The Truth About Being a Content Creator
My friends, if you think you want to be a content creator, a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer, you're going to hear the truth and get some really valuable tips right here. The truth is a lot of you will find being a YouTuber, a Twitch streamer, a content creator worse than just having a job. It's miserable lots of times. And yet, this is what I do full time. This is my life. I am living the dream. I am a full-time YouTuber and Twitch streamer, and I've been doing it for 11 years now. So I'm going to show you the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you think you want to be a content creator, I hope this either changes your mind or gives you conviction to do what it really takes to be successful, because in a lot of places you're not seeing the truth of the good, the bad, and the ugly. I'm going to show it to you right here.
The Bad: Broke, Drained, and Hurt
We need to begin with the bad, because you need to know why this sucks so much ahead of time. If you want to be a content creator, you often will end up being broke, drained, and hurt. There's often almost no money in being a content creator. For the majority of people out there on YouTube and Twitch, the money is either nonexistent or not enough to pay the bills. I'm watching a guy I like who streams right now on Twitch, and he hardly makes anything from his channel. He puts hours and hours in every week, and he has to go work at a restaurant or a regular job. Then he takes his extra time to do something he loves, hoping that one day he can do it full time. But most of the time that's not going to work out at all.
And if you do actually commit to doing this, you're likely to be drained. Every day my mind has to come up with the best video ideas I can, and it's exhausting. I wake up at like 4 in the morning trying to think of what the heck I'm going to create today that somebody's actually going to want to watch. And if you actually do become successful, like me — and I'm very successful as a YouTuber and Twitch streamer, with over 60 million views on my videos, thousands of followers, and often hundreds of viewers on Twitch — you will get hurt. Mentally and emotionally, like you probably haven't ever been. I have had almost every insult thrown at me you could possibly imagine, and some that would be so weird or crazy they're hard to even think of. And not only that, but just the ordinary daily grind of creating on Twitch: getting destroyed at the game I'm playing as everybody watches and makes fun of me and tells me "you misplayed, you screwed that up." I'm like, yes, I know. I know I screwed it up. And I get off my stream like, oh God, it hurts. So if you think you want to be a content creator, do you like being broke, drained, and hurt? Well, this is for you. You should do it.
The Ugly: It's Always About the Money and the Views
Now, we haven't even gotten into the ugly yet, because all of that was just the bad. The ugly you might think is even worse. The ugly is you will never get away. When you're a YouTuber or a Twitch streamer, you will never get away from it being all about the money and the views. I've tried, believe me. I went all over the place trying. I've streamed games on Twitch that nobody wanted to watch, and I felt like a crusader. I'm like, I'm out here doing this, and it's not about money or views. It's just about gaming. It's about gaming and community. And you want to talk about hurt and drained and broke every day? Well, I get sick of being hurt and drained and broke every day. At least I can be hurt and drained and have some money and have some views.
If you're a creator, you have to get views, or what really hurts is that nobody's watching. You put all this time and energy into a video that nobody even cares about. That hurts. And that's where most of you are likely to start: video after video, stream after stream, and almost nobody watches and you make no money. And then, God help you if you actually make some money, because you'll never be able to do without it again. I made a quarter of a million dollars in profit in 2016, and oh my God, do I lust after that again. I've made over a hundred thousand several other years, and no matter where you go, no matter how much you try to say to yourself "it's not about the money, it's not about the views" — it is about the money and it is about the views. Don't kid yourself. Don't lie. You need to be honest. Being a creator, if you're not getting views, why even bother? And if you're not making money, well, you're probably not going to keep doing it. You're going to have to stop at some point.
The Good: Freedom and Intoxicating Power
So let's now talk about the good, but some things you might not hear about in the way I'm telling you. Of course, there's freedom. But as I said, it's about the money and the views. You do have freedom to express yourself, but as I've found, if you get a little too into your freedom of expressing yourself, it can crap on your money and your views. So you do have much more limited freedom than you'd like to admit. And the power can be intoxicating. I have people spend millions of minutes watching my videos every month, listening to what I say, buying the cryptos I talk about, making changes in their lives based on what I've said. The power of that does feel really intoxicating. And the potential to change the world — to have a more financially free and peaceful and wealthy world — that potential is really intoxicating. And that's what keeps me coming back.
