Short answer: YouTube has become a landfill, and I am trying to figure out whether I want to be the best trash bag in it. There are about 5 billion videos on YouTube, roughly 20 million more uploaded every day, and a billion people watching, so in theory every daily uploader should get hundreds of views and every viewer should find exactly what they want. In practice, when I scroll my feed, almost everything feels like trash, and I have to do real work to find one video worth watching. I have been on YouTube since 2012, I run six channels, I have no other job, and I made more than $5,000 last month after deleting everything in 2025 and starting fresh in March 2026, so this is not an abstract question for me.
In YouTube Landfill, the newest post on this page, I scroll my own feed on camera with Gemini's built-in video summaries and say what I actually see: reaction videos, "grow faster on YouTube" videos from people who have not started from zero in years, black pill content telling men whose lives are hard exactly what they want to hear, and drama that makes the viewer dumber. When three kids at my son's elementary school award ceremony said they wanted to be YouTubers, my honest reaction was that they were born 20 years too late. I also pointed out to my daughter that the algorithm in China pushes kids math and science achievements while the one in the United States pushes stupid. My conclusion is that when AI can summarize any video in one click, information alone no longer matters. A video has to contain something I did not know I wanted to know, and it has to respect my intelligence. That is the only kind of video I want to make, and if one person really hears me, that is enough.
My view has moved around this year, but one thing has stayed the same: YouTube is a good place to share your life and build an audience, and a weak place to depend on for income. In my August post on the Partner Program change I argued that doubling the watch-hour requirement from 4,000 hours to 8,000 is a small change for me, because a couple hundred dollars of ad revenue is not worth losing sleep over. My monetized ICP channel, started on March 21, 2026, earned $372 from 5,900 watch hours in 28 days, and the real money comes from selling things on jerrybanfield.com, where the majority of my YouTube income goes.
The feed itself is where my thinking changed most. In my June post on YouTube's Your Custom Feed I was excited. A custom search got me a small creator in Pakistan describing an ordinary day and surfaced a channel with 6,000 subscribers I had never seen, and I thought AI-driven search would reward very specific videos nobody else had made. By late July the tone was bleaker. In The Future of YouTube Is Hopeless for Most Creators I argued that AI now answers the how-to questions that used to send people to YouTube, that bots push certain products and narratives, and that most creators who depend on views for money will struggle. The October post closes the loop: the feed I was hopeful about in June is the landfill I scroll through now, and the videos that still do well for me are the ones I throw together off the top of my head rather than the ones I labor over.
What I still believe is narrower than the headlines. I think a daily video is worth making even if nobody watches it, because real human stories are becoming rare as AI produces almost everything else, and because videos on YouTube have changed my life, including a woman I may date who found me there. I think in-person work, like coaching and local connection, is where the scarce opportunities are. I think a creator who wants to be paid has to build a platform they control, because the platform owner always has the traffic. And I will not say whatever it takes to get paid, which is a choice with a cost in views.
You do not need to read all four posts in order. The October post is the most honest look at what the feed has become, the August post is the most practical and explains why you need your own platform, the July post gives the bigger picture, and the June post is the one where I still see a real chance for small creators. If you want to know how I think about coaching and what it is for, read why I coach YouTubers. For the difference between audience numbers and actual income, read Views Are Not Income.
If you have a channel and want a straight read on it, I do personal video reviews at jerrybanfield.com/review/.
On this page
Every post I have written on this subject is below in full, newest first, each under its own heading.
- YouTube Landfill (October 31, 2026)
- YouTube's Partner Program Update Doubles Watch Hours But Doesn't Matter (August 12, 2026)
- The Future of YouTube Is Hopeless for Most Creators (July 29, 2026)
- YouTube's New AI Custom Feed Changes Everything (June 19, 2026)
YouTube Landfill
From my video published October 31, 2026.
I'm Jerry Banfield, a full-time YouTuber since 2012 with all kinds of experience on YouTube, and what's crazy to me today is this: there are something like 5 billion videos on YouTube, and it feels like it's so difficult to find just one that I actually want to watch. Only around 20 million or so videos get uploaded to YouTube every day, but there are about a billion people on YouTube every day. In theory, if those billion people are each watching at least 10-plus videos a day, there should be 500-plus views a day per video. If you just upload one video a day and views were evenly distributed, everybody should be able to get plenty of views on all their videos.
That math baffles me, because in theory it should be easy for me to find a video to watch. There are so many of them. In theory, there should be videos giving everybody exactly what they want all the time. But when I scroll through my feed right now, everything just feels like trash. I have to do so much work just to find one video I actually want to watch that it's not worth it. And that leaves me wondering about the future of YouTube. Where are we? Where are we going from here?
Where is YouTube going from here?
This matters especially to me because this is what I do to make a living. I'm grateful I've made at least $5,000 in the last month, even though I deleted all my channels last year and started fresh in March. I shared the whole story of starting over in I Created 10 New YouTube Channels and Then Deleted Them, and the push to rebuild an income from zero in Everyone Told Me to Get a Job. I Gave YouTube 74 Days to Make $30,000. So I'm sitting here asking: where are we going from here? Is it realistic for people to even be a creator going forward?
I was at my son's school recently. He's in elementary school, and at his award ceremony three kids in his grade said they wanted to be YouTubers. My honest reaction was that if you're in elementary school wanting to be a YouTuber, you missed the opportunity. You should have been born 20 years earlier and then it could have worked out. From where I sit, it doesn't look like YouTube is that great going forward, which is a lot of why I made Why YouTube is the dumbest career move you can make right now.
What I've learned on YouTube is that it's just a grind. And it seems like the more effort I put into a video, the worse it does. The more I just throw together some video off the top of my head, talking about whatever I feel like, the more original it seems to be, and that seems to do better these days. I'm so glad YouTube seems to be trending away from this copy-and-paste garbage. It seems that people are desiring something different.
