YouTube is the dumbest career move you can make right now. Unless you love pouring a bunch of time and energy into something to get zero dollars back, everyone telling you otherwise is just trying to sell you YouTube coaching. That's what they're doing. I'm here giving it to you straight. I've known YouTube for 15 years, and I know what it takes to get over a billion impressions online. It takes endless commitment, endless grinding, endless learning, and total dedication to the craft.
If you think you're going to quit your corporate job like this woman I dated a little while ago — she just quits her corporate job and starts uploading videos to Instagram, she's going to be a content creator — no. It is not at all that simple, and all kinds of people try to trick you into thinking it is because they're profiting. They are stealing from you by tricking you into thinking this is easy and that you just need to buy their course to get it to work. Wrong.
The Worst Time to Start — and It's Getting Worse
If you want to be a content creator, not only is now one of the worst times to be a content creator, but it's getting even worse. If you wanted to be a content creator, you should have started when I did in 2011. That was a good time to be a content creator. You could upload crappy videos and print money. How do you think I got here — and why I'm still here today?
Now things are horrible, because AI is eliminating the need to watch YouTube videos in many cases. Why go watch a dating video on YouTube? Why would you go watch the Jerry Banfield dating videos when you could just talk to ChatGPT and it'll give you decent answers instantaneously, in real time? Why would you bother going to learn how to do something when AI will just tell you, in real time, how to do it? Now, yes, there is a need for human content going forward. And yes, are my dating videos so much better than what you're going to get in some ChatGPT response? I certainly think so. But on YouTube, you've got to be realistic, and you've got to look at the amount of work it takes to make money. If you don't know what you're doing, it's ridiculous. Even if you do know what you're doing, like me.
My Test: Six Channels From Zero
I did one of the most incredible tests anyone has ever done. I built hundreds of millions of views across all kinds of platforms, and then got so burnt out in 2025 that I deleted everything. Then I started six new YouTube channels — about four months ago, mid-March 2026, so it's almost five months now. I started six brand new YouTube channels. I've got two of them monetized, and I make over a thousand a month already, starting from zero.
And how did I do that? This is how: 476 videos uploaded in the last 84 days. 76 minutes a day — 76 minutes a day of raw content. That's 106 hours of content. So if you love Jerry Banfield stuff, there's literally 106 hours of content I have uploaded across all six of my channels. And if you're not prepared to do that, you need to stop being delusional that YouTube is a great career move, because you're going to be disappointed when you start trying to make these videos and realize, damn, this hardly pays at all.
For example, I have a vlogs channel, and it looks like it's going to be my third monetized channel. That channel has gotten 44,000 views on 107 videos — literally just me talking about my daily life. There's gotten to be some nice momentum now that I brought in some dating drama; we've got this thing going. That channel is on pace to start making a few hundred a month in ad revenue. But I've done 107 videos on that channel in four months, and I already have a following on other channels — the ICP and crypto people came from those. My two crypto channels monetized almost immediately: the ICP channel monetized within like three or four weeks, and the crypto reviews channel monetized a little while after that. Those two channels crank out about six or seven hundred a month in ad revenue currently, and they're consistently growing.
Then people go to my website and will pay to talk to me on a call. I've made it so you can just easily drop in and pay to talk to me instantly for ten minutes on the phone, Zoom, or WhatsApp, and I'm putting a bunch of other stuff on there too — including my community, where you can join the Jerry Banfield Family on Skool.
Views, Then Depth, Then Money
So if you want to monetize, you need to have a plan, and you need to have a variety of ways to monetize. You need to be able to get views. Then you need to be able to get depth from those views — true fans. And then you need to be able to turn that into actual money. Because for most of you, if you don't have all that in place, if you can't get views in the first place, nothing else matters.
And if you can't deepen the relationship, you've got nothing. This woman I dated is posting all these videos on Instagram, and I'm like, what is your average watch time — like 30 seconds? Thirty seconds with somebody is nothing. Scrolling through videos is nothing. You're meaningless. You don't create any kind of depth or emotional connection. But when somebody sits there and watches 10, 20, 30 hours of my long-format videos, when someone goes through and watches my vlog day after day and spends 10 or 20 minutes a day watching my vlog for a month — then they're ready to join my community and talk to me directly, or take me up on any of the other offerings I have.
But if you're just doing short videos, you've got to get such a disgusting amount of views to even get anything to happen. We're talking, often, tens of millions of views just to get a client or two. And most of you who are amateur content creators have no business system set up, so you waste every opportunity you get. I have a friend who has gotten millions and millions of views on Instagram, and as far as I can see from talking to her, she hasn't made any money off of it. People DM her and stuff, but she doesn't have anything ready to sell them. She's just taking all this time on Instagram, getting all these views, and not making a dollar off of it. It's ridiculous. I want to pop the delusion for you, because most of you would be better off finding something to do locally.
