The Creator Dream Is Not Dead
I saw a video saying that the creator dream is dead, that you can get millions of views and not get any watch time or any money. I'm here to tell you that's not true at all. Within the last 100 days, I started completely from scratch. I had zero channels. I had no accounts anywhere with any followers, because I got burned out last year after being a full-time YouTuber since 2011. When I started on YouTube in 2012, I went full-time, and I got really burned out last year. I had millions of followers and billions of views, and I deleted all of it. Every channel on everything, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, I deleted all of it. I started from zero, and that was about 100 days ago.
So I had no monetized channels, and I've got 147,000 views in the last 28 days, and at least $1,500 in income coming in. I'm literally just making videos at my house and publishing them. I'm not doing anything else for work. The creator dream is alive and well, but there are certain things you need to know to make this work, and I'll share them with you here totally for free.
Two Easy Ways to Monetize at Any Following Level
If you want to monetize, in my experience there are two awesome, easy ways for anyone to monetize at any level of following. First, you get a website, which you can set up very cheaply with Cloud Code on the Internet Computer. Second, if you want to monetize, you want a community, and I've found Skool is the best place to host a community. I've made almost a thousand dollars in the first two or three weeks of launching my community. Skool is one of the easiest ways I've ever seen to make money from YouTube, because when you show people how to do stuff well, they're going to need help. You schedule calls on Zoom. That's how I've made the majority of my income here, through Skool and one-on-one calls.
I also do get YouTube ad revenue, but at least around half of these views are not monetized, because four of my channels, Jerry Banfield Games, Jerry Banfield Dating, Jerry Banfield, and this Jerry Banfield YouTube Coach, are not monetized. So I'm not getting any ad revenue on those, but you don't need ad revenue to make money. What you need to do is make videos that help people. You can help people by giving them information, you can help people by relating to them and showing them where you're at, and you can help people by entertaining them. Ideally, if you can do all three of those in the same video, you will crush it. That's what I do.
Why Live Streams Work Best for Me
The best way to do all of that, for me, is to do live streams. But if you're better at shorts, if you're better at editing videos, you've got to figure out what you do best. To me, the thing that gives you the highest quality human experience is to do live streams, and to do shorter live streams. This one will be 20 minutes minimum, 40 minutes maximum. It's a live stream where I'm literally talking off the top of my head. There's no outline or anything in the background. I have no script. I just know this stuff, so I'm sharing it here with you. The goal is that your videos give people massive value, and then you set up simple, straightforward ways for people to get back to you.
You can make additional money by affiliate selling, which means selling somebody else's thing with an affiliate link. You can also make money with sponsorships. So you don't even have to monetize the same way I do. But what I'm telling you is the creator dream is alive, and everybody else is just giving you fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Yes, people are getting burned out. That's why I quit last year. But why did I get burned out? Because sometimes when you're an influencer and a creator and you've got all these followers, they can end up becoming a burden and actually sending the algorithm negative signals. I've actually been really satisfied clearing out all my old channels, getting rid of all the people who followed me more than a decade ago, and starting fresh to give the algorithm better, consistent signals. Then I niched my content.
Do It for Passion, Not Just the Paycheck
The idea is that if you go and try to help somebody and entertain somebody every day, and you have fun doing it, you're not even really working anyway. This is just a conversation I would want to have with myself. I literally am talking to myself about this same stuff anyway, so I might as well record it and share it with you. If you're going to be a creator, ideally you should have a passion for this and not just be doing it for money, because there are lots of ways you could sell your soul to try and just get a paycheck, and you might get paid better with job stability, health insurance, and so on.
I love being a creator because, one, I can't stand having a boss trying to tell me what to do and when I should do it and where I should do it. And two, I love just coming on YouTube and being a content creator. I can show up when I feel like it and I can talk about what I feel like talking about. My goal is to help expand people's minds and to help teach. There are so many fake YouTube gurus out there that if you try to actually apply the stuff they're telling you, it wouldn't work. But I just did all this stuff on myself, and I'm telling it to you for free.
So with your creation, what you need to think about is, what are you so passionate about that you would create it even if nobody watched it? That's important. But you also need to think about what kind of content is so in demand that if you created it, people would watch damn near anything. You need to combine the two of those. Ideally you can do them both together, but sometimes you just might need to do something just for you.