Reaction videos and "grow faster" videos
So I started thinking about what makes me want to watch a video and what stops me from wanting to watch one. A lot of the content on YouTube is just garbage reactions. If you do reaction videos, I'm unsubscribing. I can't stand people doing reaction videos. You bore me. You are wasting my time. If you don't have something original to say, I don't care. I'm going to go unsubscribe from some people right now.
Here's a video in my feed: learn how to grow faster on YouTube. I'm tired. I'm tired of being told how to grow faster on YouTube, because if you already have an audience on YouTube, you don't even know how to grow faster. You haven't started from zero in so long that you don't know anything. What you say doesn't necessarily work at all these days. It's different. Growing this year has been different. I'm tired, and your reaction videos bore me.
Scrolling my feed with Gemini summaries
Let me go through my feed right now and share some of the stuff I'm seeing. "You'll never scroll again after watching this." That's such crap. That's such crap. And with AI summaries now, it's crazy. I was going to ask Gemini, "Hey, summarize this video," and I didn't even have to say it. There was already a button there for a video summary. So I'm like, okay, where are we going from here? When you can just summarize the video, information doesn't matter anymore. What you've got to have in the video is something I don't know that I want to know, and then I respect that you're intelligent enough that you're not making me stupid by watching your video. That's my main issue with almost every video on YouTube: I feel like you're making me stupid by watching your video. I've come to believe this is why AI Just Made Personality More Valuable Than Information.
The people I really love and whose videos I watch, I'm so choosy about. I watch people's videos because I want to get smarter, I want to learn, and I want to expand my perspective. If you're not doing that, I'm not watching your videos. The goal of my videos is so that you can get smarter, because most of the content on YouTube is making you dumber. "Give me a hundred thousand." "Oh, look at this drama." Most of the content is making you dumb.
I pointed this out to my daughter, who's in middle school, and she didn't seem happy with what I said, but I told her to think about the videos she's watching. For the kids in China, the algorithm is pushing them videos celebrating math and science achievements and celebrating kids learning things. The algorithms in the US are pushing stupid. Just "duh, look at this idiot" content. "Oh, wow, look at this."
The black pill video
I watched something I don't usually watch. I was trying to figure out what I want to do with my gaming videos on Jerry Banfield Games, and I watched some guy go on with this black pill garbage about looks, and how it's so hard, and how it's hopeless. I'm like, what? What world are you living in? There's a world of abundant possibilities. And a lot of YouTube is just telling people whose lives suck what they want to hear, which is not what you need. If your life sucks, you need to hear something you don't want to hear: that you can do something about it, that there are opportunities that would blow your entire idea of reality away.
The attention economy video and "reclaim your morning"
Let me see what this next video said. The attention economy: the speaker explains our brains have adapted to constant… and this is where I thank God for Gemini summaries. Look at this video. "Reclaim your morning." AI could give you this advice. I'm telling you, if you're making videos on YouTube that AI could make, you're done. You're finished. Stop making videos that AI can make. This woman's video has 300,000 views, and here's the summary. This is how stupid content is getting on YouTube. Reclaim your morning: dedicate the first hour of your day to your own thoughts rather than digital consumption. Wow. Embrace boredom: practice silence and disconnect from constant entertainment. Pause before scrolling: when you feel the urge to check your phone, pause. Does this work for anybody? Her video is called "How to never doom scroll again," with "brain damage" and "You'll never scroll again after watching this" in the packaging. Seriously.
Here's an example of what I mean. I went to Gemini right then and said, "Hey Gemini, can you give me three tips to stop scrolling and to make my day better?" I bet it would have a significant overlap, and it did. It said: add physical and visual friction to your phone. Protect the golden bookends of your day; avoid looking at feeds for the first 30 minutes. Practice the default substitute, because willpower rarely beats an algorithm, so you need a dedicated alternative to boredom. That's exactly what I'm getting at. This woman has a video with 300,000 views that YouTube is putting at the top of my feed, and it's utterly useless. This video is utterly useless. AI could tell me that.
The rest of my feed
Next video: "Freestyling till I accidentally say something gay," 13 seconds in. I've already seen that. I already saw one guy say something gay and I don't want to see that again. I'm bored. "Meet the genius kid who solved YouTube." Seriously, I'm never clicking on a stupid title like that again. "We finally did it, they're being canceled." Oh really? Here's another video about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Now this one's good: it's about Jerry Banfield. I might watch that, because I watch videos about myself. This one's kind of funny: "I tried to lure kids onto a bus to test their safety." I'm not watching that, though. That video makes me dumber. I guarantee you it's boring. "It makes $51 a day in an hour at 22, bro." I'm good. My calls make more than that in an hour. I don't care if you make $50 a day.
Oh, look, it's another stupid video: "What I saw at the store confirms why Gen Z men are choosing to be single." Let me get the garbage summary. Guys, you've got to stop watching this content. This is crazy. Summarize this video: in a parking lot, the creator witnesses a young woman exchange phone numbers, and then when her apparent boyfriend arrived in the car, she claimed she'd only asked for a cigarette. So you saw deceit, and social media describes women's reaction as arguing, and it's becoming more common, and the impact on men is that he expresses frustration, stating these experiences are driving men away. It's another critique of society. These videos are making you an idiot. This guy is not talking about anything useful, and this video has 453,000 views. "Her boyfriend has no idea." This video is making you stupid.
This is crazy. Every video on my feed is a stupid trap. This one is a stupid trap because what you need to know is how amazing relationships can be. I just did a video on my Jerry Banfield Dating channel that is the opposite of this stupid video. It's called "26 Women, 50 Dates, 100 Reasons I'm Not Giving Up." That is a video that will make you smart, because it gives you a hundred reasons that dating, yes, sucks, and I'm not going to lie about that, dating is so bad, but it's worth it. My video has a 10-minute average watch time, a 5% click-through rate, and 1.7K views on a channel with about 800 subscribers, and it's doing great with the algorithm.
By comparison, YouTube should know I'm intelligent because it listens to my conversations all the time, like this one. And yet here's what it feeds me: "I'm 28, here are the biggest wealth killers in your 20s." Not watching that. "15 brutal truths of 10 million followers I wish I knew at zero."