The Coaching Con
Here's what you're not calculating, and what none of these coaches with programs to sell you will tell you. Their idea is: yeah, quit your job, YouTube's great, you're going to make it like me — look, I made $70,000 with my scammy product launch over the weekend, selling the same kind of information you could have gotten on YouTube for free, or from AI. Literally, these coaches are selling the same stuff you could just get from ChatGPT instantaneously, personalized. Then they make videos saying, yeah, just start YouTube, you'll be great. But when you start YouTube and you're not getting views — or you are getting views but they're not turning into money and you're frustrated — then you're going to take their dumb course and piss your money away. And you're still not going to be successful. And then you're going to go back to your corporate job. Meanwhile, they've made a profit. They said what you needed to hear in order to pay them. You see how that works? Almost all of YouTube is that way.
So if you don't want to be in an environment where most people are pushing crap that people don't even need to buy, selling stuff that makes people's lives worse and exploits them — if you don't like that, you shouldn't be on there. Because if you want to be like me, and try to carry an authentic message of truth that actually is good for people whether or not they ever pay you, then the odds are stacked against you. The odds are stacked in favor of everybody who can make the most money with the least effort, so they can run flywheel business systems. Does that sound like an environment you'd enjoy being in? Because if not, you probably don't want to dedicate yourself to this. That's why I deleted everything last year. I was tired of everybody lying, cheating, and stealing while getting more views than me. I'm out here trying to provide genuine help to people, and the algorithm just leaves my silly self behind for being honest. There are certain narratives, and there are bots, and the algorithm, and people are unconscious and expect the same kinds of things. If you're not aware of all this, you are just pissing your time away for nothing.
The One Format Worth Making: Vlogs
Now, the one form of content that is worth making: vlogs. Vlogs are worth making. So if you're going to do anything on YouTube, do what I'm doing on the Jerry Banfield show on my @JerryBanfield channel: just talk about your life, real, raw, and authentic, for 10 or 20 minutes a day — and do a video every day. If you seriously want to be on YouTube, once a week — even five times a week — is nothing. You don't exist doing a video once a week, unless you can do it like MrBeast and spend millions and millions of dollars on every single video, with all the editing perfect, the title, all that research, and a whole team of people participating. If you can't do that, I've got news for you: you're going to be grinding out videos. That's the only way you have a realistic chance of anything working. You're not going to sit there researching and making perfectly edited videos, because the algorithm is already full of people who have more followers than you and have already done that. You're so far behind, it's hopeless to compete that way.
I've seen so many heartbreaking examples. I just saw a video where a guy took his life savings — $70,000 — and tried to make this incredible video, and made almost nothing back on it. I saw another guy who was so excited: he took a month — a month — to make one video. It bombed and got a hundred views.
That's why, with commenters — whom I generally try not to read, though YouTube Studio shoves some of them in my face — I sometimes try to only read what's posted by people at jerrybanfield.com. Somebody said I'm the king of slop. Slop is your opinion, but quantity is a fact. I've published 476 videos in the last 84 days. That's 5.7 videos a day, 76 minutes of raw content footage a day. If you love my videos, that's 106 hours of my videos you could watch. And every minute of every day, on average, there are five or ten people — all day, every day, seven days a week — watching my videos. That's with me starting six channels from scratch. I am on my way to my next billion views with the strategy I'm using now, because almost no YouTuber does this — but the YouTubers who are successful all do. They all grind out content. Even MrBeast has a bunch of channels, is always doing interviews — his entire life is about creating content. Even though he makes fewer actual videos, he still dumps a ridiculous amount of time into making content.
The idea that you're going to upload some videos and make money is ridiculous. But here's what you don't even think of, on top of everything else I've said — if that doesn't sound hard enough, and like everything isn't stacked against you enough: you had better be the most self-motivated, unstoppable person you can imagine. I remember going to one of those scammy MLM things back in college, where they talked about being bulletproof and believing in the product. You've got to be much more self-motivated than that to do YouTube. Because when you post over and over again and get nothing out of it, what is there to keep you going? Why would you keep posting? And then, when you finally do get something out of it, it's just people talking garbage. It's people making nasty comments. It's people saying that you suck and you're irrelevant.