Why I Stopped Locking Myself Into One Niche
I've found that trying to niche down and pick one thing, like crypto for example, can backfire. All the experts over the years and my own expertise led me to conclude a few years ago that I should just do crypto and nothing else, because crypto is where I made the most money, got the most views, and there was the most demand for my videos. The thing is, when you're a creator, if you just lock in your creativity like that, I got to hate doing my crypto videos. I wanted to make music. I wanted to play games. I wanted to talk dating. I wanted to talk YouTube coaching. I wanted to talk health and fitness and esoteric ideas and philosophy. But when I just showed up trying to do YouTube like a job by itself, that was boring, and I hated it, so I ended up deleting everything.
What you want to do is make YouTube fun, but also make YouTube profitable. So you need at least one channel that is just a fun channel, where you don't worry about getting views at all and you just have fun. Then you need a channel where you ask, okay, where can I help? You do need at least some channel that is there to get views. That is your job channel.
My Job Channel and Finding Content Gaps
I have my Jerry Banfield ICP channel, and this channel has gotten the most views. It has 238,000 views since I created it on March 21st, 2026, which was just over 97, 98, 99 days ago. This channel is my job channel, and I try to go live on it almost every day. I'm not getting huge amounts of views. I get a thousand or a couple thousand views on most of my videos. I also found the format I can create the best. What I do best is live streams. That's the hardest kind of content to create, and it also creates an expectation that I'm live, that I'm talking off the top of my head, that this is not some scripted, perfectly edited video. So I found that live streams are the best thing for me to do. On a monetized channel, they make me the most money per minute of content. I've also tried shorts, and shorts suck for me. Unless you love doing shorts and watch shorts all the time, my shorts have been mostly worthless, but I tested some to make sure. Live streams are the best.
So this is my work channel. My job is to create content about ICP. One, I personally believe in it, but two, there's a huge demand. If you go create a channel on Internet Computer Protocol, or ICP, I'm not going to totally guarantee you anything, but in my experience there's a very high probability that anyone creating content on ICP will get viewers, because there's a content gap. There are people who are desperate for great ICP videos and will watch ICP content every day, and there's simply not enough content. There are content gaps all over the place.
Let me give you another example of a content gap. On my gaming channel, I found a content gap in a game called Hearts of Iron 4. I did a video titled "Worst Hearts of Iron 4 Player Ever," and it got 5,000 views when most of my videos before that were getting 20, 30, 10, or 100 views. That is a content gap. When I do a video about Hearts of Iron, instead of 10 views, I get 400 views. I test out different games and try to play what I like, and what you need is a content gap. You need an area where people want videos and are very happy to see anyone creating. Ideally, if you can combine that with an educational context, then you will easily be able to make money.
Now, yes, if I'm sitting here playing a video game every day, I could easily get 147,000 views playing a video game and make like $100 off of that, because gaming doesn't monetize that well directly. It's important to do different kinds of content. If you want to be a full-time creator, and I'm not talking to amateurs here, but even if you just want to do this as a side hustle, you should have at least 20 hours a week for your content. And you should have at least two, if not three, different channels. One should be a pure fun channel.
Build Channels That Feed Your Creativity
One channel should be a pure work, business, make-money channel. And another one you might make a hybrid that combines the two. I have all different kinds of channels and I create all different kinds of content, and that inspires me to be creative. The number one thing you need to do on YouTube is be creative. If you can't be creative, original, and authentic, you're going to have a hard time getting views.
The Tension Between Honesty and What People Want to Hear
Here's a real problem on YouTube: you can often much more easily make money telling people what they expect to hear than by being honest or telling people what they don't want to hear. I'll give you an example from my Jerry Banfield Crypto Reviews channel. When I first came out with my crypto reviews channel, the algorithm was pushing it really hard because it didn't have any negative feedback yet, and I was making videos where there was huge demand. If you look at some of the first videos on that channel, my first video got 2,000 views, the next 2,900 views, the next 8,000 views. But the more videos I kept doing, the more YouTube started to get signals that people weren't satisfied with my content.
Why weren't they satisfied? They weren't satisfied because I was telling people things they didn't want to hear. I was telling them that their token sucked. You would think "sucked" would be a good thing in a lot of ways. It's funny how sometimes we say things that should be a compliment, that should mean something is awesome, but they actually land as an insult. My goal is comedy, entertainment, and education, and value in all my videos. So you'll notice a lot of my views have trended down on that channel, partly because crypto prices are in the shitter and people aren't even watching videos. But also, when people come to my crypto reviews channel and they leave feeling dumb because I roasted their coin and talked about how terrible it is, then when YouTube asks them about satisfaction, they say, well, no, Jerry hurt my feelings and Jerry didn't tell me what I wanted to hear. So that can be an issue.
