How MrBeast Became the Willy Wonka of YouTube

From the New York Times, I'm Katrin Benhold, and this is The Daily.

Hi.

So, I had a strange experience earlier this year. I have three kids, and they're very into watching videos on YouTube. And full disclosure, my husband works at YouTube, so I'm probably the only one in my family who doesn't obsessively watch YouTube videos. But one day, a few months ago, my teenage daughter showed me this video.

In this video, we're curing 1,000 people's blindness.

It was called 1,000 Blind People See for the First Time.

Oh, my God. I see everybody.

And in this video, this goofy-looking young guy with a scraggly beard explains how he pays for eye surgery for 1,000 people.

And we're just getting started. We still have 980 lives left to change.

And I was like, what's going on here? Who's this guy?

Thank you, Mr. Beast.

Thank you. And my daughter said, you haven't heard about Mr. Beast?

Yeah, that's kind of the perfect video to get an introduction to Mr. Beast, isn't it? It gets all of the hallmarks of a Mr. Beast production. There's a lot of money being thrown around.

I mean, it's fascinating because on the face of it, it seems kind of surprising that the most popular guy on YouTube is essentially doing good stuff. And that's just not what I've thought was popular on the internet these days. I feel like in recent years, we've been talking so much about far-right rabbit holes and darkness. So this is different.

Yeah. And he's done it, as you say, by sort of being very different from what I think people imagine YouTubers to be like. If we imagine a kind of Jake or Logan Paul, these sort of extremely good-looking drama queens who live in McMansions in Los Angeles and start fights with each other, or PewDiePie, the Swedish gamer who is probably most famous for making what he claimed were ironic, anti-Semitic pranks, Mr. Beast, he hasn't done any of that stuff. He's mostly spent his time putting on these enormous stunts and giving away a lot of money and prizes, and sometimes just to random people on the street.

So, Max, for those of us who are, you know, older than 14, what's this deal?

Well, Mr. Beast's real name is Jimmy Donaldson, and he's a 25-year-old from Greenville, North Carolina. You know, I've been covering YouTube for 10 years. I'm a tech journalist by trade, and I've been watching him rise over the last four or five years into being this behemoth figure on the platform. But he started in a much more humble place.

How's it going, guys? It's been a while since I've done a commentary or, you know, even made a video, for that matter, but...

He began making videos in about 2012, and at the beginning he was just making what are called Let's Play videos.

This is going to be a video about the top 10 worst guns in Call of Duty history. And real quick, the gameplay you're watching is nothing special. It actually sucks, but, you know...

Where he would play a video game, usually Call of Duty, and commentate on his own performance and upload videos like that.

So my number 10 worst gun in Call of Duty history is the PM-9 from Modern Warfare 3.. And I think a lot of people can agree with that.

This is a really common YouTube genre. And at the same time, he was studying the Masters, so to speak. He talks about having spent all of his time in high school just watching popular YouTube videos and looking at how they titled their videos, looking at what kinds of thumbnail images they used, and trying to kind of reverse engineer a science of YouTube success. He decided not to go to college over his mom's wishes in order to really devote himself to this, and he put in the hours. He garnered a small subscriber base early on, but he didn't really take off for four or five years.

I'm about to count to 100,000..

The first video that went truly viral was one where he counted to 100,000..

You don't believe me? Just watch this video.

And recorded it, edited it, and uploaded it to YouTube.

Hang on, he counted to 100,000?.

Yeah, just sitting in front of his computer in his room, he counted from 1 to 100,000..

49,995, 49,096, 49,997, 49,998..

And people watched it.

People loved it. It went viral.

99,999..

And I think for him, it was an object lesson in the value of putting in an effort and letting viewers see how much effort you put in. And it's really interesting to me, you know, as somebody who's been a journalist online for a long time, the conventional wisdom is that volume is the most important thing if you're producing content. If you're making YouTube videos, just make as many YouTube videos as you can, and surely one of them will go viral, and you'll gain a lot of subscribers. But what Mr. Beast seems to have learned is that if you spend a lot of time and focus a lot of energy on doing one video, that makes it very clear how much time you spent, how much effort you put into it, sometimes how much physical pain and exhaustion you had to endure, that.