The Discouragement Gauntlet
One of the most brutal things to start is a brand new YouTube coach channel. Talk about a thankless topic — if you don't have views and authority, nobody thinks you know anything about YouTube. So almost every comment on my new YouTube coach channel is negative: you don't know anything, we shouldn't listen to you, you're a failure. What kind of person keeps posting videos every day against that environment? Are you prepared to keep posting every single day when all you get is discouragement, when YouTube won't show your videos to hardly anybody, when people click on them and spend one minute watching your 20-minute video? Are you prepared to keep going? No. Most of you — 90-plus percent of you — are going to quit before you make 100 videos. I've made close to 100 videos on six different channels in the last four months, and that's the difference between me and the average creator. You need to be honest with yourself: are you up for that journey?
Let me lay it out. My YouTube coach channel has 94 videos right now, with more publishing and more coming. My dating channel has 94 videos too, and it's going to hit 100 quick. My crypto reviews channel: 120 videos. My ICP channel: 130 videos. My gaming channel: 84 videos. And my vlog channel: 107 videos. I've gotten to almost 100 videos on six channels in four months, all at the same time. And to anyone who says it can't be done — what's my name? I'm Jerry Banfield. If you can deal with all of that, then maybe you have a chance on YouTube.
Speed Is Everything: Use AI and Skip the Editing
The main thing you need to be able to do is make videos as fast as possible with the least resistance. And, by the way, do you know how to use AI? Can you make your videos without editing them? Amateur creators film these crappy videos, and my advice is: just upload that crappy video. When you upload the video where you're stumbling and going "ah" and "duh" and feeling like an idiot — upload it anyway. Because I promise you, if you keep uploading that, you're going to start talking differently all day, every day. You're going to talk like I do in my videos. Who put this thing together? Me. Who do I trust? Me. You're going to come do your videos like I do mine, where I show up and I ball out and I go hard. Sometimes I go soft and I'm chilling, relaxed, just there to help you have a nice day. Other days I'm hollering, I'm shouting, and I'm going off the top of my head.
You also ought to be able to use AI to speed up your thumbnails, to speed up your research, to speed up your metadata. It takes me three to five hours a day to crank all these videos out, and I'm convinced that all I have to do is keep doing this and I'm going to make tens of thousands of dollars a month on YouTube. To make it on YouTube you have to be an outlier — you've got to get into the top five or so percent of creators. And you do that by grinding. You do that by dedication and commitment and showing up day after day.
No Days Off, No Sick Time
So if you've got financial pressure, if you can't handle not making any money while everything sucks, if you can't handle creating videos when you're in a bad mood — oh, I hope you can show up when you're in a bad mood. Because you know what? On YouTube, I don't get days off. Every day I take off means no videos. I do take days off sometimes — I was on a trip with my kids, and no videos got made. Another day, all I made was a vlog. That was four days, and I looked at it and realized I had just lost all the views I would have gotten from making all the videos in that stretch. You don't get days off. Do you get sick? I don't, which is good, because I need to be healthy to get up and grind videos out like this every day. You don't get sick time on YouTube. You get sick time if you have a corporate job — they say, oh, we're sorry, take the day off, and they pay you. Not on YouTube. If you're sick and can't show up and do your videos, you get nothing. And if you're in a bad mood? I film when I'm in a bad mood. On the Jerry Banfield show — and maybe I lost a date or two over this — I film my videos when I feel like absolute crap, crying. I don't care how I feel; I'm filming videos. I don't care if I have nothing to talk about; I'll have something to talk about. My mind, all day, every day, all it does is generate YouTube videos. You need a disgusting level of commitment if you're going to take this seriously, and everything is stacked against you. It's one of the worst times ever to create content.
If You Still Want In, Get a Mentor
But if you can make real, raw, authentic human content like I do, then you might have a chance, and you might have some amazing opportunities. And if you want those opportunities, the number one thing I'd do is get a mentor. I've been doing this for 15 years. I can look at your channel and show you where you need to get better very quickly — if you want that kind of help from me, join the Jerry Banfield Family and message me directly.
It's like the woman I dated. I told her: you need to stop editing your videos. Give me all your videos and I'll run them through AI — they'll all be edited and you won't have to do anything. She figured it would be better to just not date me and keep doing everything herself. That's fine. I'll take the same approach to YouTube: I'll go cold approach hundreds of women, and I'll get lots more dates and lots more opportunities, all of which you can follow on my Jerry Banfield dating channel.
So if you are tired of screwing around on YouTube, tired of fake gurus selling you BS authority and niche formulas, and you want to have a real talk with someone who will tell you the truth, join my community and let's talk.
And if you want to see everything I've learned about what actually works — the grinding, the monetization, the honest numbers from starting six channels from zero — I share all of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist. Just don't say I didn't warn you: unless you're built for this, YouTube really is the dumbest career move you can make right now.