What is MrBeast’s secret to YouTube popularity?
During a court deposition last November, YouTube’s top creator, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, boiled his videos’ success to three main factors:
- High-budget spectacles
- Originality
- Obsession over content quality
At a high level, the creator’s dominance is rooted in the work of hundreds of creative staffers who help dream up video ideas, build elaborate sets, and ruthlessly optimize to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.
Let’s dive into the three key elements of his content strategy, starting with the MrBeast spectacle:
There’s no denying that MrBeast is YouTube’s king of stunts.
“I buried myself alive for seven days. No one else does that kind of stuff,” Donaldson said during the deposition.
Beyond entombing himself, MrBeast has also sent a train barreling into a giant pit and raced a car against a cheetah, among other spectacles.
The creator employs around 300 staffers in his Greenville, North Carolina headquarters — and roughly 450 in total — to help him pull off his wild ideas. He recently hired ex-NBCUniversal executive Corie Henson to run his studio division and expand the company’s content slate. The MrBeast team will soon release the second season of its Amazon Prime Video show, “Beast Games,” and recently released a separate animated series on YouTube.
While pulling off stunts has become a genre on YouTube, coming up with original ideas that feel unique to MrBeast is also core to the company’s strategy.
“We usually have pretty original ideas,” Donaldson said during his deposition. “People are like, ‘Oh, this is cool, original, far-out content,’ and they gravitate towards it.”
While many YouTubers end up imitating each other’s video ideas, MrBeast’s edge stems from making his audience of over 450 million subscribers believe they’re always getting something unique. Donaldson is often trying to break a record, like building the largest reality-TV competition set.
“I feel like in this day and age, so many content creators are trying to be him,” a former MrBeast staffer told Business Insider earlier this year. “But he will always be MrBeast. He has access to things that no one else does.”
Lastly, MrBeast is obsessed with content quality (as determined by his own taste). Former MrBeast creatives told Business Insider that he will sometimes throw out an already filmed video if it doesn’t feel up to his standards.
“I’m just really obsessed with the quality of my videos and do everything in my power to make it as good as possible,” Donaldson said during his deposition. “It’s kind of what I obsessed over most of my life. People can tell the effort we put into them.”
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