Long read: ‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star

No other industry has been arguably disintermediated more by technology than media. Youtube, Instagram, TikTok and the likes have broken entry barriers for content creators and now have their own versions of the media behemoths of yore. The biggest of them all goes by the pseudonym “Mr Beast”. Most of us with teenage or even younger kids might find that name familiar. If you haven’t been intrigued to check him out, you must do so here so you can appreciate the message underpinning this article.

Whilst many of us might find these videos entertaining of sorts, it is mostly lame. So why make a big deal of it? First, the sheer magnitude of MrBeast’s popularity:

“Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensively produced videos, has 400 million subscribers – more than the population of the United States of America and equivalent to the total number of native English speakers currently alive. It’s close to twice as many subscribers as Elon Musk has X followers, and over 100 million more than Taylor Swift has Instagram followers.

…his 2024 Amazon Prime reality competition show, Beast Games, in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5m (£3.7m), the largest cash prize in television history, reportedly cost $100m to produce, making it the most expensive unscripted show in history.”

The author attempts to answer the question: “what does his success say about the culture that gave rise to it?”

But before that, he gives a sense of what made him so popular in the first place?

“…he has the charmingly awkward aspect of a teen who has recently put on a growth spurt and hasn’t quite settled into himself. He’s likable, and is possessed of a goofy and anarchic sense of humour, but more in a guy-you-went-to-school-with sense…A good deal of his success stems from his ability to balance this quality with the obsessive grandeur of his schemes. He is, simultaneously, a gifted algorithm-charmer, possessed of arcane knowledge as to attention and engagement, and a guy who is just hanging out, amusing himself and his friends (and his hundreds of millions of viewers).

Take, for instance, a recent video called I Survived the 5 Deadliest Places on Earth, in which Donaldson visits – and, self-evidently, survives – the five so-called deadliest places on Earth. (I say so-called here because Donaldson does not visit, say, the Palestinian city of Khan Younis, or the Darfur region of Sudan; it’s more that he performs really dangerous actions in an attention-grabbing manner and setting.) Over the course of the video’s 13 minutes, we see Donaldson and his team of sidekicks 1) walking around Snake Island, off the coast of Brazil, which is infamous for its teeming population of venomous snakes; 2) scaling a sheer cliff wall of ice; 3) driving a terrifying Bolivian mountain pass known as “the Death Road”; 4) swimming with sharks; and 5) spending the night in the middle of an African savannah in a cage surrounded by fresh meat for the specific purpose of attracting hungry predators.

It’s probably worth restating here that this video’s duration is 13 minutes. Now, that may seem like a near-eternity in the era of TikTok and YouTube shorts, but we’re talking about a video with five distinct narratives, across four different continents. Five different situations the viewer has to understand and get invested in; five different scenarios to start getting entertained by and, crucially, stay entertained by. Needless to say, this does not leave a lot of time for old-timey narrative conventions such as establishing a context, or making the viewer understand or care about why any of this is happening in the first place. It just is happening. That’s the thing with MrBeast: everything that happens is always just happening, and if you want a reason for it, it’s no more or less than the fact that you yourself are watching. And this is the case with pretty much everything Donaldson does. To watch his videos is to feel your prefrontal cortex practically vibrate, like a fulfilment hub under the extreme pressure of market demand. He is, and always has been, monomaniacally committed to a lethally pure conception of algorithmically determined entertainment.”

Donaldson began as a 13yr old streaming himself playing Minecraft and then moved on to ridiculously lame things like streaming himself counting till 100,000 or spending 50hrs in solitary confinement and so on.

“…His content began to visibly improve around 2019; the videos had higher production values, and multi-camera setups – clearly the result of an expanding operation, and a creator who was acquiring skills and resources. His stunts got notably more costly, though by no means less stupid (see, for instance, the awe-inspiringly dumb I Filled My Brother’s House With Slime & Bought Him a New One, in which Donaldson fills his brother’s house with slime and buys him a new one), and he began to give away ever larger sums of money. By 2021, according to Forbes, he was YouTube’s highest earner, bringing in an estimated $54m that year.”

The author gets to the essence of it with this: “That childlike aspect of Donaldson’s whole operation turns out to be central. It is simultaneously the thing that makes him most unsettling, and the thing that makes him sort of impossible to dislike. When I say that I think he is some kind of genius, I’m partly talking about this quality of childishness to his work. I’m thinking, that is, of something Baudelaire once wrote: that “genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will – a childhood now equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated”.

Sounds a lot like a version of someone we know as the richest man on the planet.

The author ends the piece with: “Donaldson might not be the genius we need, or the genius we want, but he may be the genius we deserve” as an answer to the question at the beginning of the piece.