There are a lot of YouTubers quitting right now, especially with seeing the watch time hour requirement go up, seeing how all this AI generated content is taking up views, and just getting burned out on YouTube as well. Here's what I do differently. First, I actually deleted hundreds of thousands of subscribers last year myself. I created more than 20 YouTube channels last year. I deleted all of my YouTube channels. I deleted millions of followers online. And the only reason I'm here is that I don't have anything better to do. I'm too good at YouTube to want to do something else at this point. What am I going to do — wait tables? I've been doing YouTube since 2011 and content creation online full time since 2012. The one thing I have that's different is I've been doing this so long, I hardly know how to do anything else.
I tried to make a local business for about nine months. I tried helping people write books, and I got a couple of people I worked with, but it hardly made any money — there were no referrals or anything. I tried writing books and passing those out. I wanted to do coaching, went to some network groups, and just nothing at all was happening for me locally. Then I go online, and I just start printing money when I go online. I know how to use all this stuff — and if you want to learn more about how to do this, you can work with me on your YouTube channel.
This Needs to Feel Natural
If you want to really do YouTube and content creation, you need to be good with all this stuff online. It should feel comfortable. It should feel natural. And if it all feels difficult, you're going to have a hard time making it, because there are people like me who've been doing this for 15 years. I've been living my whole life online, playing video games and stuff, for at least 30 years or so. This stuff all feels natural to me. I'm running AI that is transcribing my video in the background right now. So if you're not using AI to make your content faster, if you can't just grind out content on a whole bunch of channels, if you know you easily get your feelings hurt, YouTube is not going to be for you. This is hard. That's what she said. This is hard.
There's hardly any validation when you have a small channel. When you start YouTube, there's the highest amount of work and the least amount of return. The better you get at YouTube, the work is less per video, although you will tend to do much more work. If you look at my work, I've filmed one video today, 30 minutes long. On average, I've filmed seven videos a day and published 684 videos. Last week, I filmed 123 videos in one day — 120 shorts and a few longs, three longs, with 132 total minutes of content. I put out 81 minutes of raw content every day. A lot of people are not prepared for that level of grind, and you should know that as soon as possible.
In theory, when you think about being a content creator, you figure you just do some videos, upload them, get views, and make money. But if you don't see the details on how you're going to execute all that stuff, it ends up being almost impossible. I dated a woman who just quit her job to be a content creator, but she's got no idea on the business system she's going to use to do that. Her entire workflow is very slow. She takes all this time editing, and she's not good at it. She's not that big into technology in the first place — she's not even using AI to edit her videos or anything. How are you going to make that work?
No Benefits, No Sick Days
You need to make much more money as a YouTuber than you would in a job, or at least as much, because YouTube has no benefits. I don't have health insurance. Now, I don't want health insurance, because in my opinion the whole system is garbage — I don't like it, and I'll just self-pay if I need anything. But the fact is, I don't have health insurance. I don't have any retirement plans. I've got Internet Computer Protocol, ICP, on my Jerry Banfield ICP channel — that's my whole retirement plan. And I have no sick days. If I can't film videos, I get nothing.
One reason I've gotten over a half million views and millions of impressions on brand new channels this year — channels I just started five months ago — is that I film almost every day. Look at this: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Eight days. Guys, this is why people quit YouTube. There were eight days I missed in the last 97 days. A couple of those days I was on a trip with my kids, and even on the trip, I still filmed videos on two of the days. Then on one day I tried filming a really long video — not sure what happened on the 16th of June. On another, I did coaching and spent the day with my family. I took a day off and did speed dating and helped a friend on this particular day. I've got a lot of stuff to do. I can literally account for the days — maybe there's one day that I don't know what I did. Oh, on this one, I built a website and had a three-hour call with my friend. On this one, I built a website on that day also. And on this one, I made major changes to my business. So I literally can account for every single day I didn't film a video. But you've noticed — it's almost a month straight of filming a video every single day, averaging seven videos a day.
The Grind Is the Difference
What a lot of YouTubers don't realize is the level of grind you need to do this. I'm able to do this full time because I work fast, and I know how to do all the stuff I need to do — like using AI to turn my videos into blog posts and get additional Google traffic, and speeding up uploading every video by looking at the best titles with AI, writing the descriptions and the tags, and automatically generating the thumbnails. I have a rapid workflow. Someone who didn't know what they were doing as well might take 10 hours a day to do what I can do in about three hours a day. I share a lot more about how I approach all of this in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
My whole life is set up for YouTube — everything is. I swear, I invent drama in my life sometimes just so I can make videos about it. For example, I've got this vlogs channel that is getting close to full monetization. It's already monetized, but for ad revenue, we're getting close to 1,000 subs, and it will be my third monetized channel. And I dated this woman, and I'm not sure if I really liked her that much or if I just wanted to manufacture some drama so that I could get my channel monetized. So if you want to do YouTube, you really need to be aware of the grind. And if you want help, go to jerrybanfield.com.