My friends, this is why I stopped streaming on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook in 2023. I want to walk you through the data from a brand new YouTube channel and compare that with a whole lot of effort I put into streaming on Twitch. If you are live streaming, the long story short is that in my experience you are basically wasting your time, and I've got the numbers to back that up.
My best months on Twitch, by the numbers
Here is one of my top months streaming on Twitch, November 2022. I averaged 77 viewers, which is enough to apply for partner, and I streamed almost 100 hours. Most of that month I was playing Gods Unchained, and I was one of the top streamers on the game. Now look at how much money I made and do the math on it. 100 hours divided by about 200 dollars comes out to roughly 2 dollars and 39 cents an hour. And that was when things were going well.
Let's go back and look at the other months. 63 hours for 89 dollars in revenue, which is a little over a dollar an hour. 69 hours for 73 dollars in revenue. This month went much better: 55 hours for 187 dollars in revenue, so I think I nearly got to 4 dollars an hour right there. Keep in mind, this is with thousands of followers on Twitch. This is with a community of many people who have watched me for years. According to the Twitch stats I've seen, only about one out of 2,000 streamers on Twitch actually makes something like 100,000 dollars a year or more. In my experience, it is very rare to stream and make money on Twitch.
Comparing that to a brand new YouTube channel
Now let me compare this to YouTube. This is a brand new crypto channel I started. A brand new channel, and it pulled 47,000 views, thousands of viewers, organic traffic, and 3,000 watch hours. If you calculate the watch hours on the Twitch side, with the average viewers I had, that comes out to about 7,000 watch hours. So I spent 100 hours streaming to get about 7,000 watch hours on Twitch.
The question is, how much time did it take to get the stats on YouTube? To make all those videos took about 50 hours or so. That means in half the time I got roughly the same amount of actual watch hours on a brand new YouTube channel. Same amount of watch time, even though the Twitch number is me working up to that point, putting on an amazing show, and actually giving money away during my show. That is not normal Twitch performance.
And here is the huge difference: this YouTube traffic will keep coming in even if I stop uploading videos. When you look at where I'm actually getting my views from, a lot of it comes from YouTube search and browse. When I stop uploading, the traffic keeps coming in on my main YouTube channel.
My main channel keeps earning while I do nothing
Let me show you my main YouTube channel. In a lot of ways, my main channel is an example of what not to do, because I ran it as a variety channel and just uploaded a bunch of different stuff. That is why I'd suggest you just start a fresh, niched YouTube channel instead. On my main channel I barely did anything last month, and I still made 186 dollars. Think about that. I hardly put any new videos up, and I made 186 dollars from my past videos.
Now look at what happens on Twitch when I stop streaming consistently. In November I moved over to creating videos, and in December I switched the game I played and I switched the format of my stream. Look what happened to my viewership. I switched from Gods Unchained to a different game, and the viewership got destroyed. The revenue got destroyed. Then last month I only streamed five hours, and I actually got close, something like 7 or 8 dollars an hour. But the only reason I had good viewership last month is that on two of the streams I got huge raids from one of the biggest crypto Twitch streamers, and I did a dedicated stream just for his followers.
That is what happens with Twitch and with live streaming. If you stop streaming, your income tanks almost immediately. Whereas on YouTube, I do nothing and I keep making money. If I take a month off and then upload a video, my audience is still there. If you look at the last 28 days on the stats, I keep getting views, and a lot of those views are on videos I uploaded a long time ago.
The videos that keep paying years later
On YouTube I uploaded three, six, nine videos on my main channel, and these were basically throwaway videos because that main channel is so buried in the algorithm. It is literally me throwing something off the top of my head and uploading it, and those videos didn't even get that many views. One of them was a newer short, and I don't recommend shorts if you're talking about earning money. Those two are shorts, so they're a little unusual, but here's a regular video I uploaded. That same video on my new crypto channel would have done so much better.
Let me give you a real example. Look at some of the videos I uploaded years ago, like this AA speaker meeting. I uploaded it almost three years ago, and this is the kind of thing that does not happen on Twitch. This one video has made 1,500 dollars, and it's just me telling my story real quick. I've since made a separate channel for my AA videos. Compare that to grinding things out on Twitch. And there's really no point in streaming on YouTube either, because when you stream on YouTube the algorithm often does not work nearly as well as just making videos.
If you look at the lifetime numbers on my YouTube channel, yes, I've uploaded 4,000 videos, so on average that's about 20 dollars a video. But that doesn't count all the other things it drove, like all the courses I've sold, the members I gained, and my millionaire mastermind. What stinks about Twitch is that you don't tend to get anywhere near that lasting return, and getting to a good viewership point on Twitch tends to be really difficult in the first place.
