Anyone who grew up or grew up in the 1990s may know the SBS 6 program About the red still. Perform a bizarre assignment – combing your own hair and that of five others with a wet toilet brush, for example, or dyeing all your clothes red – and receive a large sum of money (1,000 guilders). Wendy van Dijk scored viewers over your back, and you received one.
Those who grew up or grew up in the 1990s may have no idea who Jimmy Donaldson (23) is, but it is in that same spirit – bizarre assignments, large sum of money – that the American managed to build the most successful personal YouTube channel of all time. Donaldson passed Swedish youtuber PewDiePie this week as creator with the most subscribers: 112 million vs. 111 million. He did this with his ‘algorithm-fähige’ alter ego MrBeast.
With numbers like that and a name like that, it shouldn’t surprise Donaldson to go a bit bigger than SBS 6. MrBeast probably uses Van Dijk’s thousand to light the fireplace that makes his chimney smoke. And it smokes a lot. Donaldson’s YouTube channel raised $54 million last year. be with challenges participants can earn extreme amounts: tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Squid game
The assignments that come with it are therefore extreme. Hold your hand the longest on a private jet, and win the private jet. Survive 100 days in a circle on a lawn about 30 feet in diameter and get half a million. Play all games from the Netflix series Squid game after – fortunately without getting killed if you lose. Incidentally, MrBeast does not always let others perform the stunts. Donaldson also makes videos in which he counts to a hundred thousand, has himself buried alive or runs a marathon in some kind of clown shoes.
His videos reach tens of millions of views. Sometimes even hundreds of millions, as in the case of it Squid gamevideo. It’s the result of his tactic of tickling the YouTube algorithm in just the right places, with videos of carefully chosen title, length and content. Everything down to the thumbnail image is completely optimized. MrBeast spends 10 thousand euros per video on that alone. You almost have to click on it.
That figuring out the algorithm started for Donaldson more than ten years ago, when he started a channel as a student. Then he’s tried just about every popular YouTube genre: streaming while he’s gaming (which the previous YouTube emperor PewDiePie made it big), videos where he reacts to other videos, making compilation videos. For five years I’ve relentlessly studied the YouTube algorithm, unhealthily obsessed with discovering when something viral goes,” Donaldson said earlier.
In 2017, he already had a million subscribers when he stumbled upon his real gold mine: he became the gold mine himself. For example, sponsors paid him $10,000, and he gave it away to a random homeless person. Or as a tip to a waitress, or to his Uber driver. Naturally, he captured their shocked reaction on video. Later on, the assignments-for-money films were added. Generosity as a YouTube Genre: Video Antropy.
This is not purely altruistic. It takes money to make money. The higher the amounts he gives away, the higher the number of views and therefore the more advertising revenue he generates. MrBeast’s philanthropy is primarily a lucrative business model. He now has sixty people working for him full-time from a studio in North Carolina.
One YouTube channel became six, there is a webshop with merchandise, a game app and a chain where you can order hamburgers online. MrBeast has since evolved from a YouTuber into a billboard for a conglomerate raking in tens of millions of dollars. But he himself doesn’t care about money, Donaldson claims: ‘No fuck. I don’t want to chase one shiny thing after another,” he said in an interview with Rollingstonedriving a Tesla Model X.
His philanthropic activities are sincere, too, he notes. He earns a lot, but he can also give a lot away. There is a channel – Beast Philanthropy – that donates all sales to charity. Donaldson organizes actions to build houses or give food to the poor. Last year he gave ten thousand turkeys gone at Thanksgiving. He has a fund for planting trees and wants to have nearly 15 million kilograms of waste removed from the ocean. He compensates the emissions of videos with a private jet or Lamborghini in tenfold.
Not a party animal
Yet he is not of impeccable conduct. A number of former employees accused him in The New York Times of creating an unsafe work environment. Donaldson is extremely demanding, shouting and cursing at his staff and expecting them to work long hours. A friend of his puts it down to Donaldson’s not always social nature: ‘He finds it difficult to explain what he needs and what he wants.’
He also has that exactingness towards himself. ‘I don’t party, I have few friends. All my friendships revolve around work.’ Everything must give way to one goal: to become the greatest youtuber of all time. The money is secondary. But, “If you have a trillion dollars, you have no problems.” At the age of 23, that is almost growing on his back.
3 x Jimmy Donaldson
Donaldson’s mother Sue is a former U.S. Army prison guard. She now works for her son. Until 2017, she was unaware that he was active on YouTube.
Donaldson’s great example is Tesla, Space X and Twitter boss Elon Musk, and he says he would like to work with him. A portrait of Musk hangs in his office.
In his youth, Donaldson played baseball, but he stopped because Crohn’s disease was too much for him. That was one of the reasons he started spending more time indoors and spending a lot of time on YouTube.