All right, let me look at this "15 brutal truths" video and summarize it. You've got to be able to make content that you can't just summarize. With my content, you can't just summarize it, because my content is unusual and it's fun. Here's what Gemini gave me: strategy and mindset, avoid niching down too narrowly and instead create content that appeals to core, casual, and new audiences. I'm doing that. Avoid the lake method for content, create platform-specific pieces, and utilize your top performers across other channels. Growth and sustainability: stop chasing views and prioritize building trust. This actually has some decent information, but you see the problem. Persistence: understand content creation is a marathon. So this video has good information, but I didn't need to spend 12 minutes watching it. I just summarized it with Gemini.
And here's a MrBeast video: "Trapped inside Beast City for 24 hours." My life's too short to watch that video, because it's junk food for my brain. That's not going to make me smarter. I already learned my lesson about chasing that style in I Tried MrBeast's YouTube Advice But It Didn't Work for My Channel. Here's a video about 5,840 cigarettes. Here's "This is why girls won't let you crack the cold heart." Cam, wow, my brother Cam here just changed his name to Cold Heart Cam instead of The Way of Cam. I don't think that was a very good rebrand.
"YouTube Is Unwatchable"
Now here's one where YouTube has clearly been listening to me. This video is called "YouTube is unwatchable." It is, dude. I'm feeling that YouTube is unwatchable. How is this AI so intelligent on YouTube and yet so stupid at producing the right videos for me to watch? The summary says the platform prioritizes metrics that keep users on the app indefinitely rather than viewer satisfaction or high-quality long-form content. I disagree with that, because if you really satisfy somebody with your videos, YouTube seems to put them out. My videos seem to be satisfying people and YouTube seems to be distributing them. Yes, there is a ton of proliferation of misinformation on this platform, there's all kinds of predatory advertising, you can get demonetized pretty easily, and even if videos go viral and get blasted to audiences, it can ultimately turn against you. So that's actually decent. This guy made a video called "YouTube is unwatchable," and somebody in the comments says they've noticed the homepage suddenly got worse two or three months ago, and it's been garbage since. The YouTube algorithm needs to step up.
The best trash bag in the landfill
That one video was pretty good, but the feed is so garbage. What I'm wondering as a content creator is: am I trying to win in the garbage game? Is this what I'm doing? Am I trying to be the best trash bag in the landfill? That's what it feels like as a content creator, like my goal is to be the trash bag full of trash that you pick up and go, "Oh my God, this is the best trash bag in the landfill." I'm trying to make videos for people who are metaphorically homeless, wandering around the landfill, and I want you to open my trash bag and spend as much time in it as possible. Is that what we're doing on YouTube these days? Because that's what it feels like.
But at the same time, I know that videos I've watched on YouTube have changed my life. They've helped me be smarter. They've helped me see things that I hadn't been able to see before, and I treasure that, and they've helped me get a wider perspective too. I'm talking to a woman I may end up dating who found me on YouTube. So that's what's tricky: there are so many diamonds in the rough on YouTube. There are so many little gems of absolute wisdom. There are so many people sharing their raw, vulnerable lives. There are probably at least 100 million videos on YouTube that are worth watching out of the several billion, and it seems like an Easter egg hunt today to find them.
Make what you care about
The only thing that works for me as a content creator is to make what I care about, which is the same conclusion I came to in What 14 Years as a YouTuber Taught Me About Intention. I made this because I cared about saying it. I just wanted to say this to all the ancestors, the homies hanging out here in my house who don't have anything better to do in the afterlife besides listening to Jerry Banfield talk. To all my unborn kids that I'm going to have with some woman, maybe this woman I'm talking to, maybe another one. To all my unborn kids and grandkids hanging out, checking out what Dad and Great-Granddad had to say. To all y'all here in the house with me that I can't see, to my unseen audience, I just wanted to say this to my empty house right now.
To me, that is a way to do YouTube: you've got to share what you need to say, because just me saying it is good for me. And I hope people on YouTube get smarter and realize the average IQ of most content is for dummies. It feels like it's difficult to find content that'll make you smarter, that'll expand your brain. But I hope every video I make is content that will expand your brain and get you to think of something you haven't thought of before. I hope every YouTuber hears me promoting being authentic. And at the same time, I've come to realize there's no competition. If I get one meaningful view on my videos, that's enough. If one person really hears me, I don't care how many garbage scrolls go quickly through my video. That's how I've learned to measure things, as I shared in How I Define Success as a Creator Without Views or Money.
So if you want me to look at your YouTube channel, here's where I'm coming from. I've been on YouTube 15 years, I've uploaded tens of thousands of videos, and I shared what all of them taught me in YouTube Lessons From 5,000 and 10,000 Videos: What I Learned. I've created 20-plus channels and gotten a bunch of them monetized, and I've made thousands in the last month doing YouTube starting from scratch this year. I sell shirts on my website, I have calls, I have cameos, and I have video reviews. I've got all of it for you on my website. To me, if you're going to do YouTube, you've got to have a website to send people to. If you're a creator, I can make you a website with AI that costs almost nothing to host and does almost anything you want it to. For more of my thinking on being a creator today, everything I've said on the subject is collected in my Content Creators playlist. And that's enough on this one.
YouTube's Partner Program Update Doubles Watch Hours But Doesn't Matter
From my video published August 12, 2026.
YouTube recently doubled the requirements in terms of watch hours to be a partner in ad revenue — from 4,000 to 8,000 watch hours. And this really is a small change. Now, I see people flipping out about this with videos saying things like, "they're screwing content creators over." And I'm grateful that in my Skool community, a guy who just started his YouTube channel recently, Scouse Will, made a post saying that it's not worth him making YouTube videos because of this.
Here's my stance on this. I'm a full-time YouTuber. I've been on YouTube since 2011. I have six channels. I make thousands of dollars a month on YouTube. I don't have another job — this is all I do. I just deleted everything last year, so I have four channels I'm still looking to monetize and two that are monetized. So I'm in a good position to give perspective.
