want to be successful as a content creator, is to make a meaningful connection with someone, and usually you need to do that in long-form videos. In most cases, you need five minutes to an hour of somebody's time to make a meaningful connection. That's why often starting a new channel can be a bit daunting, but if you have several channels and you live stream, you can bring people from one channel to another, from your live stream to your other channels, and then you can grow and build relationships with people over time. If you want to be a YouTuber and/or a Twitch streamer, this is the absolute best way to do it.
I love what I do. I'm able to crank out thumbnails really fast. If you get into the upper echelons of YouTube, like MrBeast, at his level he's paying other people to do his thumbnails, to research the thumbnails, to film the video topics. He has a huge staff that helps with everything under his guidance and direction. Well, most of you are going to be working by yourself, and I have optimized my system for doing it by yourself. I've optimized a system where I have no video editors that I pay and no graphic designers that I pay. If you want to do this as a YouTuber or a Twitch streamer, you really need at least five hours a day, seven days a week. And then you need to make your time worth it.
Why I Don't Edit or Script My Videos
If you're wondering how my videos can be pretty good quality when I don't edit them and I don't script anything beforehand, here's the honest answer: I literally just get the idea for a topic in my head, bring up whatever I need in the background, and start talking. Then I upload it straight from there. Some of these I've taken 10 or 20 minutes to put together a little presentation in the background, because sometimes that can greatly enhance the quality of what I'm showing you. But for something like entering into a spreadsheet, it's really just about showing up consistently and loving what I do. I'm genuinely grateful that I'm able to be so efficient every single day.
Part of that efficiency comes from what I do in the rest of my life. When I've got five hours here to crank these live streams and videos out, that requires me to have high energy. It requires me to be in good health. It requires me to be in a good emotional state. I can't do a good live stream or make good videos if my heart is closed or my mind is all screwed up. There's a lot of pressure being a content creator, because whatever I'm going to give you is based on where I'm at. The crypto channel has just done great, and these are all organic views. I don't run any paid ads. All I do is share my videos on Twitter, on a new Twitter account I made, and on my Facebook page. Almost all the traffic comes in straight from YouTube organic, from the browse features and from search.
How I Take Care of Myself Off Camera
I'm able to do this because I take great care of myself the rest of the day when I'm not on camera. I'm hanging out with my family. I'm cleaning up around the house. I'm at yoga about five days a week, an hour each time. I go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting for an hour. I spend about an hour every day with my mom, who lives across the street, and a few hours every day with the family. I eat a mostly whole plant vegan diet, mostly in the morning and around lunchtime after I get up. I get eight to nine hours in bed every night, with about seven to eight hours of actual sleep, because I go to bed and then rest and meditate. I'm in bed around 10 p.m. most nights and up at 7 a.m.
I'm not out here grinding like some of the YouTubers and content creators I see burning themselves out, working a job and cranking videos out on top of it. I'm not doing that. In my experience, keeping everything balanced in my life is exactly what lets me keep producing. And I keep track of what I put out right here, because I've tested it. I've tested trying to create fewer things that are higher quality, and for most of us it just doesn't work. Most of us simply need to grind.
Grind First, Hire Help Later
If I grind enough to get my YouTube channel making tens of thousands of dollars a month, which I've done in the past on this channel, back when I was teaching courses, and originally on crypto here, then I can afford to pay a video editor to go through and clean everything up. I could pay somebody to do a whole bunch of crypto research for me and then just read a presentation. Sure, I may consider taking the quality of my videos up one day. But I don't want to do that until I have way, way more money than I need to make it happen.
What I've done in the past is I've been too quick to hire video editors. I was making tens of thousands a month live streaming on Facebook, and I did hire. The problem was that by the time I hired a video editor, told him what I wanted, and trained him to edit the videos, in a lot of cases I could have just clipped it and done the work myself. So if you're a content creator, in my experience you realistically need to plan on doing everything yourself. That can seem like a daunting task, but what I've found is all I needed to do was learn a few key skills.
The Equipment and Workflow That Keep Me Fast
I use Adobe Photoshop to make some of these thumbnails. The thumbnail I made yesterday is a good enough thumbnail. I've got a green screen right behind me in my studio, and I keep a whole list of all the equipment I use. The main place you do want to invest money as a creator is on equipment that makes your workflow faster. This camera is a Canon XA11 that I got used for a thousand dollars, and the picture quality is very nice. I plug it into a Cam Link 4K into my computer and it looks great. Then I use OBS to record everything, and I have a Stream Deck.
When I first started as a YouTuber, I was on a laptop with a crappy camera and a crappy mic, and my filming process was really slow. I could crank out a video about like I do today, but then it took so long to take my microphone audio, put it in with the camera, render the video, and edit it. My computer was slow, and I hated that it took 10 minutes to film a video and about an hour to upload it. Now it takes me about 20 minutes to film a 20 minute video. I hit record to start, talk, hit record again, and immediately upload. That is what allows me to do so much in such a short period of time.
Yes, sometimes I foul up the very beginning of a video. But I've gotten to a place where either the video is useful and helpful to somebody or it's not. Don't worry so much about whether you got every word right. If you're Mr. Beast trying to get 100 million views, sure, you should probably scrutinize every single frame to make the video as good as it can be. But most of you are never going to get there, and that's fine. Mr. Beast grinded like crazy on YouTube until he was making enough money and had a big enough following to pay all those people to optimize every single minute of his videos. I watched a lot of his earlier videos, and they were as bad as some of my early videos. This workflow is ideal for getting to a place where, if you do make a ton of money and get a ton of followers, you can always pay for help. But I'd prefer to never have to pay for help and to just be able to do everything with the workflow I've got.
Why a Mentor Beats Figuring It Out Alone
The main thing with content creation is that people just get used to and comfortable watching the same people over and over again. That's why I've got these other channels. If you found me on my crypto channel and you're also a content creator, you'd probably rather listen to me talk about creating than somebody else. If you've been watching my gaming videos and you're also into crypto or recovery, you automatically have a much higher chance of wanting to hear me on those subjects, just because I'm familiar.
If you're brand new at this, one of the worst things you can do is try to watch all these videos and figure it all out for free. That's exactly why a mentor is so helpful. If you want to be successful in something, get somebody who has been in it and done the very thing you think would be amazing to achieve. The best way to do that with me today is to join my community, where you can drop all your questions and I can give you answers that took me a lot of time and energy to figure out, like what's the best camera to use. Come work with me directly over at the Jerry Banfield Family.
I love helping creators, and I've helped a lot of creators be successful over the years. Joe Paris has done coaching with me and had a bunch of video calls with me. I was talking to him before he set his crypto channel up, and I helped him get the idea, follow through, and stay accountable on getting it going. I hang out with other successful content creators and YouTubers, and that community is where I can pass all of that along. I'm a full time YouTuber and Twitch streamer, and I make great money. At this rate I should easily earn about $100,000 this year. Last year was kind of rough. I only made $30,000, did a lot of trial and error, and got demonetized on Facebook while I was making $10,000 a month. It was a rough year as a creator, but we're right back in the game this year, and if anything I expect to see new all time highs with my income over the next couple of years.
While I know all of this may look amazing to you, it's just normal to me, because I've been doing it so long. If you want to go deeper on all of this, you can watch my YouTube Coaching playlist and check out those other channels too. So whether you're a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer, or any kind of content creator online, I hope this has been helpful for you. I would truly love to get to know you better and see what you go on to build.