YouTube began in 2005 as a simple video-hosting platform through which anyone — professional or amateur — could upload and share video content. The following decade and change saw the site morph into a multi-use social media platform. Creatives, conspiracy theorists, brands, content marketers, product influencers, political pundits, and anyone in between could potentially connect with and influence an audience, sometimes making a buck along the way.
Google GOOG purchased YouTube in 2006. The company’s partner program, allowing creators that met certain subscriber and view minimums to earn ad revenue from their videos, was launched the following year. This helped YouTube micro-celebrities to cash in on the viewership they’d cultivated.
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Who is MrBeast?
Part influencer, part video producer, part game-show host, part philanthropist, Jimmy Donaldson — better known by his YouTube handle MrBeast — is perhaps the most astounding example of just what has been done with the Google-owned video platform. The YouTube user began his tenure on the site in 2012 when he was only 13 years old, uploading play-along videos for popular games like “Minecraft” and “Black Ops” as well as videos about the YouTube platform itself and the net worths of some of its most popular creators.
In one of his first truly viral videos, an 18-year-old Donaldson audibly counted to 100,000 in a nearly full-day-long video, in which certain sections had to be sped up so the feat in its entirety could be contained within YouTube’s 24-hour video limit.
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As his channel grew in popularity, he dropped out of college to pursue video production full-time with a crew of childhood friends. He began using his YouTube income to invest in higher-production-value videos, building complicated sets, performing unique stunts, and hosting wild, over-the-top challenges, competitions, and giveaways incorporating fans, charities, and other YouTube stars.
As of late 2023, he is by far the most popular individual creator (i.e., not brand or organization) on YouTube. MrBeast has around 206 million subscribers — almost twice the following of runner-up PewDiePie, who formerly boasted the most viewed channel on the platform.
MrBeast’s laser maze video below, in which 10 contestants compete to make it through a series of increasingly difficult, laser-based obstacle courses for a quarter-million-dollar prize, garnered over 77 million views in its first 5 days on YouTube.
What is MrBeast’s net worth in 2023?
As of late 2022, Forbes estimated that Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson, who turned 25 in May of 2023, was worth a staggering half a billion dollars. Celebrity Net Worth, on the other hand, estimated that he was worth $100 million — only a fifth of Forbes’ estimate — as of August 2023. Yahoo Finance noted his net worth at $120 million around the same time.
In any case, most sources agree that he is the world’s richest YouTuber by a significant margin. He made $54 million on the platform in 2021 alone — the most any individual YouTuber has ever made in a single year.
How much does he make from his YouTube videos? How much does he spend on them?
According to estimates from Celebrity Net Worth, MrBeast rakes in between $3 to $5 million each month via a combination of ad revenue and paid sponsorships. His 2021 YouTube income of $54 million averages $4.5 million per month generated via the platform.
Reportedly, Donaldson doesn’t hang onto the income from his videos for long, though. He uses the vast majority of his earnings to fund future videos. These can reportedly cost him anywhere from $300,000 to multiple millions to produce. This high price tag should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen one of his more famous competition videos (below), in which he recreated sets and challenges from the 2021 Netflix NFLX hit “Squid Game” in excruciating detail. Don't worry, he offered a $456,000 grand prize to the winner (along with smaller consolation prize sums for those who were eliminated).
According to Donaldson, part of what has made him so successful is his tendency to spend almost all of his earnings on his business: “My mindset was just ‘reinvest everything I make’ – every time I got a paycheck, that was the month’s budget.”
Was MrBeast born rich?
Donaldson’s wealth is not generational, although he did grow up in an upper-middle-class household. Both of his parents were in the military during his youth, and his family had enough money to hire au pairs and pay for private schools for him and his brother.
Nevertheless, his YouTube success did not come as a result of any sort of “seed funding” from his family. His early videos were as amateur as any typical video game play-alongs or YouTube reviews of the era. His newer videos — with their elaborate sets, massive prizes, and Hollywood-like special effects — are funded via sponsorships and the proceeds from his previous videos and ventures.
Beast philanthropy: What causes does he support?
As mentioned above, much of the proceeds from Donaldson’s video ventures get reinvested in the production of new video challenges. But the young entrepreneur is also well known for gifting large sums to charity and hosting fundraisers to garner additional donations from celebrities, businesspeople, and the public.
In 2020, Donaldson launched Beast Philanthropy, an auxiliary YouTube channel and 501(c)(3) non-profit. Income from ads, merch sales, and sponsorships is donated in its entirety to a variety of charitable organizations, including mobile food pantries in his home state of North Carolina.
Along with other YouTubers and influencers, Donaldson has also created massive worldwide fundraising campaigns dedicated to environmental goals like planting trees and removing waste from the oceans. Team Trees, which aimed to raise $20 million to plant the same number of trees worldwide via the Arbor Day Foundation surpassed its funding goal in less than a year, including notable donations from tech magnates like Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Team Seas, a similar initiative, aims to raise $30 million to remove 30 million pounds of garbage from the oceans. As of May 2023, over 15 million pounds of sea pollution had been removed, marking the campaign’s halfway point to its stated goal.
MrBeast Burger and Feastables: Donaldson’s food companies
In 2020, Donaldson, in partnership with a company called Virtual Dining Concepts, created MrBeast Burger, a branded line of burgers and sandwiches that can be picked up and delivered from existing restaurant kitchens via delivery services like DoorDash DASH and UberEats UBER. Essentially, MrBeast Burger is a “ghost kitchen,” but unlike most delivery-only kitchens, it is run out of an existing restaurant’s facilities, allowing them to supplement their menu with that of a second, virtual restaurant.
Feastables, created in 2022, is a candy bar company that Donaldson launched with a Willy Wonka-esque golden ticket challenge that culminated in a video competition in which ticket holders competed in challenges to win either a custom-created “chocolate factory” or half a million dollars.
How many YouTube channels does MrBeast run?
As of late 2023, MrBeast operated five active English-language YouTube channels:
- MrBeast: 206 million subscribers
- MrBeast Gaming: 39.6 million subscribers
- Beast Reacts: 30.4 million subscribers
- MrBeast 2: 33.1 million subscribers
- Beast Philanthropy: 18 million subscribers
In addition to these primary channels, MrBeast runs alternate versions of these channels in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and several other languages and has around 10 former channels that are no longer active. Several of his team members also run popular YouTube channels with tens of thousands to millions of subscribers.
