This is an excerpt from my memoir, I Was Famous on the Internet — my honest story of 14 years of internet fame and what it really cost, and why I deleted it all to choose real life.
The Collapse Into Paranoia and Deletion
At this point, I felt like I had reached a new bottom. I thought about launching another coin, but once again I couldn’t go all in on greed despite others saying I could make a fortune on a new Bitcoin defi platform built on ICP if I launched my own ordinal there. I thought about quitting everything again, but instead I slid back into video games because I had locked into my mind that crypto was my job indefinitely. I was so frustrated with my online business that I convinced myself maybe the answer was more YouTube channels. Over the years, I had gone back and forth creating and deleting as many as fifteen of them. For the fourth time, I bought more video game systems, although this time just an Xbox One and the original Nintendo Entertainment System. My ex-wife laughed and wondered how long it would take before I gave them away or pawned them off. The answer turned out to be faster than ever.
I started experimenting like crazy, creating my fourth Jerry Banfield gaming channel after deleting the previous three. Looking back, if I had just kept the first one, it might have grown into a thriving channel. Instead, every time I got frustrated that it wasn’t doing as well as I thought it should, I deleted it and then tried again a few months later. I created autobiography and vlog channels too, expanding my creativity in new directions. I began to think the real problem was crypto, although I felt I had to do it for money. For months, I had been obsessed with it, and all it left me with was misery, burnout, and disgust. I told myself that if I got back to creating other types of content, I would finally feel satisfied and could stomach doing the crypto videos also to pay the bills.
I built back up to six YouTube channels after having eight the year before, when I deleted everything except the crypto and the original channel. For a short time, these new channels gave me a burst of energy. I felt good playing video games briefly, but the fun was shockingly short lived. Something felt wrong. I wasn’t enjoying myself, and the numbers showed it. No matter what kind of content I made, the views were painfully low. I posted on X and YouTube for extra reach, but it didn’t matter—people only wanted to hear about crypto from me.
I regretted deleting my Facebook page more than ever. In 2023, I had gotten fed up when Facebook refused to lift an automated demonetization block on my account which lingered almost a year after the hate speech demonetization expired. Out of protest and a desire to focus on YouTube without being distracted constantly by my unmonetized Facebook following, I deleted the page where I had millions of followers. A simple text post used to reach hundreds of thousands of people but rarely brought in any money which made it the perfect useless distraction. For years, my Facebook page had been my best-performing asset, and I knew I had to delete it the day after I was live-streaming Warzone solos out of desperation. Now the same kind of feeling crept in with YouTube.
After JBBJ imploded, I became paranoid about my crypto videos. I remembered getting a copyright strike on a video for using a project’s logo alongside a review saying their crypto was a total fraud. While I did file a counter notification to get the video reinstated, I realized I was constantly vulnerable to attack. I began to spiral, convincing myself that my crypto videos were a huge liability. I had already deleted more than 500 crypto videos the year before to clean up my image, then refilmed most of them over the next year to get more views and help people hear something true in an environment of lies. I had countless critical videos about different projects, and the thought hit me: if a few of these projects ever joined forces, they could sue me, flood me with copyright strikes, or even go after me in real life.
I thought about how I had built everything on Udemy and Facebook, only to have it all yanked away with a single email. I realized my crypto videos, YouTube channels, and X account were no different. Unlike with Facebook and Udemy, this time the consequences might not just be a loss of income. I imagined the people behind some of these crypto projects included real life criminals armed with lawyers for the loudest mouthed troublemakers. For the most serious pains in the ass like me, they might even have people on their payroll that could kill me while making it look like an accident. After all, my videos were meddling in their projects which collectively were worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Over the next few days after going back in on JBBJ, paranoia consumed me despite my sobriety and self-care routines. I soon enough deleted all my crypto videos hoping to feel better. I had a brand-new crypto reviews channel that was thriving, and I wiped it out completely. I erased everything on my existing crypto channel too, telling myself this was a smart way to take inventory and start fresh. YouTube saw it differently: suddenly, it was as if I had no audience at all. My views bombed to record lows.
I should have learned this lesson the first time. In 2023, I deleted thousands of videos on my original YouTube channel, right around the same time I deleted my Facebook page. Both times, I thought I was cleansing myself and starting over. Both times, I only managed to destroy what I had built.
Rebranding My Crypto Channel
In 2023, around the same time I deleted my Facebook page, YouTube handed me my very first community guidelines violation. It wasn’t even on something new—it was on an old video I had uploaded years before. In that video, I had bluntly spoken out against the lies they were promoting at the time. Somehow, I had gotten away with it back then, probably because not that many people even watched it. Later, when I went through and edited all my video descriptions to try to optimize my channel and get more views on my new uploads, it must have tripped the algorithm. Out of the 2,000-plus videos I had uploaded, YouTube now decided that one of them crossed the line a year after it was uploaded, and they gave me a community guideline strike for it.
The strike infuriated me and sent me into a spiral of paranoia. I started thinking about all the other videos I had published where I had been careless with the terms and conditions. In the past, I didn’t take them that seriously. To me, they often seemed designed to be ignored or openly challenged. Following them felt like giving in, like being a coward, especially when the rules themselves felt offensive or flat-out wrong. That mindset had worked for me for years—I pushed the boundaries and got away with it. But this time, it felt different. I panicked. Out of fear that more strikes were coming, I deleted all 2,000 videos from my original YouTube channel.
At the time, that channel was giving me thousands of views every day which was good for hundreds of dollars of totally passive income each month. Even though my new uploads only pulled in a few hundred views each, the archive of content kept the overall numbers up and brought consistent viewers into my new uploads. The moment I deleted everything, my channel flatlined. The views collapsed to nearly zero with many of my new music videos were getting fewer than 100 views. My stated goal in wiping everything was to restart and focus my original channel completely on music. For a couple years, I stuck to that.
Still, it ate at me. I had more than 250,000 subscribers on my original channel, yet I was furious at how few views I got. Repeatedly, people would comment that my channel had to be fake, or that I must have paid for my subscribers, or that my low view count meant I was a fraud. Thousands of comments like that piled up over the years, and they cut deep. It got so bad that I stopped reading comments altogether. Even then, they’d find their way to me during live streams, sneaking past the wall I tried to build. I carried that wound in the back of my mind everywhere I went.
Despite that negative experience with my original channel, I was desperate enough to delete my crypto videos the same way two years later. I figured that if I was going to keep pushing forward on YouTube, I didn’t want another situation like Facebook or Udemy where I would risk being banned, sued, or taken down. By then I had pissed off a lot of the crypto mafia, and I knew they weren’t going to let up. If I wasn’t going to stop, I needed to be ready for them to attack me and ready to defend myself.
After I deleted all the crypto videos, the disgust set in. The tiny number of views I was getting left me feeling like I had no reason to keep locking myself into crypto content anymore. In what turned out to be a wildly unpopular move, I rebranded my “Jerry Banfield Crypto” channel into “Jerry Banfield Live” and started streaming video games on it in May 2025.
The disappointment came immediately. Almost no one showed up. The audience that did had no interest in watching me do anything outside of crypto. Most of them got annoyed at me for not talking about ICP nonstop. A handful got outright angry that I was wasting their time playing games instead of sticking to the script they expected from me.
This was the same problem I had run into before where most viewers are asleep at the wheel in their own lives. They want the exact same thing you gave them yesterday, in the exact same format, in the exact same place. Any deviation, no matter how small, and they check out. That was exactly what I had experienced four years earlier with Facebook Gaming—and here I was, living it again.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my YouTube Coaching playlist.