[ad_1]
“He brings people here, he shoots videos here, he employs people here, and those dollars that he’s paying out in wages stay in our community,” Connelly said. “They’re being spent in our local restaurants, our local retail locations, they’re buying houses, or they’re renting in our community.”
If this seems a little excessive for someone making YouTube videos, his 2021 spectacle “$456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!” had 456 contestants taking part in challenges based on the Netflix series. Entrants were paid $US1000 a day, with the winner taking home that near half-million-dollar prize. Constructing and shooting the challenge, Donaldson has said, cost $US2 million to build and produce, plus another $US1.5 million in pay and prizes.
And he posts videos like this, on average, once a week, with titles such as I Spent 7 Days Buried Alive, Every Country on Earth Fights for $250,000, I Gave my 100,000,000th Subscriber an Island, and I Built Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory!
Even the most casual reader will have noticed the preponderance of numbers in those video titles. This is a result of Donaldson – then a student at Greenville Christian Academy, a small evangelical school on the town’s rural fringe – spending five years obsessively studying the site after he was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. He posted his first video under the username MrBeast6000, a short clip of him playing Minecraft – then made a series of Minecraft videos with a dodgy mic and low-grade commentary.
He helpfully updates his subscriber numbers every birthday with a chart looking back at the previous year. At the outset, it’s fair to say, growth was slow. On his 12th birthday, he had one subscriber. By 13, that had grown to 10. He hit one million just before his 19th birthday in 2017, when his stunts were still pretty low grade – he counted to 100,000 over the course of 40 hours and watched the atrocious hip-hop video It’s Everyday Bro by YouTube star-turned boxer Jake Paul for 10 hours in a row.
Loading
Fixating on the mechanics of virality – from optimum titles to the perfect thumbnail image – he also hit paydirt in 2017 with a very undersold moment of philanthropy: he walked up to a homeless man and gave him $US10,000 in a brown envelope. It became a huge hit and set his creative direction. He has recently paid for “1000 Blind People to See for the First Time”, adopted “EVERY Dog in a Dog Shelter”, and “Tipped Waitresses with Real Gold Bars”.
This blend of absurdity, extremity and attention-grabbing philanthropy sent his channel into the stratosphere, overtaking his hero, PewDiePie, who preferred to pay people to hold up signs saying “Death to Jews”. Donaldson gives away millions of dollars a year – whether at random to cheer up service workers, or as reward for his ludicrous challenges: $US20,000 for the last person to leave a pool of ramen noodles, $US50,000 for the last to leave a revolving door, $US1 million for the last to take their hand off a huge stack of money. These generate hundreds of millions of views, which in turn bring in revenue through ads and sponsors, which fund more outlandish stunts, which becomes a curious virtuous circle.
And he’s spawned a small army of copycat MrBeasts who are filling TikTok and Instagram with titles such as man pays poor mum’s grocery bill at checkout or I pay for everything you can carry. Some are more politicial, like Jesus Morales, aka Juixxe, who specialises in helping Mexican workers, and twins Brooklyn and Bailey who posted Visiting ALL 50 States Before My NEXT Period to raise money for charities helping women unable to afford sanitary products.
Although Beast himself is resolutely apolitical, he does incite wrath for, among other things, giving up his Christianity, working with his long-standing friend and trans woman Kris Tyson and – inevitably – handing out all this cash. “MrBeast is turning our children into money-obsessed narcissists,” a recent headline in a liberal newspaper read.
This blend of absurdity, extremity and attention-grabbing philanthropy sent his channel into the stratosphere.
The other person who doesn’t seem happy about this is Donaldson himself. He says he’s not very good at keeping friends, and told the Lex Fridman Podcast the best thing for his mental health was “giving into” his “innate nature to work”. He spends most of his in his cavernous production warehouse known as Studio C, telling Fridman he had left the studio only once in the preceding 20 days.
Loading
“All I do is wake up every day and obsess over how to make the best videos possible,” Donaldson said in another interview. “It’s the only thing that’s ever really made me happy.”
He might be underselling himself a little here. Alongside “obsessing over how to make the best videos possible”, he’s also devoted a little bit of time to launching a snack bar range called Feastables – slogan “feast like a beast” – which often feature prominently in his videos. In September, Beast Holdings, the parent company for the business dealings of the YouTube star, applied for a host of trademarks covering cereal fruit, nut and seed-based snacks, as well as candy bars, cookies, breakfast cereals and gummies. There’s a range of splurge guns with Hasbro – the Nerf Pro Gelfire X – and even a fast-food burger delivery chain called MrBeast Burger, which has reportedly brought in $US100 million so far.
As for the money he earned from Elon? He doesn’t seem to want it. Donaldson announced on Tuesday that he planned to give it away, handing out $US25,000 to 10 random chosen followers.
The Telegraph, London
The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.
[ad_2]
Source link
