In 2014, I found a new platform called Udemy for hosting video courses. Over the next two years, I would go on to make millions of dollars in sales on Udemy, and they would pay me over $600,000 for doing so. At the time, for a couple of years, it seemed like everything was going awesome. I'd finally solved my biggest problem: how to make money online.
I brought all kinds of people from YouTube to buy my Udemy courses. I went off on YouTube, and I had hundreds of thousands of subscribers. I had more than 50 courses on Udemy and hundreds of thousands of students. I gave out free coupons everywhere, all over the place on YouTube, and everywhere else on Facebook. I ran Facebook ads. I brought hundreds of thousands of people to sign up for Udemy.com for the very first time and to make their first purchase.
Everything was great from my point of view. I was following all of the policies. I was aware of every policy, and I was collaborating with other instructors. I was teaching people how to do what I was doing on Udemy.
The Email Out of the Blue
Then in June 2016, after zero policy violations all year, Udemy suddenly sent me an email out of the blue saying my account had been terminated. They didn't say anything publicly as to why. They gave me two reasons that felt arbitrary to me.
The first was that a small percentage, maybe three, four, or five percent of my reviews, came from questionable sources out of thousands of reviews. They said some of them came from Fiverr, and so I must be faking my reviews. I said no, people are selling free coupons to my course on Fiverr. Here are the actual gigs where people are selling my courses and then giving people a free coupon to them.
The other reason was that they said I had improper co-instructor relationships, because one woman complained after she invited me to join her course. I added two hours of video content to her two-hour course, so it became a four-hour course with each of us teaching half. I then sent a promotional announcement to all my courses promoting all my other courses, which included promoting her course to all my other students, the hundreds of thousands of students, via email. She then got 50% of the sales from that. And she complained that I had tricked her, and that I was just using her tiny little amount of students on her course to try and promote my other courses to.
From my point of view, Udemy wanted to ban me at that point anyway, because I was a big voice on the platform, probably the biggest voice. I believe the people on the Trust and Safety team were jealous of me showing how I was earning $80,000 to $90,000 a month, basically their whole salary in a single month. I developed a bunch of haters from people being jealous and taking shots at me. So Udemy banned me.
The Same Mistake for a Decade
But the reason I'm telling this story is because content creators are consistently making the same mistake I made on Udemy, and I kept making that same mistake again after Udemy for the next decade. For the first time ever, I'm finally able to stop what I experienced as this awful pimping of me out as a content creator. I was able to get traffic back in a day on YouTube, and I still am.
What I would do is, instead of sending people to jerrybanfield.com, which I owned, I would send people to Udemy. I would send them to Udemy.com because I was depending on them for a positive reinforcement loop. I'd get traffic by putting up free previews of my courses on YouTube and advertising them. Then I'd send those people to Udemy.com, where they'd buy my video courses. And the more my courses sold from my YouTube viewers, the more my courses would generate additional sales on Udemy.
It seemed like the perfect positive reinforcement loop at the time, because I didn't have that loop on my own website. If I sent somebody from YouTube over to my own website using some platform like Thinkific or Kajabi, or Teachable (I don't even know if they all had those back then), then I wouldn't have that positive reinforcement loop where I'd get more buyers because of the platform itself.
So I focused so much on the fact that I could make much more money in the short term by sending people to Udemy. Never mind that I couldn't practically sell the courses for higher than $10 on Udemy, and I was so frustrated by that. I was so focused on it. I had Google remarketing ads and an affiliate program. In the short term, I was making big money selling on Udemy, much more than I would have made on jerrybanfield.com.
And I tested it. It was much harder to make sales on my own website than it was on Udemy, because they're the ones that had venture capital funding, a very professional interface, a thriving marketplace, and a bunch of customers. That made people trust them. And the more my courses sold, the more they ranked in Google search and got found organically too. So Udemy, in the short term, seemed like a great idea at the time, especially when I was getting $80,000 to $90,000 a month paychecks, and generating hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales on the Udemy platform to get those paychecks.
They Kept All My Customers
But then when they banned me, they kept all my customers, and I got nothing. For 10 years now, all my customers, all the people who found Udemy for the first time because of my YouTube videos, are still there, unless they opted out or closed their account, which I'd guess 99% of them didn't. They're still sitting there, adding value to the company at Udemy. At least some of the ones I've talked to went on to spend thousands and thousands more dollars with other instructors on Udemy, some of whom Udemy probably banned too and kept the customers anyway.