So what are some examples of the videos he makes after figuring this out?

What's up, guys?

I'm going to be attempting to set the world record for the longest Uber ride ever.

So he rides in an Uber from North Carolina to California, which is 2,256 miles.

So he just agreed to do it. This is going to be the man taking us from North Carolina to California. Thank you. You're going to give me a viral video. Thank you.

Keeping in the theme of cars.

Why did I purchase every fan in my city to try to push a car?

He buys a thousand fans and tries to push a car using all those fans.

Number one, it's every day, bro, it's every day, bro, it's every day, bro.

He watches a YouTube video, It's Every Day, Bro, which is a legendarily atrocious rap video by his fellow YouTube star, Jake Paul, for 10 hours straight, which is frankly a daring stunt for anybody who wants to save their brain cells.

I have a headache.

I mean, he more or less invents and certainly perfects a style of video that has come to be known as the Junk Lord videos, so-called, because they involve a lot of really extravagant waste that creates a lot of junk, like, say, 100 fans that did not successfully push a car anywhere. And the idea behind the Junk Lord video is exactly what we've been talking about, that if you spend a lot of money on a huge stunt, the more ridiculous, the better, the sillier, the funnier, the more extravagant, the better. You can bring in a lot of viewers. And this becomes a really dominant style of YouTube up there with the let's play videos that we were talking about before.

This is a pit of slime. You guys will get in it. I don't care which one of you it is. Last one of you guys to leave this. slime gets 20 grand.

And a lot of his Junk Lord videos involve giving money away, whether that means a really extravagant contest where there's a prize winner at the end who gets 10 or 50 or $100,000, or sometimes it means just arbitrarily handing money to people in the street.

So you don't really have much? No. Well, I'm a YouTuber. I mean, you can see the camera. So I'm just a series where I just, you know, be nice and just give people some help.

For example, he wraps $10,000 in cash in a bundle and he hands it to a homeless man who's panhandling in a median.

All right, anything you want to say real quick?

These guys are the best, man. These guys are unbelievable. Unbelievable. This is crazy. And he does a short, awkward little interview with this guy and they give him a ride somewhere.

Do you accept tips in cash?

Yes.

Here you go, man. Thanks for driving us.

Are you serious?

Yeah. Yes, sir.

He tips $10,000 to Uber drivers. He gives away $10,000 in tips to waitresses. He hands the deed of a house to a Domino's delivery guy who's delivering a pizza to that house.

Here is the key. It is yours. Seriously. No strings, no catch, no, nothing. You mind if I give you a hug?

But like, these amounts you're talking about, these are not insignificant amount of money. Where does that money come from?

Yeah. So at the beginning, he's mostly getting direct sponsorships, you know, software companies who have some money to burn and want to get their products in front of people who watch YouTube will just give him, say, $10,000 and he can use it to fund a video of some kind. But the other important thing to understand about YouTube is that it's a platform where it's really easy to monetize your followers, by which I mean, if you have a certain number of subscribers, you can flip a button in your settings that allows you to earn about 50% of all the advertising revenue that YouTube is getting from the videos you make. So if your videos are routinely getting hundreds of millions of views, you are earning a lot of money with every video you put up. And something that Mr.

We just hit 100 million subscribers and, from the bottom of my heart, thank you everyone that subscribed.

So, when he hit 100 million subscribers, which was last year, he bought a private island in the Bahamas.

So I brought 100 of my subscribers to compete in four extreme challenges. Last one, standing, wins this island.

And then invited a bunch of subscribers to do survivor style competition in order to win the island from him.

You see the smoke on that?

How is it not loading?

This isn't easy, guys.

He's not giving it away. The production values are very high. It's very fun.

Do none of you want an island?

Then start a fire faster!

And it's hard not to think, as you watch it, that there's a suggestion that maybe, if you subscribe to Mr. Beast, you might someday be a recipient of his generosity. Congratulations!

I can totally see how my daughter would want to be called up like that.

