MrBeast’s faux philanthropy His cynical videos are fuelling the aid illusion
Jimmy Donaldson dropped out of a community college near his home in North Carolina at the age of 18 to crack one of the mysteries of modern life: what makes a video become a viral sensation on social media? Together with four similarly obsessed friends, he spent up to 20 hours a day studying the secrets of YouTube hits after becoming hooked posting footage playing games. The nerds analysed everything intensively: the algorithms, camera angles, lighting, pacing, thumbnails, viewer drop-off data. And clearly, the efforts paid off: today, eight years later, Donaldson’s MrBeast brand is the biggest star on the medium with 318 million subscribers. He is five times bigger than Taylor Swift on YouTube.
Take-off began with daft endurance videos, such as spending 40 hours counting to 100,000 and watching a bad rap video repeatedly for 10 hours. As his audience grew, so did the scale and vision of his videos: crashing a train into a pit, stranding himself on a raft at sea for seven days, surviving for 50 hours in Antarctica. Then he began making serious money from advertisers and sponsors, finding the appeal of spraying around cash after handing $10,000 to “a random homeless guy” while insisting “this is not clickbait”. The latest MrBeast video features 100 identical twins competing for $250,000. It has had 53 million hits in two days.
Donaldson’s videos are slick and his success has made him rich. Forbes estimated he earned $54 million in 2022 — and his numbers have kept on surging. His burgeoning media empire, reportedly worth $700 million, shows the rising significance of YouTube, now the most popular source of content for television viewers in the United States. But in recent weeks he has been buffeted by controversies with revelations of racist comments made as a teenager, teen grooming allegations involving a transgender (now dismissed) co-host, and the launch of a lawsuit by five women against his production company and Amazon over claims they “systematically fostered a culture of misogyny and sexism” during filming of the world’s biggest reality show contest with 1,000 people competing for $5 million.