So in my experience, I got pimped out by Udemy. Even though in the short term it seemed like a good deal, over the long term I realized I should have sent people to jerrybanfield.com.
But I kept making this mistake again, because 10 years ago it was too difficult to build out your own course hosting platform. I tried building out my own version of Udemy called Uthena. That didn't work well, because having something kind of like Udemy meant trying to pay tens of thousands of dollars to get it professional, pay for the higher hosting, pay to get courses, and promote it. It didn't work as well, being impersonal, when it didn't have giant venture capital funding behind it. I also tried just my website, jerrybanfield.com, but in the short term the sales were so much smaller, and the user experience sucked compared to having something better.
Everywhere I Sent People Instead
I couldn't find a solution I was happy with. I tried Teachable. I tried Thinkific. I tried building my own version of Udemy called Uthena with a higher-level Thinkific plan. I tried sending people to Amazon Video On Demand. There are so many places I've tried sending people over the last 10 years.
I went all in on a crypto called Steem, and I sent everybody to my Steemit blog for a year. Then, from my experience, the team rug pulled the token and crashed the whole platform. I sent people over to watch me on Twitch, hardly made any revenue from that, and wasted a ton of time. I sent people over to my Uthena platform, and I was getting some good sales there, but I tried to make it too much like Udemy instead of just Jerry Banfield. It was mostly Jerry Banfield stuff that sold, and I thought, why am I putting all this effort into these other instructors and their courses when I mainly sell my own stuff?
Then I tried other course platforms, putting stuff on Skillshare. That was a giant waste of time. With StackCommerce, I missed some of the best opportunities. Then I got so frustrated that I deleted or quit doing my business online and started an in-person show. That didn't work. So then I got on Facebook Gaming, and I sent everybody from YouTube and everywhere else over to Facebook Gaming. Then Facebook Gaming demonetized me. So I focused back on YouTube.
Then I started selling another online course, hosted this time on Thinkific. But again, even though it's much more control, they still have all my customer data.
Content Scattered Into Oblivion
In the meantime, all my old videos have broken calls to action: old videos sending people to a Facebook Gaming page that I deleted, and to old courses that I don't have anymore. Now my content is scattered all over into oblivion. I have all these old Udemy courses that were filmed just for Udemy, and they don't work very well on another platform because I talk about Udemy and show the Udemy interface so much. All this time was wasted creating content that was easy to take down or that got stuck when I switched away from the platform.
I had hundreds of thousands of subscribers on YouTube, and I sent them all over the place all the time. So then they got burnt out, and they didn't even know where to go. They stopped watching. They felt like YouTube was just a means for me to get them out and send them somewhere else. My YouTube channels went down.
Then I got into the crypto ICP. I sent everybody to the ICP token, ICP token. People were buying the ICP token. Then I was promoting projects on ICP, and from my point of view, a lot of these other projects were ripping off all my viewers.
A Consistent Pattern for 10 Years
I see a consistent pattern for 10 years. I've been generating an audience and attention. I've been delivering huge value. YouTube gives me about half of the ad revenue it generates and keeps full control over the platform. So far, YouTube has been the best out of any of the platforms about keeping me online over the years. And yet YouTube doesn't have the level of monetization I need to be a full-time creator.
I get hundreds of thousands of views every month, and people sent almost a thousand dollars in Super Chats in the last month. But I need about 10 grand a month to be a content creator living in St. Petersburg, Florida, as a single dad: to pay my taxes, to pay my rent, to get a massage once a week, and to buy groceries, and then to occasionally have a little bit of money left over for something else.
Once in the last 10 years, that something else has been the strip club. I did a live stream documenting that on my Jerry Banfield channel called I'm 200K in debt and I spent $2,200 in VIP. So occasionally there's a decision like that, and I was a hundred percent sober for it too. However, most of the time, my spending is what I think of as totally reasonable.
What If I Had Built My Website the Whole Time?
I stand here now thinking, man, 10 years ago it didn't seem like a good idea to send people to my website and to focus on that, because the income was so much smaller. But what if, for 10 years in a row, I had built and built and built my website and sent people to my website the whole time? What if I had only put my courses on my website and sent people there for the entire time? How much money would I be making every month now? I estimate I'd probably have tens of thousands a month coming into my website now if I had taken that strategy 10 years ago. This is the trap so many content creators get into.
The newest hot thing to send people to is Skool, but I don't trust Skool. I haven't been able to wholeheartedly promote Skool because I know Skool could be the next Udemy. I could very easily get banned off Skool, not even doing anything wrong.
