YouTube Content Creator

He studied how to create YouTube videos which would go viral. His dedication to creating content led to a self-supporting career and stunts which help others to cope with health and poverty issues. 

CHILDHOOD

For most of his teenage years, Jimmy Donaldson (“JD”) (also known in social media as MrBeast) was fascinated with YouTube videos. He woke up each day with the desire to learn more: specifically, about how YouTube videos were made and generally, about filmmaking. “I hardly had any friends because I was so obsessed with YouTube.” 

EDUCATION

To complete his formal education, JD graduated from high school.

For his informal education, JD hooked up with a group of similarly obsessed “lunatics” and planned a program of study for themselves – what makes a good video: what makes a good “thumbnail,” what’s good pacing, how to go viral.

(“Thumbnail” per Wikipedia – is a reduced-size version of a picture or video, used to help in recognizing and organizing them, serving the same role for images as a normal text index does for words. In the age of digital images, visual search engines and image-organizing programs normally use thumbnails, as do most modern operating systems or desktop environments. On web pages, thumbnails avoid the need to download larger files unnecessarily.)

JD and his friends would take many, many thumbnails “and see if there was a correlation from the brightness of the thumbnail to how many views it got. For videos that got over 10 million views, how often do they cut the camera angles? We would study things like that.”

As a result of his in-depth studies of thousands of YouTube videos, JD eventually reached several conclusions of what content should include for successful videos:

• A “spectacle” (visually striking performance or display).
• Persuade the audience that by watching, they are helping your efforts.
• The audience will appreciate seeing gifts made to others.
• Use numbers with lots of zeros (e.g., donating money to pay for cataract surgery to overcome blindness is more interesting if promoted as curing 1,000 blind people than only 1 blind person)

MIXED MOTIVES FOR CREATING YouTube CONTENT

Finding and keeping an audience is a complicated task.

JD has built his YouTube viewership by learning to incorporate his conclusions into each video. Of course, his audience was initially small but one of his earliest viral hits was a stunt in which he counted to 100,000 over the course of 40 hours. Its success became a blueprint for JD, which he followed with similarly effortful feats of pain and endurance, such as watching an atrocious rap video for 10 hours straight. 

As JD’s audience grew bigger, he began to earn money from sponsorships, which he would routinely plow back into extravagant purchases for his videos, actualizing the wildest dreams of 10-year-old boys by putting millions of pennies in a friend’s backyard or buying hundreds of leaf blowers to create a ‘hover field.” 

Videos like those were so influential they started an entire YouTube genre, known as ‘Junklord content’ for the waste they generate. 

But the video that JD says changed MrBeast’s trajectory was neither a flashy waste of money nor an elaborate endurance challenge at all. He wrapped up $10,000 in cash and handed it to a homeless man panhandling on a road median in 2017. Though amateurish and unedited by his subsequent video standards, the video of the gift to a homeless person became a huge hit. 

Eventually JD’s large viewer numbers produced sufficient sponsor ad revenue (YouTube shares a percentage of its ad revenue with the content creator) so he could afford to pay the cost of 1,000 surgeries to cure blindness in people within – and beyond – the U.S. Thus, was created JD’s video: “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time.” (144 million views)

An earlier video which had also gained a sympathetic audience, was “I Adopted EVERY Dog in a Dog Shelter” (195 million views)

Other MrBeast videos dealing with large numbers to attract an audience include “50 Hours in Antarctica,” “100 Days in a Circle,” a $500,000 Game of Tag,” “$1,000,000 Hide and Seek” and “1,000,000,000 Christmas Lights.”

For many of his videos, JD is simply giving stuff away, no contest needed. As one observer noted, “Sometimes, as with the cataract surgery video, this (generosity) is explicitly geared toward helping the obviously needy. Sometimes it’s simply absurd, arbitrary generosity to indiscriminately chosen viewers or passers-by, such as a Lamborghini sports car to a randomly chosen Uber rider or an entire house deeded to an unsuspecting Domino’s delivery person.”

COPING WITH A CHALLENGE – CRITICS QUESTION MOTIVATION

Critics of JD’s charitable donations to unsuspecting recipients have claimed that JD paid for events like the cataract surgeries to cure blindness, only for the attention gathered on YouTube – that the entire exercise was cynical and exploitative. 

But defenders of MrBeast videos note that “Some people don’t seem to realize that in order for him to be able to keep helping people, he has to turn his charities into content, or he won’t make the money he needs to keep helping people.”

An observer within the social media industry has noted, “Unsurprisingly, the criticism only attracted more attention. CNN, the BBC, the Today show and People magazine all covered one of his videoed charitable events and interviewed people featured in the video.”

MAKING YOURSELF UNIQUE FROM OTHER CONTENT CREATORS IS A KEY TO SUCCESS

What distinguishes JD from his broadcast-media predecessors isn’t his subject matter or editing style, but rather his relationship to his audience. 

An academic in a university media studies department found himself intrigued by JD’s videos, both for the cut-above production values but also by the pitch: “You don’t have to give up anything. All you have to do is watch. And I make so much money from each of you who view these things.” In this way, many of JD’s viewing audience believe they are active participants in his charitable events because on YouTube, the size of your audience is directly connected to your revenue and JD pitches subscribing to his challenges as an act of charity, sometimes literally. “From now until the end of the year, every single time someone subscribes, I will give away 10 cents,” JD said in a video from February 2021. “By literally hitting that subscribe button, you are taking 10 cents out of my pocket and giving it to people like we had in the video.”

YouTube CONTENT SKILLS ARE USEFUL IN RELATED BUSINESSES

JD’s skill at studying and understanding video viral success isn’t limited to YouTube. He can also claim mastery of “Seamless” having started an extremely successful business called MrBeast Burger, which mostly exists as a brand on delivery apps, licensed by local restaurants seeking to stand out in the crowded marketplace. 

JD also sells a brand of chocolate bars and for months, at his request, fans have been acting as volunteer brand representatives, tidying up the supermarket displays and posting photos of their acts of service to social media and the MrBeast subreddit. 

CAREER SATISFACTION

A key component of what people like about MrBeast is the immensity of the tasks he sets for himself. Throughout the blindness curing video, a counting-up graphic appears at the bottom of the video, ticking up to tally each surgery. To some critics, the continuing count turns the effort into more of a game than a charity, but JD’s video then shows images of lines for surgery in Jamaica, Indonesia, Honduras, etc. What you have just witnessed, the video suggests, was not simply a good deed but a small part of an ongoing movement in which MrBeast subscribers are active participants. 

JD is explicit that profit is not the goal; expansion is. The effect is a kind of unstoppable flywheel of charity, spectacle, and growth – a combination lottery, raffle, game show and television. 

Some of the beneficiaries of JD’s charitable spectacles have opted to spend their surprise money to help others. MrBeast has provided the role of viewers with a sense of purpose and offers a challenge for redistribution of wealth that may not otherwise happen. To those viewers, JD / MrBeast looks not ethically compromised, but ingenious. 

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This career story is based on several sources including an article written by Max Read, published by The New York Times on June 18, 2023, plus internet research, including Wikipedia.