YouTube Is Personal Development First, Income Second
Here's what I said to him. He was telling me that doing YouTube videos was forcing him to confront a lot of things about himself. And I said: for your own personal development — for everybody, or maybe not everybody, but for lots of people — it is worth doing YouTube. But at the same time, if you're doing YouTube with the expectation of income, that's a lot different. Most of you should only do YouTube as a hobby and just share your life and not even think about making money.
I've done a couple of videos about this. One said, "Content creators, stop working for free." And that video is basically saying, look, if you're going to call yourself a content creator, you need to act like a professional. Professionals don't upload a couple of videos — three or four videos every week — and figure, well, I'm done, I should just get income. No. I upload on average five and a half plus videos a day. I upload five to eight videos a day on average. That's 494 videos I've uploaded since May 18th. If you want to do this for money, you need to act like it's a job and work it like a job.
The Queen and the Dumb Career Move
And I know I'll mention the queen again, because some of you like that shout out. I dated this woman. She quit her corporate job — which looked like it was taking good care of her — to do content creation, where she was making $0. She was putting a ton of effort in, but she didn't even have a good path to income. And I guess she didn't want your boy to make it all easy for her and have it be like TI: you can have whatever you like. Yeah. Stacks on me. YouTube on ice. We can pop water bottles all night, baby. You can have all the views you like. Yeah. She didn't want that.
So it's a dumb career move to think that you're going to upload videos and just make money off them. Now, yes, perhaps one percent of people have some quirk of their personality, or they're so beautiful, or they're saying the exact right thing at the exact right time, that the algorithm is going to push them. But most of you are not that. So what you need to do is decide: either YouTube is a hobby or it's not. And for most people, just do YouTube for fun.
What the Doubled Watch Hours Actually Cost
And here's the truth about the change, too. Take my monetized ICP channel. I just started this channel on March 21st, 2026. I've gotten 329,000 views — 39,000 of those organic views. And here's the ad revenue: 5,900 watch hours in 28 days. Now, this is good crypto ad revenue. This is not gaming videos or vlog revenue — this is good financial services revenue: $372. So if we add a couple thousand more watch hours to it, we could round it to about $500 for 8,000 watch hours.
So yes, you could argue that since YouTube has doubled the threshold for watch time hours, you need to get an extra 4,000 watch hours, and wow, you might miss out on a couple hundred dollars of ad revenue in order to do that. Is $200 life changing for you? Because it shouldn't be. To me, I don't even worry about things less than $10,000 in one direction or another. I think about my whole year of ad revenue at once. If you're sweating a couple hundred dollars, you're in such a scarcity mindset that you're not going to make it on YouTube. And you should just get a job or find some reliable income or make some connections locally, because YouTube is hard and it's getting more difficult with AI.
You've got somebody like me who cranks out five to eight videos a day. I use AI to generate thumbnails. I use AI to rapidly research and speed up my video production process. I use AI to go in and optimize my metadata. I can have descriptions and titles done fast, and I run my videos through multiple AIs to almost instantly generate the most clickbait titles for my videos. And if you're not doing that, you're not, in most cases, going to get what I'm getting.
Ad Revenue Is the Minority of My YouTube Income
But here's the even deeper point. If you're worried about a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue, you have no idea how to really make money on YouTube. Ad revenue is a minority of the money I make on YouTube. The majority of the money I make on YouTube goes through jerrybanfield.com. And this you don't even need to be monetized for. All you need to do is have your own website and get to selling stuff immediately, as soon as you launch your channel.
My website is set up where I just built it with AI. It is super easy to build with AI. You can literally use Claude Max like I do, which is $200 a month — so I don't sweat small amounts of money. YouTube is not a great side hustle if you're sweating small amounts of money. If you're sweating small amounts of money, you're not going to be making money. Because I guarantee you, to make $200 in YouTube ad revenue, you could have just as easily gotten a job for $10 an hour and guaranteed yourself that you made $200 from 20 hours of work. Whereas if you put in 20 hours of work on YouTube, you're probably not going to make anything. If you calculate most YouTubers' income in ad revenue, you're making a few dollars an hour. You could easily work and make more money than that.
If you want to make real money on YouTube, you need to sell something. And the popular things to sell are community. If you want to make real money on YouTube, look at what I'm doing: selling a community directly on my website. I have this straight on the blockchain. There's no more third party in the middle — it's my community, on my website, via my code. And you can buy that with Stripe or with ICP straight on my website. I just launched this and tested it with one of my other profiles. You can literally be the very first person in this community. How cool would that be?
But I also have where you can schedule a Zoom call with me for 30 minutes, which can easily bring in a couple hundred dollars in a single day for me. Then I've made it even faster now, because some of you can't wait a day or a couple of days for a scheduled time — you just want to talk to me right this second. So now you can do that too. You want to talk to me about your YouTube channel for 10 minutes as soon as possible? If I've set that I'm online, you can buy this and I'll give you a call within usually a few minutes. As soon as I see the notification and I'm available, I will hop in — often you'll get a call from me within 10 minutes, on WhatsApp, FaceTime, Zoom, whatever you gave me your number for. Or you can talk to me for 30 minutes. And then I have a Skool community also, and that makes more than my YouTube ad revenue every month. All of these are things you literally can start with zero views.
Get a Mentor — or at Least Talk to a YouTuber
So if you're sweating, "oh my God, YouTube made this change" — look, if you're going to take YouTube seriously, you need to be acting like it. You need to be learning and thinking like it. And you should have a mentor. I don't need a mentor at this point — I've been doing YouTube 15 years — but I have colleagues. I have peers. I have YouTubers that text me, that WhatsApp with me, that schedule calls with me, that I've followed for years. And I know what I see in their businesses, and there are lots of other YouTubers I know and talk to. So if you don't have that, you should be talking to a YouTuber. Otherwise, you are completely wasting your time on YouTube outside of personal development. Now, that aspect of YouTube is valuable.