Yeah. I call him the Willy Wonka of YouTube, because a huge portion of his appeal is that he's both entertaining and also potentially able to transform your life as a viewer. That he could reach down and throw you $10,000 to offer you a check to quit your job on the spot. And so, to some extent, the popularity, it's almost like entering a lottery or something. You join in with Mr.

So the money comes because it's compelling to millions of viewers to give away money, which then lets him give away more money. It's kind of like the cycle that feeds itself, it seems.

Yeah. It's a flywheel. He makes money from each video that then goes into another video, both the production but also the value of the cash prize or gift, which then brings in more viewers. So he grows at the same time that the charity grows. And for a lot of viewers, this is like a beautiful, wonderful thing to watch.

It's incredible. 163 million. I mean, that's like twice as many people as live in Germany, which is where I'm from.

Right. And that's the context in which the video that your daughter showed you of Mr. Beast paying for all these cataract surgeries was released in February. And this video vaulted him even outside the containment of YouTube.

We'll be right back.

Hey, everyone, it's Asnet Herndon, political reporter for The New York Times. When I became a journalist, I made a promise to my readers, like the way that doctors take an oath to their patients. I committed to bringing the truth to light, no matter which party, business, organization or person I'm reporting on. I have to be persistent, I have to do research, and I have to push back when someone tries to hide or spin the facts. And I know I'm going to write stories that both Democrats and Republicans don't like.

OK, Max, so what happens when this Mr. Beast video breaks out of YouTube and starts to get some more mainstream attention?

Yeah, when the blind people see for the first time video came out in February, I think there was a huge sense of bafflement that this strange, Wonka-esque, goofy, maybe a bit shallow video had gone so viral. You know, it's hard to do this on a podcast, but I feel like I have to describe in just a few words the thumbnail to this video. And it's this very obviously photoshopped image of a grinning Mr. Beast with his hand on the shoulder of a presumably post-surgical child whose eyes are brimming with tears, with a kind of shocked expression on his face that to me reads almost like shocked with horror. There's some unseen horror in the distance that he's looking at.

So the criticism, in a way, is that this is all a little cynical and exploitative, that basically he's in it for the views. He doesn't really care about. these people he's helping.

Yeah. And I think if you watch the video, the criticism is not exactly baseless. It's notable that in a video where he is paying for a relatively cheap but totally transformative surgery, he never really questions why these thousand people who he's giving it to weren't able to access it in the first place, what the structural or political reasons are that they couldn't get cataract surgery. In the course of my reporting, I talked to one of the subjects in the video, a kid named Jeremiah Howard, who's been blind in one eye since he was about five or six. And Jeremiah told me what I found to be an incredibly compelling story about essentially being unable to find the help that he needed, that between applying to the Social Security Administration for help, trying to raise money from his classmates, he just couldn't come up with the money.

So what people are objecting to is that, even though Mr. Beast might be helping Jeremiah, he isn't really doing anything to change the system. That made it impossible for Jeremiah to get this simple surgery in the first place.

Yeah. Though I should also say, when I put this to Jeremiah and asked him about the kinds of criticism that Mr. Beast was facing, Jeremiah essentially said to me, well, have any of those people paid for my eye surgery? The bottom line is, he paid for the surgery. And to the extent that Mr.

So, Max, what can we say about his motivation?

Well, I don't know what's in Mr. Beast's heart, and he didn't agree to an interview, so I haven't spoken with him. But I have to say that I started reporting this piece with a skeptical frame of mind, you know, as somebody who did find the blind people video somewhat alienating. And in the end, I think I was mostly won over, at least to the position that, of all the things that anybody could be watching on YouTube and of all the people who could be making YouTube videos, this was really not so bad at the end. And one thing that helped me get past my hang ups to the extent that I've gotten past them, because I don't want to give Mr.

Beast says to them from now until the end of the year, every single time someone subscribes, I will give away 10 cents.

Every time you watch this channel, you are putting 10 cents in the pocket of someone else, which he says on some of his specifically philanthropic videos.

