I deleted over 30 million YouTube views for a fresh start on my original channel. That meant erasing thousands and thousands of videos. I do regret it sometimes, but at the same time, having a clean slate has been really helpful. If you're a YouTuber, you'll want to hear why I did this.
About 9 million of those views came from hacking videos. YouTube stopped allowing hacking content, and the truth is I don't even know how to hack. I just paid someone to make hacking videos for me because I could see they were going to make a lot of money on YouTube and help sell a lot of courses on Udemy. That's why they were up there in the first place. On top of that, I made a lot of gaming videos, and a lot of them got views. I made tutorials on all kinds of different subjects too.
How one violation pushed me to delete everything
By 2023, even though I had already deleted 9 million views from the hacking content, I was back up to 18 million views. Then I deleted all my videos. What set it off was my first ever community guidelines violation. At that point I'd been on YouTube for 12 years with no violations at all. I edited the descriptions on all my videos at once, and I believe that triggered the algorithm to go back and re-check the content in every one of them.
Maybe a year, or even a year and a half, before that, I'd gotten away with a video that they said violated the community guidelines. I don't think it actually did, but they decided it did, and they rejected my appeal. So I got upset and deleted all my videos. My attitude was, you want to treat me like that? Then forget it, I'm going to delete everything.
At the time I was also really frustrated with my content. I had a crypto channel that was doing really well, and I thought, why am I holding onto this original channel that has basically become a liability? At that point it was doing nothing for me. But here's the catch: if you get one channel taken down for community guidelines violations, YouTube says you can't run any others. So I realized I had thousands of videos sitting up there, and who's to say there wasn't another violation buried somewhere in 2,700 videos? I didn't used to pay much attention to the community guidelines, and YouTube keeps adding things you can't do all the time. They added the rule about ethical hacking tutorials not being allowed anymore, which is what cost me those 9 million views. They keep changing the rules, and they can retroactively enforce those new rules on your old videos. So I just said, forget it, I'm deleting all my videos.
At the time I was getting thousands of views a day, mostly through YouTube search traffic and Google search traffic, which is very valuable. I deleted all of it to clear the slate and have a fresh start going forward. Sometimes I regret that. But at the same time, deleting everything let me create without the burden of all those old videos hanging over me, without feeling annoyed by them, and without dragging along a very confused audience.
A year of music videos and a broken algorithm
For the next year, all I made on this channel were music videos. Even just posting music videos, I still managed to pull around 50,000 views, but the algorithm was destroyed on the channel and I was massively frustrated. I feel a little embarrassed that I've uploaded over 10,000 videos online, yet you can hardly tell that when you analyze my channel.
So recently I started doing it again: putting up four videos a day on all kinds of different subjects. I'm really grateful the algorithm has gone back to work, especially on my ICP videos. But my gaming videos, my AA videos, affirmations, and music have all been getting out there in the algorithm again too. I'm really happy to see that. Going forward, I'm just going to make videos that are set up as well as I can for the long term and not worry about how many views each one gets.
If I get a violation here or there, I read the rules and try to stay up to date with them. At the same time, with most of my videos I can be confident there isn't a violation in them today. In the future, I really want it so that when you go to my channel, there are thousands and thousands of videos there, because that represents the work I'm doing. Right now I'm grateful that it'll only take me a few months to have over a thousand videos back up on this original channel.
Rebranding the crypto channel into a live stream home
I also deleted all the videos on my other YouTube channel. It used to be Jerry Banfield Crypto, and it was blowing up in 2023. I rebranded it and deleted all my original videos there because, again, I needed a fresh start and I needed to think outside the box. That channel was totally boxed into crypto, and I was really frustrated with it. The algorithm constantly underperformed, especially when the ICP price was down. I never want to be boxed into doing one kind of content again.
What I want now is a place where everybody can go for a consistent experience. On my original YouTube channel, you watch videos. On my Jerry Banfield live channel, you watch live streams, and that's all that channel is going to have. The videos live on the original channel. I'd been feeling pressured to record every single video as a live stream, but the reality is the opposite: the main thing people watch are the videos. One of my live streams got 2,000 views, but a lot of my gaming videos and other content got nowhere near that on the live stream side. When I compare the views on a four-hour live stream against the views on the videos, most people on YouTube watch videos. It's the main thing people watch. Two 10-minute videos got more views than a four-hour live stream did.
What's nice now is that if I do a live stream, I set the intent to record a whole bunch of videos out of it, then crank out four videos a day and think about it as YouTube search. I just trust the algorithm to try and get the right people in. In my experience the YouTube algorithm has gotten significantly better in the last year or so at handling variety channels. I was originally really frustrated on my original channel because it did very poorly with variety content. The algorithm barely pushed my variety videos out at all, while it did really well when I focused on crypto. But I realized that for the long term, I need to stick with variety content. I need to just grind out whatever I want.
When I was only doing crypto, I actually quit YouTube because I was so tired of making crypto videos. Now I don't have to make crypto videos, and I feel really freed by that. If I want to make a video today about what I did on YouTube, or how to stream, or something about Twitch streaming, or AA and the 12 steps, I can. I've tried running as many as eight channels at once, at least, and I deleted all but two of them: the original one and this one. I've almost deleted this channel so many times. But what I want is just one place where everybody can watch my videos and one place where people hang out and watch live streams. The live stream is a much different experience than watching videos, and YouTube often doesn't do a good job moving people from video watching into a live stream. That way the videos can be whatever I want on the one channel. I share more of how I think through all of this in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
So yes, what I'd like to do is never have to delete any of my videos again. I didn't have to delete them the first time either, but I was feeling so burdened by my old videos that deleting them and starting fresh felt like the best thing to do.