how MrBeast, the most followed YouTuber in the world, broke all the codes

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Since December 19, MrBeast, the YouTuber followed by the most subscribers on the planetoffers an extraordinary game on Amazon Prime: 1,000 candidates compete in 41 events to win $5 million.

A look back at the success of a 26-year-old superstar who is causing controversy.

Beast Games, “the craziest competition you’ve ever seen”

MrBeast has more than 338 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel as of December 2024. This makes him the most followed YouTuber in the world, positioning him far ahead of the Indian production company T-Series, second with its 281 million subscribers. . He has just launched his Beast Games which combine the codes of YouTube with those of reality shows like Ninja Warrior, series like Squid Game and action films such as Mission Impossible.

Presented as “the craziest competition you’ve ever seen”, number 1 in 82 countries, this show designed and hosted by Mrbeast on Amazon Prime corresponds to the grandiose vision that he had already expressed in certain interviews: the greatest number of participants with 1,000 candidates, the biggest prize to be won with 5 million dollars, the most impressive sets, and extreme tension.

With its Beast Games, MrBeast breaks down the boundaries between media and offers innovative and fascinating entertainment.

An exceptional success

Making videos isn’t just MrBeast’s job: it’s been his passion since he was eleven years old. He even talks about obsession. His closest collaborators are his best friends. As a teenager, he spent ten hours a day studying YouTube’s algorithm, following trends, and talking with other creators about how to make the best videos and get recommended by the platform.

In January 2017, he published a video of himself counting to 100,000 for 40 hours which caused the first big buzz. Five months later, for his first sponsored video, the Quidd application offered him $5,000. He demands double and promises to give the $10,000 to a homeless man in a video that has gone viral. This is the beginning of the escalation of challenges and gifts.

One of MrBeast’s first viral videos, “Give $10,000 to a Random Homeless Man”:

Since then, MrBeast has created increasingly spectacular videos with considerable sums to be won by participants: “$10,000 Every Day You Spend in a Grocery Store”, “50 YouTubers Fight for $1,000,000”, and “All the countries of the planet compete to win 250,000 dollars” (with very questionable geopolitical choices).

He wins fortunes in tickets displayed in briefcases or huge transparent boxes, a car – more than a hundred have been distributed to date – a boat, a plane, a house, and even a private island… twice .

The central place given to money and luxury objects reflects a very materialistic vision of the world. Giving large sums to people with modest incomes to “get clicks” also calls into question the generosity displayed.

Other content is based on extreme challenges like: “I Spent 7 Days Buried Alive”, “I Survived 50 Hours in a High Security Prison” or “The Most Dangerous Trap in the World!” ”, and raise questions because of their promotion of physical endangerment.

90 billion cumulative views

Today, MrBeast has 90 billion views on its channels: MrBeast, MrBeast Gaming, Beast Reacts; Beast Philanthropy; and MrBeast 2. Multiple sidechains help generate more capital to reinvest in the main chain.

MrBeast lives in his own $10 million studio building in Greenville, where he grew up and employs 300 people. He says he works all the time, from sunrise to sunset, with the exception of a few days a month when he forces himself to rest. Everything is done so that he does not waste time, because he supervises everything, from ideation to editing to the construction of the sets.

Since his videos cost on average around $3.5 million and take months to produce, he shoots four or five in parallel to keep up the pace of posting on his channel. When he collaborates with another YouTuber, the latter’s studio is completely reconstituted on site so that MrBeast does not have to travel.

Behind the success, an unstoppable method

MrBeast has explained his approach, his creative process and his working methods in great detail in numerous podcasts. He gives all the tips to provide spectacular and original content that will generate a lot of engagement and encourages everyone to copy it.

He particularly works on the first ten seconds so that they announce all the content and hook the viewer. Like the aesthetic, the storytelling is very elaborate with surprises and twists that continually re-engage the audience in order to maintain retention above 70%. The outro is very fast, usually with an explosion.

Thanks to all his methods, one of his latest videos with Christiano Ronaldo, Tom Brady and Noah Lyles reached 20 million views in 5 hours, breaking the record held by the GTA VI trailer which had done so in 8 hours.

The Beast games: a carefully considered project

With the Beast Games, MrBeast wants to demonstrate that a YouTuber can be successful outside of YouTube and that he is not limited to it. He spent a year designing a show that is unlike any other game already on TV or streaming. He did not want to work with any platform, demanding to keep intellectual property and have total creative freedom, which only Amazon agreed to. With a contract estimated at more than 100 million dollars, MrBeast had the means to do “20 times better than his videos”, with 41 physical, intellectual and psychological challenges, each crazier than the last.

For the launch of the show, MrBeast shot a prequel video exclusively for his channel to select 1,000 candidates from 2,000, which reached 50 million views in 24 hours. The intensive two-day shooting at a Las Vegas stadium, several weeks before the Beast Games, was followed by accusations of harassment and endangerment.

As the making of shows, the 10 episodes of the Beast Games break 42 world records certified by Guinness, including that of the number of participants in a game, the most cables used (42 km) and the greatest number of cameras filming simultaneously for any type of audiovisual production (1107), the most money won in a single episode (2 million dollars from the first), the largest cash gain for a show and the largest island offered in a game. All these records are worrying in terms of environmental impact.

The first episode alone reportedly cost more than $20 million. An entire town intended to house all the candidates during filming had to be built, again in record time, for a .

A daring entrepreneur

At 26, Jimmy Donaldson has also developed an empire with his merchandise store Mr Beast Store, online restaurant MrBeast Burger, chocolate brand Feastables, snack line Lunchly, co-created with KSI and Logan Paul, and the YouTube Viewstats data analysis platform.

MrBeast attacked several saturated markets that he managed to shake up. In three months, his virtual restaurant MrBeast Burger opened in more than 300 cities, and sold more than a million burgers. The application became the most downloaded, crashing the App Store, and the brand became one of the five most popular Google searches in the world.

The opening of the first brick-and-mortar restaurant in the massive American Dream shopping center and amusement park attracted more than 10,000 people and broke the record for burgers sold in one day by a restaurant. Since then, quality problems have led MrBeast to take legal action against Virtual Dining Concept, its partner in this project.

With Feastables, MrBeast has gone to war against Hershey, the centuries-old chocolate leader, whom he criticizes in numerous posts. In particular, he claims that his own chocolates, Feastables, taste much better and are better for your health. Launched in January 2022, Feastables quickly sold out of stock at several distributors. The brand generates $10 million in revenue in a few months and brings in $200 million in 2023.

MrBeast recently featured in a video the launch of Feastables in Germany by buying all the products in a store and donating them to charities. He invites German content creators to help him empty the shelves and hold happenings.

MrBeast seeks to move the lines in many sectors, even if it means confronting well-established giants and having practices subject to criticism. The Beasts Games are just a new challenge for him. He does not hide his ambition to one day reach a billion followers: for an upcoming video, he privatized the pyramids of Egypt for 100 hours.

Oihab Allal-Chérif, Business Professor, Neoma Business School
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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