Success Tip #1: Find a Way to Live for Free
Now, I'm going to give you some success tips. After 12 years of doing this, 11 years of doing this full time — no other job, no other income except from YouTube, Twitch, creating, and freelancing online — I'm going to give you the success tips in a short period of time here. The number one success tip I'll give you is find a way you can live for free. And I've not heard anyone else say that in all these videos, because, well, it doesn't sound so sexy, does it? But this is what you really need. If you want to be a successful content creator, find a way where you don't need any money at all. Live with your parents. Let them pay all the bills. Let them buy all the food, pay for your cell phone, pay for your car. Then you can grind it out and put in the work that you need before you actually get good enough to get money and views. MrBeast lived at home with his parents for the first five years or so of his YouTube career. Then it took off right after he moved out.
I have a wife who makes six figures at her job, works at home, and is able to also take care of the kids. I've got time to create, and I don't have to hardly pay for anything. Now, it was very stressful during the times when I was the primary income earner, after our kids were born and my wife was putting almost all her time and energy into them. While I was making hundreds of thousands a year, it was great. But being a content creator is a very inconsistent income-earning business lots of times. You may have years where you make huge amounts of money, and then you get banned, the algorithm changes, your topic goes out of style — whatever it is, your income at any time, no matter how much work you put in, can go back to almost zero for any reason or no reason. So if you can live for free, you can make it in the long term as a content creator.
The Only Platforms That Matter
Now, the platforms you need to be on. To me, these are the only big platforms that really matter. YouTube is the best form of content — we'll talk about that in a minute — but YouTube is the absolute best place to create right now, by far. And creating a long form video is the highest form of content to create. On YouTube, you can also do shorts, you can also do live streams, you can also do posts. You can really do everything on YouTube. The monetization is there, and the traffic is there. Then Twitter is an outstanding complement to YouTube. You share your videos from YouTube onto Twitter, you interact and build a following with your fans, and you create a positive reinforcement loop. If you want to live stream, Twitch is the absolute only place you should live stream. I've tested almost every other way to do this. Everything besides what I'm telling you is almost always a waste of time.
Long Form Videos Build Real Relationships
Long form videos on YouTube are the most valuable thing you can create, because as a content creator, you need to make a meaningful connection with someone. If you're here and you've actually stuck with me through all of this, there's a chance we've started to make a meaningful connection. I've had millions of views on short videos, and those are almost, almost completely worthless. I want to say that again to really drive the point home: I've tested reels and shorts and TikToks, and I've tested it so many different ways. Having somebody watch a video of yours for a few seconds means nothing. The platforms have tested this out, and YouTube is seeing that shorts are not good in terms of getting people to actually care about and return to watching a creator. A sub from a short is almost worthless. Long form videos are where you really make deep relationships with your viewers. And I'm defining a long form video as a horizontal video, basically a minimum of maybe five minutes usually, but longer can be much better. If you can make a podcast that's like two hours, those can be really good.
Limit Yourself to Four Hours Daily
I'm going to give you a couple more tips in this exact direction. I'm going to suggest that you limit yourself to a maximum of four hours daily. This is something that I do. Now, of course, some days I might go about five, other days I go two or three. But on average, do not work yourself to death, because when you're a content creator, you're going to be thinking all the time. My mind is always processing in the background: what's the next YouTube video I should make? I have five YouTube channels — five YouTube channels. And I upload a video every day on my crypto channel and every day on my gaming channel. Maybe occasionally I miss a day, but it's almost every day on the gaming and crypto channels. Then I have a recovery and a business channel I try to hit once or twice a week, and my main channel once or twice a month, because that one is just dead — long story short, that's another story. But what I've found is if you go over four hours daily, you're going to speed up the burnout. You're going to expect things too fast. This is a marathon.
Make Time for a Life Outside of Creating
If you want to be a creator, you need to make time for other things. Yoga, relationships, dating — especially if you're trying to live for free — hanging out with your parents and doing stuff with them, taking time to exercise, hanging out with your friends. If you put too much into this, it's going to leave you crazy or with an unbalanced life, and in my experience an unbalanced life makes being a creator very volatile.
Pick a Strategy: Quantity or Quality
Then you need to generally pick a strategy of either quantity or quality. Now, if you've done this as long as me — I've done tens of thousands of videos in the last 11 years. I've probably averaged about a thousand videos a year, and I've done thousands and thousands of hours of livestreams. I've practiced so much that I can just film videos in my studio, and I don't even edit my videos anymore most of the time, because I can just do it and it's so fast. So I've tested both, and I'm firmly in the quantity approach.