However, you still do it. You still act honestly, you still act with integrity, and you just keep giving the best value you can. Over time, the algorithm will get better at finding people who actually will be satisfied with your videos. You tell the truth even if people don't like it. And sometimes you just don't realize that your time is coming. These videos I'm making saying everything sucks, when they all collapse and go to zero, I'll have a whole inventory of videos saying "I told you so" right there, and then people are likely to be more satisfied. So it's important that you can cover something with integrity and authenticity.
In my experience, it's better to get views on something you honestly created and shared and make less money in the short term than, as I've done in the past, make lots of money on things that were not sustainable. Because usually when you make money on things that aren't sustainable, you'll piss it away and end up worse off than you were before. At least if you've never made any money on YouTube and you make a little bit, you're going to be happy. But if you're like me and you've had months where you made $80,000 or $90,000, and then you go back to making five or ten thousand, that's hard. That's what happened to me in 2025. I had so many of these huge months in previous years, and by 2025 I just felt like, I suck, this is all worthless and useless. Sometimes your content will not get there in the short term. But the thing is, it's got to be fun.
Read the Comments and Make Every Impression Count
You mainly want to read the comments. Spend time, spend hours looking at the comments and seeing what people are saying in reaction to your videos, and try to help someone. There's a huge amount of value I feel just in making a video that's there to help someone.
If you look at my YouTube Coach videos, a lot of people would look at that channel and say it's a big failure, that I don't know anything about YouTube, that I've only got 65 views in the last 48 hours on all my YouTube Coach videos. But I've made a significant effort on this channel. It has 65 videos on it. It does have 23,000 views, all of which are organic, and I haven't even put out a video since the 23rd, so about five days. Here's the thing, though: there's more happening than you see on the surface on YouTube. If you go to your content and your analytics, and especially if you look at how many impressions you have, you'll see it. My YouTube Coach channel, which on the surface people think is a waste of time, has had my thumbnails shown 73,000 times on YouTube. The majority of people who see that will not watch it. But I've communicated 73,000 times that you have enough, that you can make money on YouTube right where you're at now.
On a channel where a lot of people look at the surface and think, what a waste of time, nobody cares about any of this guy's content, YouTube still gave me 73,000 impressions. If you look at the videos, they got 64,000 impressions. The live streams, I've only done a few on this channel. This is my fourth live stream ever on this channel. So on the surface you might think not much has happened on a small channel, that your channel with a few hundred subs doesn't matter. But if you're getting your videos out to 73,000 impressions, that does matter.
As I said in one of my previous videos, most YouTubers waste their impressions. Most YouTubers just choose views over time, and their impressions are basically useless if people don't click their videos. Make every impression you have count. Make every title and every thumbnail help somebody, and you will be amazed that even if it looks like almost nothing is happening. Some of you look at my channel and see 42 views, 36 views, 119 views. Look at the live streams: four views, 75 views. This is the one I'm doing now: 75, 115, 63. You might look and think nothing is happening there, but I'm communicating a message to thousands of people on every single video.
Every View Is a Real Person You Reached
For example, on this video, again, so many would think it sucks: 38 views, four watch-time hours, who cares, right? But I communicated a message to mostly unique people, although there could have been some duplicates. I communicated a message 1,500 times with this video. So once you start seeing that, even if your video has 38 views on it, that's thousands of people you've had the chance to communicate with. And with things like crypto, that's a big deal. My crypto videos have gotten millions of impressions. When my crypto video says Cardano is finished, even if it only gets a thousand views, that's at least 10,000 people on the impressions that I sent the message to that Cardano is finished. When I'm doing ICP videos, those have gotten millions of impressions in the last 100 days. There are probably 100,000 people who have seen them at least 10 times, or 10,000 who have seen them 100 times. I've communicated millions of times to what looks like maybe 50,000 to 100,000 unique people. I've communicated a message from me to them, and I've gotten paid to do it.
What an honor. What an awesome job, where I get to come up with messages that I want to send to other people, and I get paid to send them. That's awesome. And if you laser in on the message you're sending, it matters. There have been videos I've seen on YouTube that communicated a message that was helpful, and I still have never watched another video from that channel, but it helped me. If you start looking at it that way, your goal is to serve humanity and to help humanity by sending helpful messages. That kind of energy will bring people who will pay you.
Turning Helpful Videos Into Paid Calls
I get paid well for my one-on-one calls. People book time to talk to me on Zoom, and that has been the majority of my income. The way you do that is, when you help someone with your videos 10 or 20 different times, that creates a desire in people. Some people have literally only ever watched one of my videos one time, and they'll come in and pay for a session. If you want to get some money in the door, all of a sudden all you need is about 15 people to pay you for 30 minutes of your time, and now you make $1,500 a month. Or you need one person who will pay you 15 times. You see how easy this is? You don't need to have huge numbers of views. Even the views I have, a lot of them are on gaming videos, or crypto videos that are extremely repetitive, or YouTube Coach videos where nobody's even scheduled a call, or videos where I'm just having fun and entertaining, like on my Jerry Banfield channel.
