Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, passed 100 million subscribers on YouTube on 28 July 2022, at the age of 24. Only four channels had reached the number before him: T-Series, the Indian music label; Cocomelon, the nursery-rhyme channel; SET India, Sony's Indian television channel; and PewDiePie, the Swedish gamer who was until now the only individual creator in the club. Donaldson is the second, and on current growth will be the largest of all within two years.
The formula
MrBeast videos are expensive stunts with a simple hook in the title: "I Spent 50 Hours Buried Alive", "$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life", "I Gave $1,000,000 to Random People". The money is real; his production budgets run to millions of dollars per video, funded by the previous ones. Underneath the spectacle is obsessive craft: every second is edited for retention, the thumbnail is tested against alternatives, and Donaldson has said he studied YouTube's algorithm for years before anything worked. He posted his first video at 11 and spent a decade in obscurity. "One hundred million is a lot," he said. "I've been making videos since I was eleven. I hope to be a YouTuber until the day I die."
The business
His videos were watched more than 10 billion times in 2021, and Forbes estimated his earnings at $54 million, the highest of any YouTuber. The channel is now a company: a burger chain, a chocolate brand, a philanthropy channel that has built wells and paid for cataract surgery, and dubbed versions of the main channel in Spanish, Portuguese and other languages, which is how a creator in North Carolina is watched in Dhaka.
What Bangladeshi creators are taking from it
Bangladesh has a fast-growing YouTube scene, but its largest channels are still in the single-digit millions of subscribers, and the local imitation of MrBeast, giving away cash or phones on camera, mostly misses the point. Three transferable lessons:
- The first ten seconds decide everything. MrBeast opens with the premise and the stakes, never with "hi guys, welcome back".
- Reinvest. Each video's earnings go into the next; the channel grew because its production grew.
- Language is a multiplier. His dubbed channels show that a Bangla creator with English subtitles or dubs reaches far beyond 170 million people.
The mark he is chasing next is T-Series, at about 220 million. Nobody who watched his channel in 2015 would have bet on it.
Update: MrBeast overtook T-Series to become the most-subscribed channel on YouTube in June 2024.
