I think it’s safe to say that philanthropist YouTuber MrBeast has become a household name.
MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, has become the most successful YouTuber out there with by far the most subscribers having bypassed Indian music channel T-Series, on 283 million.
The 26-year-old has surpassed 341 million subscribers on his main channel with the government Census calculating there to be 341 million people living in the US.
But by no stretch of the imagination has it been easy, with his journey starting half his lifetime ago at the age of 13 back in 2012 – when he primarily uploaded content related to Minecraft and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
His channel didn’t really take off for the next five years, having diversified content he was trying everything to make a name for himself and his channel, but his big break came when he uploaded a video in 2017 titled ‘Counting to 100,000’.
Yes, he really counted to 100,000 and it took him more than 40 hours to do so – after the video went viral he realized he’d found a niche that for whatever reason people enjoyed watching so he then uploaded two more videos based on the same ideology.
These were: ‘Reading the dictionary for 24 hours’ and ‘Saying Logan Paul 100,000 Times’.
MrBeast proposed to his girlfriend on Christmas Day, 2024 (Instagram/@mrbeast)
He then began using all the money he’d gained from YouTube paying him for the amount of subscribers and video views he had, to put it back into his videos.
Soon after, he began letting people use his card in Walmart to buy whatever they want and those videos were a huge success. It snowballed with him giving more and more money away.
MrBeast saw just how well the videos of him giving money away were doing that he began holding competitions with huge cash prizes that people could only dream of, as well as posting videos where he’d trap himself underground for 24 hours and so on.
The guy knows what he’s doing.
Now, following on from the success of MrBeast releasing his own version of Squid Game, he’s since landed another lucrative deal with Prime Video in what’s been dubbed as the ‘largest game show in history’.
Titled Beast Games, it’s based on his YouTube show in a ‘fast-paced and high-production format’.
It sees 2,000 contestants competing for a $5 million cash prize – the largest single prize in TV and streaming history.
Beast Games aired on Prime Video on December 19, but only two episodes dropped with the remaining eight episodes are then released on a weekly basis.