My Vlog Channel Makes Money Without Monetization
For example, I have a channel that you could make yourself — a vlog channel. This channel makes money straight through my website at jerrybanfield.com. And this channel does not make any YouTube ad revenue. But people have come through from my vlogs and spent hundreds of dollars in the last month joining my Skool community and scheduling calls. On my main channel, I have YouTube ad revenue, and on my website there's going to be a bunch more things you can buy. But this vlog channel is not monetized. And for this channel in particular, yes, could I monetize sooner with the old watch time requirement? Sure. But does it really matter if I have to wait an extra month or two? Again, I don't care about missing a couple hundred dollars in ad revenue.
Looking at the actual analytics for this channel, it's on its way to monetization. It's almost to being monetized on the new system — this will basically be two, three, four more days and I can monetize there. And if I remember correctly, YouTube didn't change this threshold; they just changed the ad revenue one. So you can still get Super Chats, you can still live stream and get memberships and all of that right there with 500 subs. And this is nice, because once you've completed that tier, then you're able to easily complete the watch page ads requirement. At the rate I'm going based on my analytics, I'll probably be able to get the watch time ads within a couple of weeks.
I've got 1,900 watch time hours on this channel in a month, which is half of what you need right now. But look at the growth. And the subscribers are growing even faster — at this rate, I'll hit the watch time hours faster than the subscribers. So again, this change isn't a big deal because, ooh, I might have to wait a couple more months.
What Actually Matters: A System to Make Money
What is a big deal is that you know the truth about YouTube and what it really takes to make money. If you want to make money on YouTube — especially if you want to do it as anything more than a hobby or a side project — you need to be taking it seriously, putting in some serious effort, and then having a mentor who can tell you where you're wasting your time. Most of you are putting too much time in and not getting enough views, subscribers, and high-quality fans. Most of you, like the woman I dated before, have no system to make money if you do go viral. She had some of her videos get hundreds of thousands of views, and she didn't make any money off it. Unlike if my videos get hundreds of thousands of views — people start coming through jerrybanfield.com, scheduling calls, buying the community, and joining the Skool.
And I'm going to put things like tips up on my website. Then there's a leaderboard, so you can show off on the leaderboard that you're the top Jerry Banfield fan. I'm going to put all kinds of other products on there — courses, comedy, all kinds of stuff is going to go up there.
So if you want to do YouTube full time, this change doesn't matter. And if you're just doing YouTube as a hobby, this change might cost you a couple hundred dollars. But if you're doing YouTube as a hobby, then you shouldn't be spending hardly any money on it anyway. Just film the videos on your phone and upload them, and be happy with whatever views you get. If you want more of my thinking on all of this, I've collected years of it in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
Why You Need Your Own Platform
I hope this has helped, because I see a bunch of people panicking and going off on YouTube. From YouTube's point of view, they need to make their business profitable. And this is also a good example of why you need your own platform. And this is why I'm bringing everybody to jerrybanfield.com as much as I possibly can. Because when you have your own platform, you can set the rules. But when you're on YouTube's platform, they have the traffic. So what you need is traffic plus your own platform. And your own platform is easier than ever to build with AI today.
If you don't have your own platform, you have no right to even complain about the terms, because you're using somebody else's platform. That's like going into somebody else's house — if you don't like it, go somewhere else. YouTube is the best deal for content creators out there right now. And at the same time, you've got to get people off of YouTube if you really want to monetize the best.
I hope to see you on jerrybanfield.com. I would love to talk to you and hear about your YouTube channel.
I'll also put some services up on my website where you can just submit your YouTube channel and I'll give you something like an email review of your channel and everything. I'm going to add all that stuff up there, so go take a look for that on my website.
The Future of YouTube Is Hopeless for Most Creators
From my video published July 29, 2026.
Why I See the Future of YouTube as Hopeless for Most Creators
The future of YouTube is absolutely hopeless for most creators. I'm going to lay out, after 15 years on YouTube, why I see that happening, where we're going in the future, and I'm going to give you a very clear solution for what to do instead. The best part is, I'm doing exactly this myself. I deleted everything on YouTube last year. I had gotten over a billion impressions across all the different platforms — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and more. I deleted everything last year because I see what's coming. AI is getting so effective that it's annihilating the need for a lot of content, and you haven't seen anything compared to what it's going to be able to do in the future.
If you've seen how much AI has progressed in the last few years, you know what I mean. A few years ago, I had to make thumbnails and come up with my own hooks and video titles. Recently, AI created a thumbnail for me in just a minute. I had just told AI my video idea, and it instantly gave me fifteen titles and the hooks — it did all of that. So right now, AI is actually making content creation easier, and most creators are trying to teach you how to use AI to do better content creation. But you've got to look at where this is going. AI can already generate videos. And AI like ChatGPT, when people go and talk to it, is eliminating the need for people to even go on YouTube.
AI Is Cutting Out the Need to Use YouTube at All
One of the big things that used to draw people to YouTube was educational and how-to content. People would think, "Oh, I want to figure out how to do this. I'll go to YouTube." For example, with dating: "I'm struggling with dating — let me go to YouTube and find somebody that can help me." You don't need to do that anymore. AI has gotten so good, you don't even need to go to YouTube. AI will tell you the same kind of stuff about dating, and you can give AI your entire dating profile and it will instantly come back to you with feedback. AI is doing this in so many other areas. You've got ChatGPT Pro, which is insane for doing research.
Crypto, for example, is a perfect area of YouTube that in my view is absolutely hopeless, because crypto YouTube totally depends on people being utterly clueless about these different coins and watching people who are so-called authorities or influencers tell them what to do. I make crypto videos, so I would know. And yet now AI can do such incredible research that you don't need to even watch crypto YouTube content anymore. I just wanted to do some research for a video, so I asked Gemini. I went into Gemini, and it was so much better than watching a video. I asked what some of the most viral or interesting things happening in crypto today were, and it had all the data — bam, it just cranked all of it out right there. I don't have to go on X and listen to all these people. I don't have to pick who to follow. AI just pulls all the data and drops it right there. That's the future. So the future of YouTube, to me, is absolutely unsustainable, because AI is cutting out the need to even use YouTube for most things.