A lot of the time you need to make repeated impressions with people. That's why I suggest trying to put a video up, or going live, or doing a short every single day if you can, because that's what I've been able to do. I've consistently put videos up. I have a spreadsheet where I actually track this. So here's my spreadsheet. I've done an average of six videos or live streams a day since May 18th, when I started tracking this, and that's 260 videos and live streams I've done. Now I'm only doing live streams, because live streams are the most effective form of content I can do. I've done a total of 12 live streams that I've tracked on here. Actually, I've already done two today, so let's add those. The dating one and the ICP one are about 70 minutes. So I've now done 14 live streams total since I started doing live streams on June 22nd. Every day, live streams are my only form of content, and I'm averaging two live streams a day among my six channels.
How I Track My Live Streams and Why
I focus on doing the ICP channel primarily, because that's monetized and I get the most money per live stream on that channel. I'm averaging 35 minutes a day live, and I've done 24 hours of live streams. I've been live for 24 hours in the last week. This is actually the third live stream I've done today, and we've been on this one 20 minutes already, so we'll put that in at 90 minutes. That's 15 live streams, 2.1 a day, about 89 minutes a day on average. On average I'm live, and across the week I've been live around 24 or 25 hours.
So this is what I do, and this is how I track what I'm doing. Whatever you want to do on YouTube, track whatever it is you're doing so that you can see it. Because when I look at that spreadsheet and I see all the videos and all the live streams and all the minutes I've gone live, that's your accountability. That's your productivity. That's where you get to say, oh, look at what I've contributed. A lot of us focus on what we're going to get. And to be clear, I'm not looking to be full-time on YouTube for $1,500 a month. This is just what I've done in 100 days following my own advice, not anybody else's, following what I know.
The Best Time to Be a Small Creator
In my experience, this is the best time to be a small creator on YouTube. There are huge opportunities you can have. AI makes all of this like a superpower. I generated this nice-looking thumbnail with ChatGPT in just a few minutes. I generated the title idea for this video by taking somebody else's video and saying I wanted to make the opposite message, and it literally just gave me a nice title to work with. Then I use AI to crank out blog posts on my website, so that this way my videos are truly uncensorable.
I've got all my videos on my website, 896 posts. All of these send people to YouTube, and all of these send people to my community. I set all this up with AI. Look how many posts there are. I've got diary entries from when I deleted everything on YouTube and was narrating just into audio files, and AI cranked all that out and put it all together, and this is all on the blockchain.
Get a Mentor Who Actually Has What You Want
If you want to do better on YouTube, I suggest you get a mentor who has what you want. Most of the people on YouTube do not have what you want. They're telling you whatever they need to say to get you to pay them. They're doing things that won't work for you, things that they don't actually have to do themselves. Once you have an audience on YouTube to some degree, you can just kind of do whatever you want and keep having an audience and keep making money. What's hard is starting from scratch and building something up, like I did in 100 days with no foundation.
So schedule a call and share your YouTube channel. I have brilliant insights I can give you. You can DM me, you can post your channel for feedback in the group, and you can talk to my AI. I plan to have in-person meetups in St. Pete at some point. I've got a PDF showing how to get your whole website on a blockchain and use AI to turn all of your videos into blog posts, so you can have Google search traffic and AI training there indefinitely. I know this might sound a bit advanced. But if you want a mentor, if you want a teacher, don't you want someone who's advanced, who knows this stuff really well, who's here to support you, and who's living it themselves on their own channels, rather than saying what they might do if they started from zero now, even though they don't have to? I do, because I did, because I deleted all of it.
So I'm really proud of where I'm at on YouTube today. I've offered this as a gift that most people don't even watch. I've communicated the idea that you have enough, whereas a lot of people are communicating the opposite idea, that you don't have enough, that you're not enough. The truth is, you don't need my coaching at all. I'm not paying anybody to coach me. I'm just doing this myself off my own experience, my own passion, my own motivation. Now, when I want to learn something rapidly in other areas of life, I absolutely do get a coach or a mentor to help me. But I know how to do this, and I'm doing it myself. And if this was awesome for you, I've got a lot more videos and a lot more live streams for you in my YouTube Coaching playlist. The creator dream is alive, and you can start right where you're at.