The quantity approach is what most of us have to do as creators. If you want money and views and relevancy and growth — all the things you're doing this for — then quantity is generally going to be the approach. My definition of quantity is one YouTube video a day on any channel I'm serious about. I'm a YouTuber and a Twitch streamer, so I put a crypto video up once a day, because that's my main channel. That's my main income earner, the main place people watch me, the main thing people want out of me. So I crank a crypto video out every day, usually unedited, just ripped off in my studio. Now, I think about it sometimes for hours beforehand, but then I execute it relatively quickly. That's taken practice.
Almost all the time, you're going to start with the quantity approach. MrBeast's advice — and he's the top YouTuber — is that you should just do a hundred videos. You're going to keep getting better, but just do a hundred videos. Crank out a hundred videos, and then you can get an idea of whether you can hit quantity or quality.
If you want to take the quality approach, that's a lot harder, because you need to make videos where the title and the thumbnail and the video idea are viral — where it's something out of the usual, something people just have to watch, something that's going to trigger people's curiosity, desire, or fear. You're going to have to make something that's truly exceptional and do that less often. Me, I've tested the quality approach a few times, and I can't stand it, because I'm so good at quantity. And for certain topics like cryptocurrencies, doing one video a day is how you grow the fastest. Other crypto YouTubers have made it clear and proven it — nobody's done well in crypto YouTube cranking out a video once a week, because people want new crypto videos all the time, and they prioritize getting the newest videos. Whereas if you're doing something like mass entertainment, like MrBeast, then you could do one video once a month, put millions of dollars into it, and that makes sense.
Thus, you're probably going to be on the quantity approach. And if you're not willing to just grind out videos and get better — if you're not willing to do a crappy job and make a bunch of crappy videos — then you're not willing to do the work to get good. I can tell you I've made more crappy videos than almost any other YouTuber has, and that's how I've gotten good now. I can make a video in such a small amount of time that I can crank out three videos on three different channels in a single day and get clicks, get views, get earnings, and it only takes me about four hours. And I don't have to pay anybody to help me. That's a pretty good system.
The Number One Thing I Did Not Do: Get a Mentor
The last thing I'm going to say that you absolutely need here — and this is starting to sound like a lot, because it is — if you truly want to be a content creator and you really want to be serious, the number one first suggestion is you need to get a mentor. This is the number one thing I did not do. If I would have just gotten a mentor immediately, I would have saved myself tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. I would have probably made millions more dollars online. I did a lot of dumb things that a mentor could have easily given me advice about.
And you know what I've done starting my new crypto channel that's really helped it blow up? I immediately got a mentor. Joe Parys is one of the top crypto YouTubers, and he explained to me and showed me a clear formula for exactly how to make a successful crypto channel. After nine years on YouTube, with my main channel where most of the videos just go nowhere, I created a brand new crypto channel, followed the advice of my mentor, and I've got 10K subs with videos consistently getting thousands of views, all organic. For example, one video got almost 10,000 organic views in two days with 10,000 subs. We got some great growth on this channel. Then I've got these other channels where I don't have a mentor — my gaming channel and my business recovery channel — but I've done this so long, I know what to do with them, and I have a mentor for my main channel.
That said, if I had just gotten a mentor immediately — oh my God — I would have made all these other channels earlier. I just made all of these YouTube channels a few months ago. If I would have made these channels and gotten a mentor six years ago, all these channels would have hundreds of thousands of subs. I'd be making tons of money and have so much bigger of a future. I'd have so many more followers and so much more of a following. And all because I refused to get a mentor and just kept trying to do it myself.
I know it's hard to find a mentor, especially in creating online, because people charge too much. Most of the people at my kind of experience level charge ridiculous amounts to work with us — some $50,000 to $100,000 for a coaching program. That's why today, the best way to work with me on this is to join my Jerry Banfield Family community, where you can ask me questions and connect with other people who are building as creators. If you really want to be a content creator, this is the best way I see to advance yourself, because just watching videos and taking in free tips will often not give you what you really need to succeed.
For example, on my crypto channel, I talk to Joe Parys almost every week. When I talk to him, get to know him, and ask him questions, it also raises my belief that I can do this for myself, because I know someone else very well who's doing it for themselves — and Joe gives me very good feedback on the things I have questions about. In my experience, if you don't have a mentor, you are almost guaranteed to go nowhere as a content creator. If you want to go deeper on how I do all of this, you'll find more in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
Thank you very much for reading all the way to the end. I appreciate your support, and I am so curious as to whether I'll see you again somewhere else.