Or Skool, the platform, could shut down, or anything else could happen. On Skool, I have to kind of play their game, form a community, and sell how they want me to sell. I can't really offer everything I want on Skool. For example, I want to offer very dark, crazy standup comedy. I can't put that on Skool because it risks getting my entire account banned. So I can't send everybody to my Skool. I can't do paid calls on Skool. I can't launch video games on Skool.
AI Finally Made It Possible
I'm so grateful that AI has now made it possible for me, as a solopreneur, to finally build my website up to do whatever I want. I needed this 10 years ago, but I've got it now, and that's what I'm doing.
Looking back at getting banned on Udemy 10 years ago, it's amazing. It almost didn't matter that I got banned on Udemy, because every other platform has essentially been the same way. Either the algorithm on that platform died and left all my viewers no longer seeing my videos, or I got demonetized but could stay on the platform.
The biggest mistake I've made as a creator for the last decade has been not having one platform that I send everybody to all the time, with everything I want on it. In the past, it was too expensive to set that up and to build out a custom solution. Although looking back now, I probably could have just spent several hundred thousand dollars to get jerrybanfield.com built up as an everything platform, and it would have been worth it in the long term.
In 2016, when I still had all that Udemy money coming in, what if, instead of spending it investing in cryptos and investing in a course platform for others, I had just put everybody, all the time, into one website? What if I had used all these content creation platforms, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, to always send people to my website? Then I would be in an amazing position today. And that's what I'm doing going forward.
What's on jerrybanfield.com Now
AI now allows me to build my own website, and it's just amazing all the stuff that's on jerrybanfield.com now. This is just an initial basic build-out, but I've got thousands of blog posts on there. I've got a leaderboard for people who've spent money. I have Stripe payments. I've got crypto payments. I have AI games that I've made. I have a community chat. I have user profiles. I have affiliate marketing.
I'm in the process right now of scaling this up to where jerrybanfield.com is a full-fledged e-commerce social media platform with direct messages, notifications, physical products I can sell, digital products I can sell, and services I can sell. Instead of sending people to Skool, over to Acuity, and to Cameo, then trying to have people schedule a call on my website, and instead of sending people to Audible and Amazon, every single thing, all my courses, everything, will be in one single spot.
For the first time, I'm going to be able to have one single destination and promote it on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and X. Every single platform will always send people to jerrybanfield.com. Then I can finally sell everything I have to sell: comedy, games, books, courses, coaching, community, tips, shirts, and anything else. My videos, outfits, experiences, anything I want to sell, I can put on there.
It's built on ICP, which, if you check out my Jerry Banfield Tech channel, is the essential piece of this. I'm not vibe coding this on Lovable or Replit, because that wouldn't be reliable for building something advanced in e-commerce, where everything needs to work, the backend needs to be perfect, and it can't be easily hackable.
Getting Off the Platforms That Keep Your Customers
I've realized one of the most valuable things I have to show other creators is how you can get off all these other platforms that, in my experience, are pimping you out, stealing from you, keeping your customers after they ban you, and doing anything they can to get you to send your audience directly to them. In the meantime, I believe you are very likely going to be left with nothing over the long term, like I was, as they use you and move on.
If you want help with this, jerrybanfield.com is there. I've got an email address sitting there now.
At some point, we're going to have a course up showing the essential technical details of how to do this.
In the meantime, I would just go schedule a call with me. Right now it's still on Acuity Scheduling, but I'm going to build this out so you can buy a Zoom call right on my website.
I'm really excited about this change. To me, this is the biggest change I've needed to make as a content creator. People are afraid of AI right now, and a lot of things are difficult. Content creation is hard right now, especially with all this AI content, but AI is also finally giving me the ability to make my content creation sustainable.
The Dream
In the ideal version of this, at some point, I will be able to create content only on jerrybanfield.com, and I won't need to make content anymore on YouTube, Facebook, X, or Instagram. I will just have such a big audience coming straight to my website that I can publish directly to my website with no third-party crap in the middle. That's the dream.
It's finally technically possible today, because of AI, for solopreneurs who don't have a whole bunch of money to spend to build up their own custom platform. If you're a creator working through the same questions, I share a lot more about this in my Content Creators playlist.
I invite you to go to jerrybanfield.com and keep an eye on it. I'm building heavily right now, and it's going to evolve a lot over the next few days. I invite you to follow me everywhere and join me on this journey.