The 24-year-old, who is believed to have earned more than $54 million in 2021, has established himself with his challenge videos and multi-language channels.
“Squid game in real life», «I offered a private island to my 100,000th subscriber», «I haven’t eaten anything for 30 days»… Here are some videos posted on the YouTube channel of the American MrBeast, alias Jimmy Donaldson. The 24-year-old, who just surpassed Swedish videographer PewDiePie’s subscriber count, has nearly 112 million supporters on his main channel alone. He is now the most followed YouTuber on the platform, without overtaking the Indian channel T-Series, with its 229 million subscribers.
His meteoric career began in 2012 when, at the age of 13, Jimmy Donaldson launched his first channel with content devoted to video games. However, it was in 2017 that he gained notoriety with the publication of a video entitled “I count to 100,000“. On the strength of this success, the young man did not hesitate to invest his money in new projects and very quickly became a specialist in challenges of all kinds: building a functional car out of legos, giving $50,000 to a homeless person, spending 24 hours under water… Anything goes and its community grows. In 2021, he is even the highest paid content creator on the platform, earning nearly $ 54 million according to Forbes. Last July, it was the consecration for his channel MrBeast which passed the bar of 100 million subscribers on the platform.
A frantic entrepreneur
Each video of the youtubeur counts between 30 and 90 million views on average. His recipe now lies in the production of long videos with, often, other known influencers. Latest success, the reproduction of a real “squid game», a survival competition, directly inspired by the concept of the Korean series of the same name on Netflix. The video alone gets 303 million views and 14 million blue thumbs. Its editorial line also differs from that of the platform’s former number one, Felix Kjellberg, better known as PewDiePie, who played video games for a long time on his channel.
Beyond his main channel, which has more than 18 billion views, the American, who hopes, on his Twitter account, “make the world a better place before you die“, multiplies the projects. He thus launched other channels, such as MrBeast Shorts to capitalize on YouTube’s short format or even Beast Philanthropy, whose funds are donated to charity. Always in search of new audiences, the youtubeur also dubs all his videos, among others, in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Hindi, Korean and Arabic. It also has several channels in foreign languages, including one in French and three in Spanish. Here again, the investment is working: its French channel, launched in January 2022, now has more than a million subscribers and competes with content creators in France.
The money accumulated through his projects on YouTube also allows those who consider themselves an entrepreneur to invest in different activities. At just 24 years old, the content creator owns his own clothing brand, launched his restaurant chain “Mr Beast Burger“, its mobile gaming application and has partnered with the Creative Juice investment fund, which helps promising content creators.
The young man always sees bigger and even dreams “to be Elon (Musk Editor’s note) one day», did he declare in July 2020. On the social network, the youtuber and the billionaire have already got into the habit of exchanging by tweets interposed. In 2019, Elon Musk donated $1 million to a charity campaign run by MrBeast. Coincidence: the videographer’s main channel has almost as many subscribers as the businessman’s Twitter account of 115.7 million.
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