![]() ![]() Make a clip too long, no one watches or wants to watch another. Over time, he deduced more of YouTube's mysteries. "The first million subscribers you get will take years, but the second will come in a few months." "The beauty of YouTube is double the effort isn't double the views, it's like 10x," he said. At 19, he attracted more than 460 million. But at the age of 18, with his full attention on YouTube, he earned 122 million annual views. In his first six years on the site, he had generated just 6 million views. The views on his videos, which are YouTube's primary currency, started to snowball. He spent 24 hours in a prison, then an insane asylum, then a deserted island. He watched a fellow YouTuber's rap video on loop for 10 hours. While many of his friends were interested in getting the most views with the least effort, he wanted to convey to the audience how hard he was working. The success of the counting video taught him an important lesson. "I didn't have much money, so I wanted to do something big," he said. But he soon dropped out without telling her and turned to his preferred pastime: making YouTube videos. He lacked a microphone and his laptop crashed frequently.Īfter high school, Donaldson went to college briefly at the request of his mom, who'd raised him and his siblings on her own. For the first few years, he filmed every video on his phone. At one point, he filmed a series of videos estimating the earnings of top creators, starting with PewDiePie, the long-reigning king of YouTube.ĭonaldson's first check from YouTube arrived when MrBeast crossed 10,000 subscribers. Over time, he grew increasingly curious about the site's economics. He named both channels using a riff on Beast, his Xbox playing handle. In one, he filmed himself playing the video game Call of Duty. He wakes up every day thinking about the perfect videos, with an exactitude that borders on monomania.Īt age 12, he created his first two YouTube channels. Unlike many first-wave YouTube stars, who were actors, screenwriters, models and singers hoping someday to break into traditional industries, Donaldson has only ever aspired to YouTube stardom. There's a reason other people don't do what I do." A lot of them take four to five days of relentless filming. "You can practically make unlimited money." "Once you know how to make a video go viral, it's just about how to get as many out as possible," he said. ![]() But the restraint quickly fades away when he starts talking about YouTube. He speaks with an aw-shucks modesty and doesn't do many interviews. "He lives on a different planet than the rest of the YouTube world," said Casey Neistat, a filmmaker turned YouTuber.ĭonaldson, now 22, has a baby face and a patchy goatee. ![]() Such consistency is unparalleled, even among YouTube's biggest stars. Last year, every video he posted eclipsed 20 million views. The consistent success of MrBeast's videos has gotten the attention of the YouTube establishment. 12, MrBeast was named Creator of the Year at the Streamy Awards, YouTube's equivalent of the Oscars. In the last 28 days, people have spent more than 34 million hours watching his videos. Over the past four years, Donaldson's channel, MrBeast, has amassed more than 48 million subscribers. The video helped give rise to one of the unlikeliest success stories on YouTube. 8, 2017, it has earned over 21 million views. The resulting video - entitled "I COUNTED TO 100000!" - was a viral smash. It was an oddly mesmerizing performance, the kind of thing every kid in elementary school thinks about but never tries. At the end of the exhausting stunt, he looked deliriously at the camera. Donaldson sat down in a chair and, for the the next 40-plus hours, murmured one number after the next, starting from zero and continuing all the way to 100,000. Then, one day, he was struck with an idea for a video that he was sure would work. "I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life," Donaldson recalled during a recent interview. They gave one another YouTube-related homework assignments, and they pestered successful channels for data about their most successful posts. They conducted daily phone calls to analyze what videos went viral. In the months that followed, Donaldson and a handful of his friends tried to crack the code. But he was convinced he was close to unlocking the secrets of YouTube's algorithm, the black box of rules and processes that determines what videos get recommended to viewers. In the fall of 2016, Jimmy Donaldson dropped out of college to try to solve one of the biggest mysteries in media: How exactly does a video go viral on YouTube? Donaldson, then 18, had been posting to the site since he was 12 without amassing much of an audience. ![]()
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