UPDATE on MR BEAST 8/6/2024, 3:48 PM EST: Jimmy Donaldson, aka MrBeast, made a huge leap to Amazon Prime this month with his Beast Games, a YouTube-ified version of The Squid Games. But with great budgets – and liabilities – comes greater scrutiny, and the word from Beast Games participants is that conditions were unsafe. According to these reports, poor food and medication were controlled by the crew, and elements of the production allegedly felt unfair.

Donaldson’s team blamed the CrowdStrike failures and a number of other issues, and future productions show no signs of slowing down. Follow here for updates as the story develops.

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MrBeast in Short

I don’t have a lot of objective criticism for MrBeast’s main YouTube channel. He’s a 24-year-old who makes a massive amount of money through YouTube’s Ad Sense (he has 124 million subscribers) and brand sponsorships. His videos just aren’t my style.

Sometimes he just gives money away to see people’s reactions. Sometimes he comes up with a simple challenge (for every mile you run on a treadmill, you earn $1,000) and sometimes there are elaborate Survivor-type challenges, and you could win a $700,000 island. There are multiple videos where he shows piles and piles of money, and at first I didn’t like that content. It did get my family talking a lot about how money works and how he makes it. More on that later.

His videos are not my kind of thing, but I also knew that he paired with Mark Rober for #TeamTrees, and whether or not I liked how he gave all that money, he gives away all that money. Hell, he gave away houses for $1. I realized that I couldn’t review his work objectively until I learned more of the reasoning, of his motivation behind his channel.

3. To that end, after his first $10,000 brand deal, he turned around and gave it away to a homeless person. He knew it would go viral, and he’d rather put that money toward being the best YouTuber possible than pocket it.

5. All of his other channels — Beast Reacts, MrBeastGaming, Beast Philanthropy, MrBeast 2, MrBeast Shorts, MrBeast Apps — are revenue streams for his main channel.

6. He has a growing food pantry charity with a $100,000 fridge to store food, something most food pantries can only dream about.

7. He’s been able to make philanthropy fun — for himself and his audience. He and Mark Rober worked for over a year to figure out how to raise $20,000,000 to plant 20,000,000 trees.

8. He puts millions of dollars into his videos every month.

9. With a flagship store in the American Dream mall at New Jersey, he created BeastBurger. An estimated 10,000 fans showed up for his opening day. [UPDATE 8/25/2023: See how MrBeast Burger has turned into two massive lawsuits.]

10. He is all about having fun, making the best YouTube videos, mentoring other creators, and giving his money to people who need it.

Now, when my kids watch his videos, I can give them background on his business and how he’s able to give away so much money. It helps to show them how he isn’t giving money away because he’s a multi-millionaire; quite the opposite. His videos might not be my taste, but I appreciate MrBeast’s mastery of the YouTube format (and thumbnails) and his desire to make every video better than the other.

And now I that I understand MrBeast a little better, I can review him objectively. So….go read that!

UPDATE 5/4/2024] In March of 2024, Donaldson announced that he wanted to slow down the pace of his videos so the storytelling could take center stage. On X, Donaldson also urged: “My fellow YouTubers let’s get rid of the ultra fast paced/overstim era of content. It doesn’t even work.”

Photo/Image Credit: Canva, & Shutterstock

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Read more: YouTube Review: MrBeast & Wonka, MrBeast, and Clickbait Philanthropy

Sources:

• “Visit the world’s First MrBeast Burger Restaurant at American Dream!” MrBeast Burger, 4 September 2022, https://www.mrbeastburger.com/american-dream/.