The Algorithm, the Comments, and the Bots
On top of that, you have a ton of people already doing YouTube who already have audiences. And if you're not saying exactly the right things, you are just never going to go anywhere in the algorithm. I hate to break it to you, because you might be pretty idealistic if you're a content creator. I had channels with thousands of dollars a month in passive income where I literally didn't have to do anything. My old videos — because I put thousands of videos on YouTube — would continue to get search traffic. And I deleted all of that because I see where this is going. I see that my effort on YouTube is continually producing diminishing returns. In terms of monetizing YouTube, it is continuing to get more difficult.
These days I'm not reading anything anyone says to me on YouTube for free anymore. It doesn't matter what you post in the comments. The comments are your place to say whatever you want, and the video is my place to say whatever I want. If you want me to listen to you, you can join the Jerry Banfield Family on Skool. And you can see, even with my community, your first thought might be: why would I join that? I can just ask AI anything I want to know immediately. Why would I bother with a community?
Well, to me, the future of monetization on YouTube is communities — bringing real people together. But there's a huge problem with that also. In my community you can have a direct interaction with me, which can be nice — you can share, discuss, give me comments, share your situation, and ask for advice. However, online interaction and posting is turning into one AI response talking to another AI response. Have you noticed that? You go on X, and it's like somebody just talked to AI and had it crank out something for them. Then they post that, and somebody replies by talking to AI and dumping an AI post back in there. In a lot of cases, people probably aren't even reading these posts. They're just putting them into AI and asking, "What did this guy really say? Now give me a response." People are just talking through AI.
That's bad for YouTube, because a lot of YouTube was built on comments and organic discussion and people not having AI to use. The future of YouTube is being hit from every angle, where you don't even need to get into the comment section on a YouTube video because you're just going to find bots there. And the more people disengage from YouTube, the more it becomes an empty bot farm. If you haven't noticed, bots are a huge problem on YouTube. From what I've seen, bots are pushing huge amounts of videos — if you'll put the right narratives out there, bots will push your video. If you promote certain kinds of diets or certain crypto coins or certain narratives that certain people with no ethics at all want promoted, they will use bots to push your videos. The bots will give YouTube all kinds of positive data, and then YouTube will show the video to more real people because of that. So if you think you're just going to go on YouTube, share your thoughts, and not end up having to say certain things to get views, I hate to break it to you. My channels are a great example of that.
Why I Came Back to YouTube After Deleting Everything
You might ask: well, why did you come back to YouTube after you deleted everything, here in 2026? Honest answer — I couldn't find anything better to do with myself. I tried doing local stuff, and I didn't get anywhere trying to help people write books or build a local business in nine months. So I started up YouTube channels because I got divorced. I'm living by myself now, and I can't live off my wife anymore, so I need to make some money. I went first to what I already knew made money for me, which is YouTube. And I've been surprised to find that it actually is pretty easy, if you create very certain types of content, to get some organic reach today — because a lot of YouTubers have given up. It's obvious how hopeless it is.
It is absolutely naive to think you're just going to put a great title and a great thumbnail on a video and get any kind of views. There are so many other people doing so much better titles and videos and thumbnails than you're ever going to come up with, you might as well quit. Hopelessness is actually very valuable, because you quit doing wasteful activities. I've seen that my YouTube is pretty hopeless. I know I'm not willing to say whatever I need to say to get paid on YouTube. The way I see it, the future of YouTube is that pretty much only the people who are saying whatever they need to say to get paid are going to get paid. That's what I've seen, and the Mr. Beast era has really reflected that — you do whatever you need to do, go to any lengths to get attention, say whatever you need to say to get paid, and anyone not doing that is pretty much irrelevant.
The Solution: Use YouTube to Focus In Person
Now, that said, I still think having a YouTube channel and doing videos that are out there to try and help people is valuable. Even if I don't have a lot of people watching some of my videos, like my YouTube coach videos, I at least have the chance to help someone, and that feels good. I at least have the chance to express myself, which is useful. But what I see as the future is focusing in person. One of the best things you can use YouTube videos for is to help support you in focusing in person. To me, this is the solution.
When I started on YouTube in 2011, there was a huge opportunity because hardly anyone was creating content, and the number of people interested in watching content consistently went up. However, since the peak in 2021, the number of people watching content has actually dropped. A lot of people are pulling away from even watching YouTube or any kind of content creation or consumption. Take me: I'm not on Instagram. I'm not on Facebook. Even on YouTube, my consumption of content is very conscious and very limited. If I'm not getting a video specifically recommended to me by somebody, I'm not just scrolling the YouTube feed anymore. This is why YouTube has gotten so hopeless for most creators. The thought that you're just going to get discovered in the feed because you made a great video is ridiculous. I've seen so many heartbreaking examples of people who put a month into a video, tried everything, and then their video got 200 views.
So the way I see it, the best thing YouTube is good for is helping you focus in person. YouTube is a great place to share, express yourself, and see what you want to talk about. But doing what you do on YouTube in person is valuable, because what's scarce right now is in person. For example, a dating coach. You want a dating coach? You can go online, and there are all kinds of so-called dating gurus that will talk to you, charge you for their communities, and charge you a fortune for their coaching. But if you want a local dating coach, that's scarce. I know exactly two dating coaches in St. Petersburg, Florida. And I guarantee you, if one of these guys had tried to do dating on YouTube, he would have made nothing. This guy is making ten grand a month doing local dating coaching, and he has a handful of clients — the majority of them paying him thousands of dollars a month to basically be like a paid boyfriend for them.
The Local Dating Coach Making Ten Grand a Month
I talked about that on my Jerry Banfield dating channel. There's not any sex involved — he's basically filling the role of a boyfriend and then trying to help these women get out there, meet men, and be ready for an actual boyfriend. And this guy is cleaning up. This is a guy you'd walk by in the street, and you wouldn't believe that he's making ten grand a month coaching mostly hot women on how to date and showing them how to date, showing up for them like a boyfriend until they find their man. These women are paying this guy fifteen-plus hundred dollars a month. This is the future.