Why the Twitch grind goes nowhere for most people
Let me show you where I was when I switched over from YouTube to Twitch. I had great support when I made the switch, and I'd been streaming games pretty consistently before that. But look what happens. I streamed almost every day and the support just plummeted. That first bump was initial excitement, people coming over from YouTube, and then my stats went down. It recovered later because I found a very specific, particular game to play, but the majority of you trying to stream are not going to do that. Most of you are just going to grind a game out and basically go nowhere.
Meanwhile I keep getting new views on my videos all the time. What I've done now is create five different YouTube channels, because the algorithm really does well when you niche your content, as I showed with my crypto channel. If you put your time into videos instead of live streaming, the returns you are capable of getting are so much higher.
Now, if you've got a massive audience of people who've watched a bunch of your videos, then it can make sense to live stream, because it can be a great way to connect with your community. But even with as big a community as I've got online, live streaming doesn't make sense for me. Especially when I've got people who want all these different topics. I've got people who want crypto videos, gaming videos, recovery videos, and business videos. Bringing all of those people together on one live stream often doesn't work, because some people want to talk crypto, other people want me to play games, and some people just want me to do just chatting. What I've found is that if I'm going to spend 100 hours of work in a month, I can make 10 times as much by grinding out YouTube videos instead of live streams. Easily 10 times as much.
Discoverability is where new channels win
Not only that, but I get so much more discoverability. When you make a new channel, you've got great potential discoverability on it. Look at the brand new business channel I'm putting this on. Some of you would say this channel isn't doing that well, but think about it: my main channel with 4,000 videos had 30-something thousand views, and this brand new business channel already has 2,000 views. When we look at how people found this channel, a lot came in externally from my promotions, but people are also finding it through browse features and suggested videos. YouTube is actually doing a great job recommending my content.
This brand new channel has the ability to bring in hundreds of dollars a month by itself. All I need to do is show up and take 10 or 15 minutes to throw a video out off the top of my head. In the same amount of time I was spending live streaming, I can put up five videos on YouTube most days. Today I spent a little more time researching my crypto video, but in the same time it takes me to live stream, I can put a video up on this channel, that channel, and that channel. So I don't see why I would live stream.
I've spent thousands of hours live streaming, and live streaming audiences are extremely fragile. As the data shows, even when I came over to a new game, it is amazing how fast people fade away and lose interest. I streamed a lot, and yet the average viewers went down, the subscriptions dropped by 50 percent, and the revenue dropped. In my experience, live streaming is not something most of you should do, and I hope I've made that clear, because I see so many people just grinding on live streams. If you put that same grind into your YouTube videos instead, you're going to get a much better deal. Just make sure you've got content on different channels, because if you grind it all out on one channel, it's not going to work. But look at this: my crypto channel is getting almost double, nearly triple the views that my existing channel was. When it gets monetized, I'm looking at 500, 1,000 plus a month in ad revenue. Now compare that to Twitch.
And you might say, well, Jerry, it's not all about the money. What about your community? Here's how I see it: if I don't make enough money, then I have to go get a real job and I can't create all of this online, and then there's no community at all. So the money and the community aren't in conflict. I'd like to make at least 10,000 a month off of creating three hours a day. That might not sound reasonable to a lot of you. It's totally reasonable to me. I've done it before, and I know I'm going to do it again.
Live Streaming Only Works as a Labor of Love
Live streaming, if you're going to do it, the only way to do it is just as a labor of love. That's when you've already got all the bills paid, you're making plenty of money, and you can afford to just show up and hang out with the community. I might do some more live streams once I'm making 10,000 a month and all these other YouTube channels are kicking off and I've got lots of followers on Twitch who want to connect and build a community. That's the time to consider doing a live stream. Then you can just do it whenever you've got the time, with no pressure on it.
So if you don't have a community, and if you don't have your income set up, in my experience you've got no business live streaming yet. The way I look at it, these YouTube channels are where my full attention is going. Any time I've got something I could live stream, I'm filming a video instead. And when I get to a point where I'm making 10-plus thousand a month and I've got an extra hour or two here and there to stream, then I'll consider it. But until then, I don't see the purpose of live streaming. It doesn't make sense financially. If you want to build alongside people who are working through this same question, the best way to do that with me today is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we focus on creating instead of just hanging out.
What's Actually Better for the People You Love
And for you, if you love Jerry Banfield stuff, would you rather mess around for three hours going through one of my long-winded Twitch streams, where maybe I'm playing a video game you don't like, or maybe I'm talking crypto? Or would you rather just check my YouTube channel? Maybe you like everything except the gaming. Doesn't it seem a lot better for you to just get exactly what you want without all the other stuff wrapped around it?
The reason this works better is because creating videos is much better for the people you love. It's much better for the viewer. Live streaming, by contrast, is kind of wasteful in terms of the viewer's time. That's why I've put my energy into focused videos, and if you want to see how I approach this whole subject in more depth, I've collected a lot of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
So I appreciate your love and support on all my different channels, and I hope this is helpful for you if you're streaming and you've been trying to talk yourself into quitting, or you've been feeling like there's a better way. There is a better way. Stop streaming and make videos.