100% of all the ad revenue, brand deals and merch sales from this channel, Beast Philanthropy, will go into this food pantry, allows them to feel empowered, allows.

them to feel like they're doing good, and sort of gives them a sense that by doing this thing that they already love, which is to say watching YouTube, they're also participating in a kind of movement themselves, that they're able to act on the world.

Every view on this channel is literally putting food in people's mouths like this,

which, especially if you're, you know, 12 or 13 and you don't have a ton of money or a ton of agency, is probably a pretty attractive proposition to you.

It's kind of funny because it's such a vague sense of doing good, right? A lot of charities are actually aligned with some sort of political point of view or ideology, but it doesn't seem like Mr. Beast is. And so I'm curious, Max, has he aligned himself with any political faction, given this huge platform that he clearly has and the amount of money that he's given away?

No, and I think this is one of the more interesting things about him. You know, I think we all have heard plenty of stories about YouTube as a site for right-wing radicalization, but I certainly wouldn't place Mr. Beast on the right wing by any means. While I was reporting this story, one of his close friends who appears in a bunch of videos and as if they were undergoing hormone replacement therapy, and Mr. Beast has been nothing but quite vocally, openly supportive and protective of his friend, which is, sad to say, not something you would necessarily expect from a popular YouTuber.

Do you think it's actually a selling point for Mr. Beast that he can't be categorized politically in the same way? He's kind of all over the place. So in a way, he's nowhere. And I don't know, maybe that helps his appeal.

I think so. I think it's important to keep in mind that the bulk of Mr. Beast's viewers are adolescents, young teenagers, people who are not necessarily extremely politically sophisticated, who are not particularly interested in joining in a culture war that aligns with electoral politics, and for whom pretty simple and straightforward charities like planting trees, cleaning up the ocean, giving cataract surgery to people who need it, are much more appealing than more explicitly political causes.

So, Max, you were won over, and clearly so are many of the young people that are, you know, subscribed to this channel. But do you think there's any danger in making people feel like they are actually doing good by simply watching Mr. Beast videos? It kind of reminds me of, you know, a lot of kids liking a cause on Facebook, but not actually going to the march.

Yeah, I think one difference we can say in Mr. Beast's defense, I suppose, is that there actually is money being generated by them watching videos and that money is going to charity. So it's, I suppose, on the, on the grand spectrum of do gooding, slightly better than merely liking the cause on Facebook. But this style of charity, or altruism, is pretty new. We don't really know where it goes from here and we don't really know what happens to people for whom Mr.

What we do know is that what Mr. Beast is doing is clearly working. So, in a way, I wonder, doesn't that seem kind of countercultural, that this is what young people are going crazy over, when everything we thought about the Internet was sort of pointing in the opposite direction?

Yeah, I mean, what I find actually quite funny about it is that it feels a little bit retro to me, that all kinds of stuff on YouTube that I would see in the 2010s just didn't make any sense to me. This is like admitting that I'm...

That you were born before 1990..

Yeah. But to say I've never really loved watching other people play video games, but clearly some people really love that. But when I watch Mr. Beast's videos, I don't necessarily find myself confused. They remind me in a really direct way of TV I watched when I was a kid of American Gladiator, Double Dare, Extreme Home Makeover.

I mean, I feel like he's cracked the formula, right? And that it seems like the formula is universal themes, universal games, universal humor, kind of a common denominator people go for. Do you think this portends good things for the Internet? broadly? Like, I think so many people are worried about the Internet.

I suppose I felt... The only way I can gauge this question is telling you how depressed I feel after I finish any given story that I write about the Internet. And I felt, I would say, less depressed at the end of this story than I have about many different stories that I've written over the years. That there's a lot to criticize about Mr. Beast and a lot to criticize about the sort of model of charity and viewership that he's promoting.

So I guess, if my daughter asks me how to become a successful YouTuber, I should just tell her, go for generosity and decency. Morality sells. This is what I should tell her.

It turns out that being a successful YouTuber is also the same as being a pretty good human being, I guess.

Thank you very much, Max.

Thank you for having me.

We'll be right back.