I can tell you firsthand that what you have to do on YouTube to earn $1,500 a month is significant. I know, because what I've done is post several videos a day across six different channels, and that's got me to earning $1,500 a month. Do you know how much time I have to spend, and how much knowledge I have loaded into AI? Do you know how much experience it takes to crank out several videos a day across different niches, monetize a couple of channels to make a few hundred a month of ad revenue, and then have some one-on-one calls people pay for, all adding up to like $1,500 to $2,000 a month? Now, yes, I did start up within three months and got over a thousand dollars a month, and now I'm at around $1,500 to $2,000 a month.
What It Would Take for Me to Get Paid Big on YouTube
However, here's what I see. By the end of the year, I want to make something like 50 or 100 grand. So I asked: how am I going to do that? Well, if I want to do that on YouTube, I need to say what I need to say to get paid. I know what I need to say to get paid, and I know how to find what to say to get paid. I know which things to talk about and promote. The problem is, I have integrity, and I'm not just going to say whatever I need to say to get paid. I'm not going to promote garbage crypto coins and take a bunch of money in exchange for doing that. I'm not going to promote diets that are pushed by bots and that, in my experience, don't work in real life — like I talked about on my Jerry Banfield channel. I'm not going to push these manipulated narratives. I'm not going to create content that garbages people's lives up and pushes narratives like "dating's broken," or "life is so hard and hopeless," or "the job market's wrecked." If you push stuff like that to people who are mostly lonely and angry, you can get paid. If you really want to get paid on YouTube, you need to lean into drama and gossip, talk all kinds of junk about people, and react to garbage viral content that puts out extreme points of view. So that's hopeless. That's why I'm defining how hopeless this is — because unless you want to show up and do all of that, you will find that the opportunities are so much better in person.
No Amount of Content Makes Up for Real In-Person Relationships
Here's what's beautiful about in person. Being a YouTuber, lonely and filming videos in a studio like I'm doing right now, is often pretty sad. You're just in your house talking to yourself. But when you're in person, you're meeting people, you're connecting, you're building friendships. If you're single, you can find somebody to date. It's amazing. What I've noticed is that no amount of content will make up for a real in-person relationship. No amount of videos I watch will make up for having a massage. No amount of dating videos I watch will make up for having an in-real-life dating coach who takes me to real events where I meet real women, then analyzes and talks with me.
I paid $1,200 for a dating coach. Now think about how many dating videos I watched on YouTube where I did not join their community. Think about how many dating videos I watched where I didn't pay them anything. I had one woman locally — actually two people offering coaching. The one guy I was telling you about before, I turned down his coaching because my friend offered me a better deal: more value for less. For $1,200 — or maybe it was $1,800, I think it was $1,200 — she took me to something like six in-person events. We went and had dinner together afterwards one night just to talk about everything. The experience of doing in-person dating coaching with her was awesome. And there are probably only a handful of people in St. Petersburg, Florida, at least that I could find, who even offer dating coaching. Meanwhile, there are thousands of people acutely struggling with dating in St. Petersburg, Florida. So you always need to be looking at where the opportunity is. And then what you can do with YouTube is get out there and share your experience with other people. I think that's a great way to use it.
So if I wear a shirt in person — which I'm planning to order — that says "Jerry Banfield Dating Coach," then I have a Jerry Banfield Dating YouTube channel to back it up. And I actually got a date, and part of it was because I had a dating channel. I got this woman talking about dating, and I ended up having two weeks of dating her. The first week was awesome. I talked about that on my recent Jerry Banfield Dating video — about how I respected her and she felt rejected. That's the full story on that video. Long story short — or maybe we'll make this long story longer — being out there in person with people, having real conversations, is so meaningful to your life. Being a YouTuber is often a very empty-feeling, sad kind of thing.
I remember watching a guy a year or two ago who did a video about a week in the life of a full-time music YouTuber. This guy's whole life was sitting at home editing videos and sitting at home talking on Zoom. That's part of why I deleted everything before. I've made a lot of videos, and I've made millions of dollars from YouTube and online content creation. What I can tell you is that I used to charge $300 for an hour-long Zoom call, and I got so burnt out doing Zoom calls talking about the exact same thing every day that I literally stopped offering them. I intentionally said, I don't care how much money I'm getting for this — I hate doing it. Whereas doing stuff with people in person tends to be really fun, and magic tends to happen in person. That, to me, is the future.
AI Will Come for Entertainment Too
AI is going to be able to wipe out even entertainment. You might say, "Well, Mr. Beast is never going to be irrelevant on YouTube." Even Mr. Beast's views have started to drop off. A few more years into the future, assuming they set up the licensing, you're going to be able to just go to AI and say, "Generate me a version of Star Wars where Han Solo doesn't show up at the final Death Star battle." Or, "Generate me a version of Star Wars where it's all about Leia instead of Luke Skywalker." You're going to be able to do stuff like that with AI, and that's going to make YouTube entertainment mostly irrelevant. A lot of YouTube entertainment may shift more towards AI-generated stuff. And the people who are able to still survive in an environment like that are going to have to be saying what they need to say and doing what they need to do to get paid by all the bots. So YouTube is absolutely hopeless for most creators.
The One Kind of Content Still Worth Making
However, I will note, while it's on my mind: just making a vlog is something that is very useful, regardless of whether you get views on it. I have my @JerryBanfield channel where I just make vlogs every day, and I did one recently called something like "It Doesn't Matter What I Title This." One thing that can be very helpful for you is to make a vlog just to preserve your own life story. One of the most valuable things going forward will be real human stories, because AI is going to be able to generate almost everything else. A real human attached to a real story — that will be one of the only kinds of content that even matters anymore. So to me, the one kind of content that's worth creating on YouTube is a vlog. Just talk about your life every day. It's therapeutic for you to talk, it's therapeutic to see your life and to share it out there. But I don't think relying on YouTube for money, or holding onto the idea that you're going to be a content creator, is sustainable going forward. And if you want to come give me your comments and feedback and support me, join the Jerry Banfield Family — I'm in there with you.
