Jimmy Donaldson aka MrBeast is now the most subscribed YouTuber in the world, beating out PewDiePie aka Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg. MrBeast’s channel now has 112 million subscribers, according to SocialBlade, compared to PewDiePie’s 111 million. Donaldson’s channel hit the 100 million mark back in July, according to the esports website Dexerto, which tracks influencers. He crossed PewDiePie’s subscriber base on November 15, according to Dexerto. Incidentally, in 2019, MrBeast staged stunts to help PewDiePie maintain his lead as the most followed channel on YouTube. At the time, PewDiePie’s crown was under threat from T-Series, the Indian media channel.
According to a Bloomberg profile in 2020, MrBeast was the top YouTube creator for the year 2020 and had cracked the code of going viral on the platform. “I woke up, I studied YouTube, I studied videos, I studied filmmaking, I went to bed and that was my life,” Donaldson had said in an interview, noted in the profile. Socialblade estimates his monthly earnings to be between $200,000 to $3.8 million from YouTube, and he is estimated to make $45 million a year.
“The videos take months of prep. A lot of them take four to five days of relentless filming. There’s a reason other people don’t do what I do,” he had told Bloomberg.
Most of his videos include outrageous challenges, though he also makes videos of himself reacting to other stuff– which is another popular genre on the platform. For instance, the last video on his channel is titled, “I Gave My 100,000,000th Subscriber An Island”. Other popular video titles include playing a real-life Squid Games, based on the Netflix show, being buried alive for 50 hours, and surviving 100 days inside a red circle.
But creating these outrageous videos also comes at a high cost. One of his most expensive videos cost $1.2 million because he gave someone $1 million for keeping their hands on a stack of cash. He is also known to give away money to the homeless on the streets and to his subscribers.
One of his first viral videos on the platform– which was posted in 2017– had the title “I COUNTED TO 100000!” and got over 21 million views. These days most of his top videos on the channel have 50-60 million views on average, which shows that his formula continues to work, even when some of the other influencers on the platform have seen a decline in views. As most will testify, maintaining consistency in views is one of the biggest challenges on YouTube.