I hope this helps some of you. I've seen some of you previously in the comments saying you're so burned out, that you feel like it's all over on YouTube. It is — YouTube is ending for most creators, at least financially. You can still make and share whatever you want, and you might be able to get an audience, but the ability to make money off it will be very limited in most cases, because people are not buying. Why would anyone buy a digital product or a course when people are sharing the same information for free on YouTube, and when AI can tell you the same thing? If you want to see more of how I think about building a channel in this environment, I've shared a lot in my YouTube Coaching playlist. And if you don't see how hopeless the future of YouTube is, look at the typical response of almost everybody who's going to watch your videos: they're not going to do anything else with you besides watch the video.
YouTube's New AI Custom Feed Changes Everything
From my video published June 19, 2026.
YouTube just quietly released a feature that made me yell out loud when I saw it on my phone yesterday. It's called Your Custom Feed. This is where AI is integrated into YouTube directly. I mean, there's been AI on the platform for a long time behind the algorithm, but they've literally made a button on the feed to make it easier for you to find the content you want to watch. When I saw this on my phone yesterday, after being on YouTube since 2011, I'm like, oh my God, this changes everything. I often have a video I want to watch, but I'm just too lazy and search is too ineffective to try and find it.
The woman in Pakistan who proved it works
For example, yesterday when I saw this, I thought I want to watch someone in Pakistan talk about everyday life there. I don't know who else would think this, but I want to know what somebody's regular life is like in Pakistan. I told the custom feed, and I gave it exact descriptions. I want somebody that is a small creator in Pakistan to give me an average day in their life. Boom, it served me up a woman in Pakistan going through her daily life. I'm like, whoa.
Normally when you try and search and find something that detailed, it doesn't work very well. The search has been so bad and so frustrating lately on YouTube, with the changes they've made to try and get you to stay on the platform and watch more, that it's like, why even bother searching? This custom AI though goes through and delivers.
It found the one small creator I was looking for
I then had it search for something like, I want a small YouTuber. None of these channels that have like 200,000 subs trying to tell me how to do YouTube when literally they're just going on momentum and not creative at all anymore. Give me a small creator showing what's actually working. I found this guy, Lord Heck. I did a video about him recently, and the custom feed delivered one of his videos up immediately. I'm like, wow. Out of all the videos on YouTube I found about shorts, that was the best one, and when I used the custom feed it delivered it immediately. I don't think I'd even watched it on this actual channel. I have six channels, so I go through and look on different channels. I'm like, wow. That is so good.
So I tried some more custom searches, and what I found is that often the very first result would be shockingly laser exactly what I asked for. When I tried to make it ultra niche, like I asked for a very small creator, less than like 5,000 subs or so, with some exact details I wanted to watch, boom, it served it up. They had 6,000 subs. I was like, okay, this is pretty close. This is such a game changer.
What this means for the future of YouTube
What this means is that the future of YouTube is heading toward surfacing very niche content. That's why I've been mining all these YouTube thumbnails for gold. What you want to think about for the future is: how can you satisfy somebody? How can you give somebody a video that they will want to watch potentially 5, 10, 15 years from now? How can you make a video that, when someone custom searches for it, your video will be the only one they find? How can you give a video that has a unique value proposition that will get discovered? How can you give a video that's different than something else? I've never even seen somebody make a video about this feature so far.
To me, the feed and the search experience, compared to what they used to be, have really fallen off. I used to enjoy my subscriber feed a lot more, and I used to enjoy searching more. The feed has been one of the worst things on YouTube to me for a while because of how inaccurate it is at giving me videos I actually want to watch. It's focused on just constant clickbait junk. But to me, YouTube is a place where there are so many amazing niche videos. You can really enrich your life on YouTube if you could just get some help finding that stuff.
What enriches my life is to hear somebody in a significantly different life situation than me, like some woman in Pakistan, share what her ordinary day is like. Then I can come up with incredibly niche things. I want a full-time author in India to tell me how they released their latest book. It gives you the chance to easily just chat with AI and create, like, hmm, I'd like to watch a full-time game developer talk about their life creating their newest video games. This is an area of growth where, wow, I've got so much control over what I watch now. I absolutely am not interested in watching the garbage default feed anymore.
Why this is a huge deal for small creators
This is a huge deal for small creators, because this custom feed is set up to help small creators. What it does is try to give you exactly what you want first. But if you give it something ultra niche and it can't find it, or it only gave me one or two videos that very clearly matched, then it just started putting the usual fluff into the feed after that, videos with hundreds of thousands of views and clickbait garbage, which I seem to be almost immune to watching now. I don't want your mainstream thought anymore, because you're just wasting my time. I already know that stuff, and a lot of it's just crap.
So I'm so excited for this, because to me the custom feed is also set up for quantity in authentic videos. The main opposition people give me when I start talking to them is, well, I hate editing my videos, and I just don't have that much time. It's like, well, can't you just get your phone out, talk to your phone, and upload that? If you're trying to be a full-time YouTuber, this means that if you can just crank out a lot of videos and make them about some ultra specific situation, you've got a real shot. Like this: I've done a video specifically about the new custom feed feature in YouTube. This is probably one of the first videos ever about it. If you can make a video that's talking about something for the first time, this will likely have a place in custom feeds for a long time.
The more you get discovered, the more you get surfaced by the custom feed, then the more you're likely to get subscribers and show up in the regular feeds and subscription feeds. The standard on YouTube is to have people actually go into their subscriptions and look for your new videos every day, and the custom feed is in a position to give you those exact subscriptions. If you want to go deeper on how I think about all of this, I keep these conversations going in my YouTube Coaching playlist, and it ties right into why I believe no title or thumbnail alone will get your small channel views the way genuinely niche content will.
The one downside, and why I'm still excited
The only downside I see is that this is not something that's likely to just instantly blow up most channels. Although, if you've done a video about something before it blows up, and you have a bunch of people asking AI about it at the same time, your random video could all of a sudden get huge amounts of traffic from people's custom feeds. And the more people use custom feeds, the more they'll see that it allows you to take control back of your viewing experience on YouTube.
I am really excited to see how this surfaces so many more quality videos that have been sitting there unfound.